400 Species Observed on iNaturalist

For most of my life, whenever I went on a walk, I would feel a pang of regret about not being able to identify trees or plants. Today, I passed 400 species observed on iNaturalist, 402 to be exact. I find this miraculous given how nature-blind I was up until four years ago. The silver lining of the pandemic was that I ended up learning a lot about birds and native plants, and I am deeply grateful for that.

My 400th species was the Northern Rough-winged Swallow. I saw a bunch of them in a tree by the parking lot at San Joaquin Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary, a glorious treasure that’s hidden in plain sight in Irvine, California.

I knew that they were swallows from their flight pattern, but I had never seen a flock of swallows just chilling out in a tree before. I’m used to Tree and Cliff Swallows, both of which tend to flutter about constantly and frenetically. I used Merlin to identify the exact species, which iNaturalist later confirmed. Then I just stood there with my Dad, watching them in wonder, before finally walking into the marsh to continue congregating with some other feathered friends.

Many thanks to Travis Kriplean, who helped catalyze my deep dive into the world around me by sharing his own journey so generously and comprehensively. I started my iNaturalist account in the Fall of 2000 with Travis’s encouragement and also with great skepticism, as I didn’t quite understand how iNaturalist worked, and the interface felt… challenging. I was dipping my toes into a mushrooming curriculum that Travis had developed, and I thought I would use iNaturalist to document my findings. I didn’t realize the giant nature-related U-turn I was about to take thanks to a run-in with a big, beautiful, brown bird.

I also have to give a lot of credit to Dario Taraborelli, who unwittingly primed me for all of this. I met Dario 15 years ago through Wikimedia, but I had no idea how much of a birder he was until I started following him on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter. (He, like me, is now mostly on Instagram.) He often posted glorious photos of birds, a stark and welcome contrast to the rest of my feed back in the day. He also sang the praises of iNaturalist, so much so that I knew about them well before I attempted to use the app.

Strangely enough, I don’t think this deep dive into nature would have been possible without iNaturalist and social media in general (and Instagram in particular). It still boggles my mind that iNaturalist’s interface manages to facilitate any kind of community, but it’s how I met Marisol Villareal, whose encouragement and engagement on Instagram helped me feel like I was a card-carrying member of a state-wide fan club, even though I’m still largely clueless. It’s how my friends, Jon and Linzy, met Rudy Wallen, an unassuming and generous nature savant, who also happens to live on our side of town. For all of the terrible that social media has wrought onto all of us, this is a great example of what social media can do when it works.

Lessons Learned from 30 Days of Blogging

Last month, I decided to blog every day. As I explained earlier:

For whatever reason, I’ve found writing hard to do the past few years, and this year has been the hardest. I’ve also been disinclined to think out loud, even though I’ve had a lot I’ve wanted to say and share, both personally and professionally.

Mid-way through the experiment, I reported:

What it’s been doing is helping unlock whatever has been inside of me. I’ve been precious about sharing what I’ve been thinking, not wanting to say them unless I can say them well and feeling paralyzed as a result. I’ve also found it overwhelming at times to try to blog. I guess things are crazy in the world right now, and it’s not only affecting my mental health, it’s hard for me to make sense of it all.

Blogging as a practice has reminded me not to be too precious. The less I try to say, the less overwhelming I feel. The more frequently I share, the less I have to worry about saying it all in one piece, which makes it much easier to write. Plus, even though I don’t think I’ve shown it yet, I’m starting to remember what it feels like to write well. I’m rounding into shape again, which always feels good.

The biggest surprise has been that sharing regularly has helped me re-engage with my broader community. I didn’t think anyone really followed this blog anymore, and because I’m rarely on social media anymore, the algorithms seem to have decided I’m not worthy of most people’s feeds. Still, some people are paying attention to what I’m saying, and getting to hear from them has been a treat and is also motivating me to write more.

After having finished the experiment, I’m not sure I have anything different to report, other than to say that I don’t think I had any breakthroughs after 30 days, and I want to keep exercising this muscle. I thought seriously about extending my project through the end of the year, but I opted against it for a few reasons. Even though it wasn’t particularly stressful, it wasn’t stress-free either, and I don’t need the added pressure this month. It also tires out muscles that I’m using for work right now. I can focus on developing these muscles more when work settles down.

In the meantime, I think the exercise still is helping me share more than I was before. This is my third blog post in December. I think a good pace for me is to be blogging about once a week, especially when those posts are more or less organic.

Maybe the most interesting thing for me was seeing what I chose to blog about. This wasn’t just a writing exercise, it was a sharing exercise. I aggregated all of the tags from those 30 days of blog posts and ran them through WordClouds.com to see if I could detect any patterns.

Not surprisingly, I wrote a lot about COVID-19 and the elections. It was nice to see that I wrote quite a bit about collaboration. This wasn’t my goal, but I admit I was curious to see how often I felt compelled to write about “work stuff” — the original purpose of this blog — especially when I had so many other things on my mind. I loved that I wrote about a lot about making — food and art and photography and stories in general.

Finally, I was curious about the people and places I wrote about. Here were people I knew whom I mentioned in various posts (not including my partner and sister, whom I mentioned often and didn’t bother tagging):

I loved seeing this list. My interactions with others play such a huge role in what I think about and how I feel, and I love being able to share this space with the people in my life.

People I mentioned whom I don’t know:

Places I mentioned:

  • Africa
    • Nigeria
  • Alaska
  • California
    • Bay Area
      • Colma
      • Oakland
        • Joaquin Miller Park
        • Mountain View Cemetery
      • San Francisco
        • Fort Point
        • Golden Gate Bridge
    • Los Angeles
      • Forest Lawn
  • Cincinnati
  • Santa Fe
    • Ghost Ranch

Artist’s Conk

My friend, Travis Kriplean, organized a “mushroom learning pod” for his pre-school age son and friends up in Portland, and he’s been regularly sharing stories and photos from their adventures in my colearning group. I’ve not only been moved by what he’s been doing and why, I’ve been highly envious. Last month, Travis shared a writeup of what he’s been doing, and I thought, “Why does this just have to be for pre-schoolers?” I pinged Travis about starting up a San Francisco Bay Area pod, and I pinged the Bay Area constituents of my colearning group to see if they’d be interested in playing. To my surprise and delight, all of them said yes!

Unfortunately, I know nothing about mushrooms, other than that the edible kinds are delicious and that they play an important role in our ecology. I also already have plenty of things keeping me interested and occupied and didn’t need or want another big project. Fortunately, Travis explained that neither of these would be impediments, and he suggested keeping things simple. Go out, find mushrooms, and document them. Most importantly, enjoy some hot chocolate together afterward.

This framing appealed me for a lot of reasons. It reminded me of Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life, which has felt like my mantra for these pandemic times:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

So that’s what we did. I did a minimal amount of preparation. I found a place close by (Joaquin Miller Park), picked a date and time, and put some hot chocolate in a thermos.

When I arrived at the trailhead, I felt a little bit bad about not being more prepared. It was unseasonably warm, even for the Bay Area — about 80 degrees. The one thing I knew about mushrooms was that they like moisture, and the trail I had picked was bone dry. Still, I had been transparent about my lack of preparation, it was a beautiful afternoon, and my friends had great attitudes, so on we marched.

We found a grand total of one mushroom (pictured above), which felt like minimum success. I also learned some things about lichen (it’s both a fungus and an algae!), and we spotted some beautiful birds, including some Dark-eyed Juncos. I also had learned enough from this experience to start plotting a second trip, this time closer to my home in San Francisco, where it was foggier and hopefully more mushroom-friendly. Plus, drinking hot chocolate with friends as the sun began to wane, even on a warm evening, was pretty great. All in all, I was pretty happy about the afternoon.

But when I got home and tried to identify the mushroom, things got even more interesting. We found it on a Bay Laurel stump, so it’s probably a Ganoderma brownii, but it could also be a Ganoderma applanatum. Both mushrooms are known as “artist’s conk,” because the white underside turns brown more or less permanently when bruised, and artists have been known to do etchings on the bottoms of these mushrooms. They are hardy mushrooms, which is why we were able to find them under such dry conditions, and apparently are also used for medicinal teas.

When I uploaded my photo to iNaturalist (my very first contribution!), I was stunned and delighted to see that the app correctly guessed what it was.

I’m sure I’ve seen these before, but I’ve never stopped to pay attention and to figure out what I was looking at. Next time, I know to look even closer, so that I can more definitively identify it. I had felt self-imposed pressure to find more mushrooms, so rather than slow down to look more closely and carefully document it, I took a quick snapshot, and moved on. This was the very muscle I was hoping to develop, and this experience reminded me how much practice I still need.

Excited about this first foray! Let me know if you’d be interested in participating in the next one! I’m thinking early December at Land’s End.

How Effective Are Different Climate Interventions?

My friend, Mariah Howard, shared this CNN.com climate change solutions quiz today. It’s based on data from Paul Hawken’s excellent climate nonprofit, Project Drawdown. I took the quiz, and it nicely confirmed what I suspected: Other than the consequences of a mostly plant-based diet, I had very little clue about the actual impacts of most proposed climate interventions.

I’d like to see more exercises and visualizations that accomplish this for all sorts of problems. Skilled systems thinker don’t think in terms of binaries. They ask questions like, “How much?”, and, “In exchange of what?” Knowing that driving a Prius lowers my carbon footprint isn’t useful if what I actually care about is getting overall atmospheric carbon below 350 parts per million. (We’re currently at 412 and growing.) What matters is how much it lowers my carbon footprint.

That said, there were a few things I didn’t like about the quiz. First, the scoring system doesn’t make sense. (I scored 34.4 percent overall.) You’re asked to rank a set of interventions based on carbon impact. As my friend, Travis Kriplean, pointed out, if your three interventions are ranked 1-2-3, and you rank them 1-3-2, you’re penalized the same as if you ranked them 3-2-1, which is a more egregious error.

Furthermore, the rankings alone don’t tell the whole story. If intervention 1 will remove 10 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, intervention 2 will remove 2, and intervention 3 will remove 1, then mixing up 2 and 3 wouldn’t be egregious, whereas not ranking 1 first would be a huge miss.

Second, CNN.com tries to show which interventions can be implemented by individuals versus industries and public policy. For example, eating a plant-based diet is labeled as something that individuals can do, whereas investing in high-speed trains is something that requires policymakers. I don’t find this to be a helpful distinction. Sure, I could switch to a more plant-based diet, but policymakers could also end meat subsidies, which would raise the price of meat and consequently lower a lot of people’s meat consumption. On the flip side, the quiz labels more walkable cities as a public policy intervention, but it could just as well as have made it an individual intervention where a whole lot of people simply walked more.

This problem is exacerbated by the quiz attempting to make the impact more tangible by showing the equivalent number of gas guzzling cars taken off the road by each intervention. This is an admirable goal, but it makes no sense in the context of this particular exercise. For example, it claims that “driving an electric car” — an individual intervention — would be similar to taking 75.7 million cars off the road. No, actually, if I drive an electric car, that would be similar to taking one gas-guzzling car off the road. If you read Project Drawdown’s analysis, they make projections based on EV’s taking up 16 percent of total passenger miles by 2050. The details here matter.

All that said, the quiz caught my interest enough for me to go down a little bit of a research rabbit hole, something I’ve been wanting to do for a while but have never gotten around to doing. I also learned some surprising things. I’d encourage others to give it a try.

For more on these drawdown strategies, Travis recommends watching Chad Frischmann’s TED Talk:

Doug Engelbart, Human Systems, Tribes, and Collective Wisdom

Sunday, December 9 was the 50th anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s The Mother of All Demos. There was a symposium in his honor at The Computer History Museum and much media and Twitter activity throughout.

Among the many things said and written that caught my eye that weekend was a Twitter exchange between Greg Lloyd and Mark Szpakowski. Greg tweeted a quote from this Los Angeles Review of Books article:

“At the very heart of Engelbart’s vision was a recognition of the fact that it is ultimately humans who have to evolve, who have to change, not technology.”

Mark responded:

And yet 99% of the Engelbart tribe work has been on the techie Tool System. http://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/human-system.html … used to say “coming soon”; now it has disappeared. Time to join up with recent progress on Social Technologies for Complex Adaptive Anticipatory Human Systems?

I agree with Mark, with one caveat: It depends on how you define the “Engelbart tribe.” Let’s explore this caveat first.

Tribes and Movements

There are many folks specializing in process design (what Doug would have categorized as “Human Systems”) who consider Doug a mentor or, at worst, an inspiration. I’m one of them, although I didn’t start (exclusively) from this place when I started working with him in 2000.

Three others in this group have been direct mentors to me: Jeff Conklin, who spent a good amount of time with Doug, and Gail and Matt Taylor, who didn’t, but who knew of him and his work. David Sibbet, the graphic facilitation pioneer, came across Doug’s work in 1972 and worked some with Geoff Ball, who was on Doug’s SRI team doing research on facilitating groups with a shared display. Those four people alone make for an impressive, accomplished, world-changing group.

There are also many, many more folks doing important work in human systems who aren’t familiar with Doug’s work at all or who don’t identify with him for whatever reason. Doug himself thought that lots of what was happening in both open source software development communities and in the Agile Movement were highly relevant, although he had nothing to do with either. At the Symposium celebrating Doug, Christina Engelbart, Doug’s daughter and the keeper of his intellectual legacy, connected the Lean movement to her dad’s work and invited Brant Cooper, the author of The Lean Entrepreneur, to speak.

An effective movement is an inclusive one. What matters more: Seeing Doug’s vision through, or establishing tribal boundaries? If the former, then it’s important to acknowledge and embrace the work of those who may not have the same heroes or conceptual frames of reference.

I don’t think many of us who loved Doug and were inspired by his vision have been very good at this, and unfortunately, our tribalism has extended to technologists too. After the Symposium, I had drinks with my friend, James Cham, who is a long-time fan of Doug’s, but who wasn’t lucky enough to spend much time with him. James told me that Dylan Field (co-founder of Figma Design) was inspired by Doug and that he had hosted his own celebration of the Demo that same Sunday that 300 people attended. Amjad Masad (founder of Repl.it, a tool that Doug would have loved) gave a thoughtful toast about Doug’s work there.

I didn’t know either Dylan or Amjad, and I certainly didn’t know that they tracked Doug’s work and were inspired it. I’m fairly certain that the organizers of the official celebration didn’t either. That’s pretty remarkable, given how small of a place Silicon Valley is. Now that we know, I hope we can start making some fruitful connections.

Capabilities and Collective Wisdom

The movement of folks committed to Doug’s larger vision is much larger than the “official” tribe to which Mark referred in his tweet. But even if we take into account this larger group, I think Mark’s criticism still holds.

Doug sought to make the world collectively smarter. He believed the path to achieving this would be a co-evolutionary process involving both tool and human systems. In other words, new tools would give us new capabilities, assuming we learned how to master them. Those new capabilities would inspire us to create even better tools. Rinse, and repeat.

As my friend, Travis Kriplean, pointed out to me this morning, we can already test this hypothesis. Technology has already evolved exponentially. Have our collective capabilities — or even more importantly, our collective wisdom — evolved with it?

Let’s narrow the question. Our ability to capture, store, and share information has improved by leaps and bounds since Doug’s Demo in 1968. Has our collective memory increased as a result of that?

If you were pinning me down, I would guess, “no.” The mere existence of those tools don’t guarantee that we remember more. Furthermore, the tools have a nasty side effect of overwhelm. But, these tools certainly create the potential for us to remember more — we just have to figure out how.

Right now, my eight- and 14-year old nephews have access to this blog, where they can read many of my innermost thoughts, including stories I wrote about them when they were younger. Right now, they can explore my Flickr, Instagram, and YouTube accounts without even having to ask for permission. If they asked for permission, I would probably let them go through my Google Maps Timeline, which is automatically harvested from my cell phone’s location data and which contains a comprehensive journal of my every day travels over the past few years. They already have access to lots of information about me, including my efforts to distill little bits and pieces of my experience. Most of this is purely the result of technology, with a little bit coming from my occasional discipline of sharing thoughts here and there.

But does any of this help them become wiser? If not, is it because our technology has not evolved enough, or is it because our human practices have not evolved with the technology?

The best example I know of a human system that evolved with the technology are wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. Not enough people realize that wikis and Wikipedias aren’t just tools. They are a wonderful marriage of human and tool systems that created fundamentally new collective capabilities, exactly the type of thing that Doug envisioned. They are also 20-year old examples. I think this speaks very much to Mark’s critique.