While washed up in Manaus, I’ve taken a few hours to catch up on some recent papers in the (technical) ecological literature. A new paper by Egbert van Nes et al. in the most recent issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution caught my attention. Entitled “What do you mean, ‘tipping point’?“, van Nes et al. encapsulate well the competing ideas and definitions of tipping points in the ecological and broader literature, but then end up arguing for a broad definition: “any situation where accelerating change caused by positive feedback drives the system to a new state.” But they then go on to say that their “proposed definition essentially boils down to the necessary conditions for [Malcom] Gladwell’s examples where a small initial change makes a big difference.”

I think this is unfortunate. They give too much credence to Gladwell’s sloppy handling of tipping points in his book, their  broad definition will lead to a proliferation of “tipping points,” and such vagueness can only result in so much watering down of the term as to render it meaningless.

So with that in mind, I offer up for today’s posting an essay I wrote three years ago but never published. I post it here, unedited from 11 September 2013 (albeit with a few [editorial clarifications]). Perhaps an updated version could find a broader audience somewhere; suggestions welcome!

On tipping points, regime shifts, and the balance of nature

“Five-nine” doesn’t have quite the cadence as “nine-eleven,” but when we look back on the early 21^st century, May 9, 2013—the day that the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in recorded history—may be seen as a far more important date than September 11, 2001. If the scenario described in the Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21^st Century by Anthony Barnowsky and his colleagues at Berkeley[1], along with more than 500 other scientists, including Nobel laureates, members of the National Academies of Sciences, and other luminaries is true, Five-nine will be seen as the long-anticipated tipping point whereby human impacts have caused irrevocable harm to our planet. Or perhaps not. Perhaps there is still time to take the concrete, immediate actions Barnowsky et al. suggest—suggestions echoed by President Barack Obama in his June 25 [2013] speech at Georgetown University—that would ensure a sustainable, high-quality future. Or maybe we’ll just keep muddling along, slowly and steadily acclimating to our new lives on a now unfamiliar world, which, to distinguish it from our familiar “Earth,” Bill McKibben christened “Planet Eaarth”: durably, sturdily, stably, hardily, and robustly.

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I’ve been traveling and working outside of the US since the beginning of August, and watched the evolution, media/twitter/blog coverage, and eventual vote count of the US presidential election unfold from abroad—passing through degrees of disbelief, astonishment, and horror—but also seeing it with the perspectives of physical distance and those gained through the eyes of citizens of other countries. During the two weeks leading up to the election, I was simultaneously engrossed in developing new mathematical statistics and depressed by what I could clearly see, from an overseas vantage point, was going to go down on November 8. And although I voted in Massachusetts (the first person on the first day of early voting in my small rural town—which, contra the Commonwealth overall, went for Trump by a small margin ) while I was in transit between Tokyo and Valparaiso, I suffered no illusion that my vote for Hillary would make a difference, either statewide (Massachusetts is, of course, the bluest of the blue states, notable for being the only state to vote for McGovern against Nixon in 1972) or nationally (the writing was on the wall for anyone who could read it).

As I expect many travelers and ex-pats also did, I stayed up all of election night watching the returns, until the election was called for Trump at close to 2am Valparaiso time. The next day, I watched the sunrise over the docks of Valparaiso harbor, did my daily 45-minute walk up (northeast) the esplanade, past the omnipresent graffiti, murals, stray dogs, seagulls, sea lions, and pelicans, paused to dip my feet in the icy-cold Pacific Ocean, climbed up the daily 108 stairs to the mathematics quad, and then walked up the last three flights of stairs to my temporary office at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (USM), where I skyped my fiancée and had a good cry – for my country, for my family and loved ones, for myself, and for the future.

I spent a lot of that day talking about the election with Flossie and with my three friends—Ronny Vallejos, a statistician at USM, and Hannah Buckley and Brad Case, ecologists from Lincoln University in New Zealand—with whom I was working at USM for the two weeks I was there. And I thought it would be worth setting down here the common themes and ideas that emerged in those conversations, filtered through another few days of reading, thinking, walking, and flying.

These reflections come in two parts. This one, entitled “An Elegy for my Home”, and the next one, entitled “The Politics of Identity and the Destructiveness of Identity Politics”. I emphasize that these are personal reflections and opinions set down as stream-of-consciousness with little editing. The writing is rough and the ideas incomplete. But I needed to start somewhere, as the run-up to the election, the election itself, and the few days aftermath have made it hard to focus coherently. I welcome constructive engagement, discussion, and dialogue about them; please post comments here, on Twitter, or send me email.

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