The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  For birds that migrate across continents, the changing flowering and insect cycle is also leading to a timing mismatch. Researchers studying North American avian species have found that some birds—including indigo buntings, northern parulas, great crested flycatchers, blue-winged warblers, and Townsend’s warblers—are arriving well after spring starts. The old adage reminds us that the early bird gets the worm, but for some species that are arriving up to fifteen days late in the season, the caterpillars and insects that time their reproductive cycles with blooming plants have already moved on, leaving the birds tired and starving after their long journey.

  That’s because birds time their migrations with the sun. When the sun begins to rise earlier in the day, this signals it’s time for the migration. But the trees and plants are timing their “biological spring” not with light but with a change in temperature. Insects emerge en masse to feed on young leaves before trees release their natural repellent. And by the time the birds flying in from Central and South America arrive for their annual buffet, there’s been a fundamental mismatch and a cascading effect. As Stephen Mayor, a lead author of one study, has stated, “The growing mismatch means fewer birds are likely to survive, reproduce and return the following year. These are birds people are used to seeing and hearing in their backyards….It’s like Silent Spring, but with a more elusive culprit.”

  The elusive culprit is timing, and around the globe it’s throwing many species and ecosystems out of whack. As Damian Carrington writes in The Guardian, “Suspected mismatches have occurred between sea birds and fish, such as puffins and herring and guillemots and sand eels. The red admiral butterfly and the stinging nettle, one of its host plants, are also getting out of sync.” This is a very real butterfly effect, and its impact could be devastating.

  Scientists are also noticing changes at the very base of our own food chain. From honeybees and insects that pollinate the vast majority of our crops to the shifting timing of plankton in the seas, which in turn affects shellfish, fish, seabirds, sharks, and marine mammals like seals and whales, nature’s complex systems are under more strain all the time.

  Our inventions of the human clock and the manufacturing cycle—that rule our behaviour inside the reality bubble—have begun to wreak havoc with nature’s temporal cycle. Not only are we subject to the artificial beat of our own invented time but species throughout the plant and animal kingdoms are starting to feel this rupture as well. The changes around us are accelerating, and yet we have not even noticed that this fundamental break has to do with our own creation of time. Instead, as Bertrand Richard notes, faced with “climate chaos, stock market panics, food scares, pandemic threats, economic crashes, congenital anxiety, existential dread,” we do not slow down. Instead we do the exact opposite: we put the pedal to metal and increase our speed.

  Before moving on, there is one other clock I should mention that scientists have devised. This one is more metaphorical than physical. Each year since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has used the concept of a clock counting down to midnight to show the imminence of humanity’s destruction from climate change, atomic weapons, and other technologies of our own making. It is known as the Doomsday Clock. On January 25, 2018, in an open letter addressed to leaders and citizens of the world, the scientists announced that we are now highly vulnerable to catastrophe, and the clock ticked a minute closer to our end. It now reads two minutes to midnight.

  The question before us is: Do we hit the snooze button?

  *1 Time zones are also not static. In the winter for example, the time difference between Toronto, Canada, and São Paulo, Brazil, is three hours. In March—with changes to daylight savings time in the northern hemisphere (spring forward) and southern hemisphere (fall back)— it shrinks to a one-hour time difference.

  *2 That is, the worms have two clocks—one circadian (based on the day), and one circalunar (based on the month).

  *3 The Long Now Foundation is currently building a ten-thousand year clock in Nevada that will only tick once a year. Its purpose is to encourage people to consider a long view when it comes to the nature of time.

  *4 This is not a situation unique to Japan. Charles Czeisler, a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School has documented sleep deprivation in hospital interns who are at times scheduled to work twenty-four to thirty-four hour shifts. A lack of sleep presents real dangers: sleep-deprived interns made 36 percent more serious medical errors and 5.6 times as many diagnostic errors. They also increased their risk of stabbing themselves with a scalpel or needle by 61 percent.

  *5 In fourteenth-century England, peasants worked around 150 days per year.

  *6 A survey of 1,018 full-time U.S. employees found that 41 percent of people prefer having time to money. That said, only 30.3 percent of people surveyed were willing to give up their present salaries for a better schedule.

  *7 Garment workers in Bangladesh are some of the lowest-paid workers in the world. On average, a monthly salary is $68, which is significantly below a living wage. Workers often work seven-day weeks, with overtime amounting to fourteen to sixteen hour work days.

  *8 This author found a “poet style” similar top with yoke on sold by H&M for $13 that was similar to the type of shirt described by Fisher.

  *9 High-frequency trades now account for 50 to 70 percent of stock market volume.

  *10 The human brain needs thirteen milliseconds to process an image, and it takes between one hundred and four hundred milliseconds to blink an eye. A high frequency trade travelling round-trip from Chicago to New Jersey takes only 13 milliseconds. That means 30 trades can take place in the blink of an eye.

  *11 Some physicists, for instance, have suggested that the “universe is timeless.”

  *12 Even our idea of “now” operates on delay. According to scientists, the psychological present is only three seconds long and “our consciousness lags 80 milliseconds behind actual events.” According to neuroscientist David Eagleman, “When you think an event occurs it has already happened.”

  *13 In recent years, these hot spells have not been isolated. February 21st, 2018, wasn’t isolated. Temperatures were freakishly warm in 2017 and 2016 as well.

  8

  SPACE INVADERS

  Measurement is certainly an illusion, because you don’t find inches lying around—you can’t pick up an inch. Inches…are actually imaginary.

  —ALAN WATTS

  IN ENGLAND, you can go for a walk through Madonna’s private estate. This is possible because the “right to roam” through the countryside is enshrined in British law. In nature, this freedom—for animals at least—is a given. For birds flying overhead and insects marching on the ground, the lines drawn by humans to divide private and public property are largely inconsequential. But for our species, it’s like we live in a world that’s been booby-trapped with tripwire. As Floyd Rudmin, an expert on community psychology, writes, “more than 99% of the world around us is off-limits to any one of us, and we rarely notice that.”

  But in the 1930s in England, a group of young people did take notice. They were factory workers in the industrial heart of Manchester. At the time, Manchester was gloomy and polluted, but nearby was the Peak District, a gorgeous part of the country with grassy, rolling hills. The problem was the workers were forbidden from entering it. This was before national parks existed in Britain, so for the workers, going out to take a bit of fresh air and enjoy nature meant they were trespassing on private land.

  So on April 24, 1932, a group who called themselves “ramblers” decided to engage in a simple act of protest. They would do something that few of us would consider “rebellious” today: they would go for a hike. But knowing that they’d be stopped if it was only a few of them, the ramblers gathered as a large group instead. Together, four hundred people set off up a mountain in the Peak District called Kinder Scout.

  At first, local gamekeepers with clubs attempted to stop them, and a scuffle broke out, but the men backed off when
they realized they were outnumbered. Then the police got involved, and several of the hikers were arrested and jailed. Surprisingly, this worked to the ramblers’ advantage. The story spread quickly, and public sympathy led to a national outcry as more and more people began to demand the right to walk through the countryside. The Kinder Scout mass trespass is now known as one of the most successful acts of civil disobedience in British history and is celebrated every year. By literally exercising their freedoms, the ramblers paved the way for the creation of national parks and opened up nature to the average person.

  These days, in England, you can walk through 7 percent of the countryside. That may not sound like much, (and is a reminder of how much land is still off limits), but it’s significant enough. In Scotland, however, things are even better; modern ramblers not only have walking rights, they also have access to the equivalent of free Airbnbs. That’s because the landscape is dotted with empty farmers’ cottages known as bothies, abandoned huts that remain as a relic of the Scottish Clearances, when populations were driven from the rural highlands. These modest huts now form an informal travellers’ network of accommodations, and while they are basic—some only have beds and a hearth—bothies have become a beloved Scottish tradition of giving hikers a free place to spend the night.

  Freedom sounds wonderful, of course, but it does have a flip side: lack of security. After all, while it might sound lovely to amble unrestricted through the countryside, you might not feel quite as comfortable if a stranger were walking through your own backyard. That’s because human beings, like many animals, are territorial.*1 It’s hard-wired into our brains. Scientists know that animals from insects to chimpanzees have evolved a sense of personal space, and this makes sense, because in the wild having your space encroached upon can be a threat to survival.

  For humans, four distinct zones of personal space have been detected. In the 1960s, American anthropologist Edward Hall was the first to measure and define what he called reaction “bubbles.” The closest bubble surrounding us is “intimate space.” It extends approximately forty-six centimetres around the body and is reserved for family, partners, and close friends. The next bubble is “personal space.” This ranges from 0.46 to 1.2 metres and is where we feel most comfort with acquaintances. “Social space” is the third bubble. It extends 1.2 to 3.7 metres from the body and is the area for strangers and new acquaintances. Finally, beyond that is public space, a space that for the most part anyone is free to enter. There are of course exceptions, and as social creatures things like status, sex, and cultural differences all affect our notions of personal “safe” space, but in general these bubbles define our most basic sense of territory.

  The part of the brain responsible for our feelings of fear or safety is the amygdala. It forms the neural circuitry behind our “fight or flight” responses. But in rare instances where there has been damage to the amygdala, the human sense of these spatial boundaries can be erased. This was the case with SM, a patient with significant amygdala lesions who, as a consequence, had no sense of personal space. Like the character Aaron, a notorious “close talker” from an episode of Seinfeld, SM was perfectly comfortable standing even nose-to-nose with strangers.

  Our need for space, then, at least at close quarters, is an evolved defence. But in defending larger territories—spaces beyond personal threat—there are allowances. In the animal kingdom, birds like the American robin, for instance, are aggressive towards other robins that enter their territory but let in birds like the white-breasted nuthatch, as the two species have different food sources and do not compete. Chimpanzees likewise guard their space from their own species. And their territories are significant, ranging from 48 to 241 kilometres. Males, and sometimes females and juveniles, regularly patrol their borders to ensure that their chimp neighbours do not sneak into their territory. And while neighbouring males are always attacked as intruders, fertile females are welcomed as new immigrants, at least by the males chimpanzees. They are usually fought off by the resident females at first but eventually are allowed in.

  Humans, however, are distinct in that we manage our territories not just physically but also with our minds. As a species, we’ve created borders and maps that separate us from one another and mark out defined spaces. Also setting us apart is that our territories can be massive; in fact, what constitutes our territory now spans the entire globe.

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  IN FINLAND, THE INDIGENOUS SAMI PEOPLE have a very special unit of measurement. It’s called a poronkusema, which is defined as the distance a reindeer can travel before it needs to stop and urinate. The Sami, who have lived alongside reindeer for centuries, attentively noted that the animals won’t walk and relieve themselves at the same time. And so, once approximately every 7.5 kilometres, a poronkusema, they stop and empty their bladders. While this measurement may seem a touch absurd to non–reindeer herders, it should be said that before the metric system came along, many countries and cultures had their own rather peculiar systems. It’s likely that people of the future will find it just as weird that we described the unfathomable loss of our rainforests in terms of “football fields.”

  Our ability to define and measure space accurately separates us from other species. We are the only animals with the ability to project our mental delineation of the world—using lengths, widths, lines, and maps—to define the physical space around us. To understand how we’ve constructed this mapped world, however, it’s important that we first look at how we came to create the basic units of measurement.

  The dimension of space, as we saw in Chapter One, is too gargantuan for our little brains to fathom, and so we’ve scaled down the abyss by chopping it into more manageable pieces we can understand, something human-sized. Much like the dimension of time, originally all measures were made with bodies. As Witold Kula writes in Measures and Men, throughout most of history the human body acted as “the measure of all things.” Going as far back as 2700 BC, the Egyptians were using the royal cubit, a length that ranged from 523.5 to 529.2 millimetres and was the rough equivalent of the measure from the tip of an outstretched hand to the elbow. The cubit was then further broken down into seven “palms,” which were approximately seventy-five millimetres each, and palms were subdivided into four djeba, or fingers, of about nineteen millimetres each.

  These forearm measures were popular around the world. And it made sense. We all have arms, so it was like carrying your own measuring stick. The ancient Greeks measured the cubit at 460 millimetres, while the ancient Roman ulna was 444 millimetres. Certainly not exact measurements, but similar enough. Other body part measures were used, including the shaku (foot) in Japan, the hasta (forearm) in India, the chi (hand) in China, the thnang dai (finger joint) in Cambodia, and the wa (outstretched arms) in Thailand.

  But the problem with measures based on the body, as you’re no doubt aware, is that they aren’t equal. So when rulers wanted to levy taxes on a population, the exact meaning of one handful or basketful of wheat or sixty strides of a field was subject to interpretation. Farmers, of course, preferred long strides, just as tax collectors favoured big baskets. In ruled territories, then, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman suggests, all these colourful varieties of measurement had to be subsumed by the “imposition of standard, binding measures of distance, surface or volume, while forbidding all other local, group- or individual-based renditions.” Measures had to become standardized.

  In Medieval England, land was once measured by the amount needed to support a household. This unit of measure was known as a “hide.” Traditionally, a hide was about 120 acres, but the definition of a hide was flexible in the sense that it was more a measure of value (in the form of taxes it produced from the family) than it was a measure of area. A hide of fertile soil, for example, would be smaller than one with poor soil. The point is, measurement of space was not something written in stone. It could be negotiated.

  In contrast, the first standard that we know of was issued by Richard
I in 1196. In the Assize of Measures, the king decreed that “throughout the realm there shall be the same yard of the same size and it should be of iron.” But he was also aware that to be accepted, his standards had to be seen as beneficial for the people. And so, when Magna Carta was signed in 1215, it not only set limits on the monarchy and gave greater rights to the rebel barons to gain their political support, it also, rather surprisingly, delineated the first standards for beer. The charter’s “rights” ensured that one’s beer would finally be the same “throughout the kingdom,” ensuring that townsfolk weren’t short-changed by each other or by greedy merchants.

  As the charter’s thirty-fifth clause reads, “There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges. Weights are to be standardised similarly.”

  Over the centuries, as different monarchs came into power, measurements often changed with their desires. During the reign of Edward I (1272 to 1307), the rod, or perch, was the official land measure. Its definition was much like a Monty Python skit, a rod being equal to “the total length of the left feet of the first sixteen men to leave church on Sunday morning.” Until the reign of Henry VII (1485 to 1509), the “yard” was proudly defined as the “breadth of the chest of the Saxon race.” Henry then replaced it with the standardized “ell,” a measure that was approximately a yard and a quarter, a measure borrowed from Parisian drapers. The ell was then superseded by Elizabeth I’s yard in 1588. Her yard was fairly long-lived, lasting over two hundred years. But in 1824, another yard took its place when George IV commissioned the Royal Society to come up with the imperial standard. Unfortunately, his yard only lasted nine years and 198 days, as the official rod that measured it was damaged in a massive fire on October 16, 1834, that burned the Houses of Parliament to the ground.