Interplace

Brad Weed
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Interplace explores the interaction of people and place. It looks at how we move within and between the places we live and what led us here in the first place. interplace.io

  1. VOR 48 M

    Street Snatches, Stolen Soil, and the Power of Care

    Hello Interactors, Minnesota has seen federal incursion and overreach before. And not just in 2020. These removal tests we’re witnessing are rooted in the premise of US ‘manifest destiny’ and how quickly the notion of ‘home’ can be made fungible by a violent state. But likeminded bodies always resist being bullied. SCAFFOLD, SOVEREIGNTY, AND SEIZURE On December 26, 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. The execution, staged as public theater, was not a solemn judicial act. A special scaffold was built, martial law was declared, and an estimated 4,000 spectators witnessed the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The spectacle mattered because it carried meaning beyond Mankato. The hanging marked the end of the six-week U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. This brutal conflict devastated the Minnesota River Valley and left deep trauma in Dakota communities. It also conveyed that the state could swiftly and effectively attempt control of contested land by violent force. Mankato was the visible climax, but Fort Snelling was the quieter cruelty that continued. After the war, Dakota families — women, children, elders — were confined in harsh conditions near the fort during the winter of 1862–63. Disease and exposure killed between 130 and 300 Dakota people. Execution and exile worked together. One provided public power, the other attempted to ensure territorial outcomes. Here’s what Dakota Chief Wabasha’s son-in-law, Hdainyanka, wrote to him shortly before his execution: “You have deceived me. You told me that if we followed the advice of General Sibley, and gave ourselves up to the whites, all would be well; no innocent man would be injured. I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man, or any white persons. I have not participated in the plunder of their property; and yet to-day I am set apart for execution, and must die in a few days, while men who are guilty will remain in prison. My wife is your daughter, my children are your grandchildren. I leave them all in your care and under your protection. Do not let them suffer; and when my children are grown up, let them know that their father died because he followed the advice of his chief, and without having the blood of a white man to answer for to the Great Spirit.” This moral failing was part of a larger burgeoning political economy. In 1862, the Twin Cities were still emerging, with mills, river commerce, and infrastructure. Yet the region’s future as an urban, financial, and political center depended on converting Dakota and Ojibwe homelands into transferable property. The spring prior to the massacre, in May 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, handing out 160-acre chunks of stolen land labeled now as “public.” Colonizers and immigrants could occupy this land, and be defended by the US government, if they showed they could “improve” it through five years of occupation. This act negated all Dakota treaties, seized 24 million acres of Minnesota lands, and mandated removal of what were now called Dakota “outlaws.” This converted communal Indigenous homelands into surveyed “public domain” eligible for homesteading, auctions, and rail grants, directly feeding wheat production for Minneapolis mills. Speculators and railroads exploited the act via proxy filings, reselling “cleared” parcels at profit to European immigrants. By 1870, non-Native population surged from 172,000 to over 439,000. The “clearing” of land was not metaphorical. It was the prerequisite for surveying, fencing, settlement, rail corridors, and the wider commodity circuits that would bind the Upper Midwest to national and global markets. That is what Harvard historian Sven Beckert calls war capitalism. He argues that global capitalism’s ascent was not a clean evolution toward free exchange. It relied on coercion, conquest, and violence. As his book on the history of Capitalism lays out, state funded war capitalism fundamentally relied on slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed commerce, and the imposition of sovereignty over both people and territory. In this framing, the Dakota and Ojibwe were obstacles to industrialization and commodification. The frontier needed to be safe for settlement and investment of Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, as well as railroads and industry. This included these two flour mills, the world’s largest by 1880: General Mills and Pillsbury. The gallows in Mankato were the blunt instrument that made the state-capital alliance credible. The point was not only to punish alleged crimes, but to demonstrate a capacity and will to kill. The American state needed to show it could override Indigenous sovereignty and reorder space. The subsequent removals and confinement at Fort Snelling completed the transformation. “Home” was recoded from relationship into asset. This land was no longer lived geography but extractable territory, from stewarding real soil to the selling of real estate. TOPHOPHILIA, TIES, AND TENSIONS War capitalism is not merely to punish resistance, but to convert a lived place into a fungible asset. But violence plays a deeper role than just legal rearrangement. It has to break this constant of human life: our attachment to place. Behavioral geographer Yi-Fu Tuan borrowed the term topophilia to describe this attachment — the “affective bond between people and place or setting.” The phrase can sound soft and sentimental but it can also cause friction in projects of political economy. The state may be able to abolish or rewrite a treaty, redraw a border, rename a river, and issue new deeds, but it still confronts bodies that have been oriented by firm ground. It’s on these grounds that paths are walked, food gathered, relatives buried, stories anchored to landmarks, and seasonal rhythms internalized as a habit of life. The obstacle is embedded and embodied in the physiology, including cognitive, and grounds to location. Modern neuroscience gives a concrete account of how place becomes part of a person. The hippocampus plays a central role in spatial memory and navigation, and research on place cells shows that hippocampal neurons fire in relation to specific locations in an environment. Familiar surroundings are not only around us they are within us. The brain builds spatial scaffolding that links location to memory, routine, prediction, and emotional regulation. When cognition is tied to the specificity of place, it becomes hard for a parcel to be made equivalent to another. Commodification demands interchangeability. A home cannot easily be made equivalent to another home when it’s part of the nervous system — not quickly, not cleanly, and often not at all. When the state-capital alliance imagines territory as a grid of extractable value, it is implicitly trying to override how humans experience territory. That is why “simple” displacement so often produces disproportionate harm. Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove coined the term root shock to describe the traumatic stress that follows the destruction of one’s “emotional ecosystem.” Root shock is not only grief or nostalgia. It is a stress response to the sudden loss of the social and spatial cues that stabilize daily life. The shredding of a mesh of relationships, routines, and meanings embedded in a neighborhood or homeland. The root shock of the state violence of 1862 was not just incidental to the project of transformation. It was structurally necessary. If topophilia is a biological and psychological anchor, then a purely legal or economic strategy (bureaucratic coercion) will often be insufficient because the anchor of topophilia holds. To clear land at speed and scale, the state reaches for tools that can sever attachment abruptly. Public executions, mass incarceration, forced marches, and exile doesn’t just relocate people. They’re violent attempts to scramble the conditions under which people can remain attached at all. It transforms topophilia into vulnerability. Work on social exclusion and “social pain” helps explain why. In a widely cited fMRI study, Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues found increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex during experiences of exclusion. This parallels patterns seen in physical pain studies where distress is tracked with painful activities. The point is not that social threat is “just like” physical injury, but that the brain treats social severing as a serious alarm condition. It’s something that demands attention, vigilance, and behavioral change to overcome. ROOTS, RESISTANCE, AND REPAIR Topophilia doesn’t end with the so-called frontier or attempts at ‘removing’ its inhabitants. It reappears wherever people form durable bonds. That includes the streets and schools, churches and parks, language, kin, and the local economies and cultures war capitalism eventually built. The Dakota and Ojibwe were never “removed” in any final sense. Many live and organize in and around the Twin Cities today. In South Minneapolis, the Indigenous Protector Movement, a biproduct of the American Indian Movement, works out of the American Indian Cultural Corridor along Franklin Avenue — an immediate target for ICE. The protectors made their presence known as a form of ongoing place-based care and defense. It is a living archive of tactics for defending attachment under pressure through direct action, community building, patrols, and the mundane discipline of showing up. What it offers is not merely a critique of state violence, but vigilance without spectacle, care without permission, and solidarity as a daily habit rather than a momentary sentiment. Other areas of Minneapolis show how when federal enforcement turns public space into a zone of uncertainty, topophilic neighbors often respond by adopting exactly those same “weapons” of persistence — care, doc

    22 Min.

  2. 16. JAN.

    The Mind Can't Act Alone and AI Can't Either

    Hello Interactors, It’s winter. So, as the sun tilts toward the sun (up north) my writing tilts toward the brain. It’s when I put on my behavioral geography glasses and try to see the world as a set of loops between bodies and places, perception and movement, constraint and choice. It’s hard to do that right now without running into AI. And one thing that keeps nagging at me is how AI is usually described as this super-brain perched in the cloud, or in a machine nearby, thinking on our behalf. That framing inherits an old habit of mind. Since Descartes, we’ve been tempted by the idea that the “real” mind sits apart from the messy body, steering it from some inner control room. Computer metaphors reinforced the same split by calling the CPU the “brain” of the machine. And now we’re extending the metaphor again with AI as the brain of the internet, hovering overhead, crunching data, issuing guidance. An intelligence box directing action at a distance is a tidy picture but it risks making us miss what’s actually doing the work. Let’s dig into how the brain leverages the loops of people, places, and interfaces we all move through to extend it’s richness and reach. GRADIENTS GUIDE WHILE BODIES BALANCE Have you ever hiked or skied in snow or fog and seen the middle distance just in front of you disappear? It takes the world you thought you knew, like ridge lines, tree lines, and the comforting predictable geometry of “just ahead” and reduces it to panic stricken near-field fragments. I’ve sensed once familiar ski runs become suddenly unfamiliar not because it changed, but because it was no longer accessible to my brain. In these moments, we’re all forced to reckon, recalibrate, and (usually) slow down as our senses sharpen. We take note of the slope under our feet and the way the ground shifts. We listen for clues our eyes can’t see and notice which direction the wind is blowing, how the light is changing, and how our own heartbeat and breath changes with each calculated risk. We know where we are, but the picture is fuzzy. Our memory only gets us so far. Everything around us becomes this multi-faceted relationship between our body making sense of it all while our brain updates its status moment by moment. The last thing a brain wants is to have its co-dependent limbs fail and risk falling. That experience demonstrates how the world is coupled with us. In world-involving coupling a living system survives through ongoing coordination with the affordances and constraints of its surroundings. In behavioral geography this frames spatial behavior as dynamic, reciprocal coordination between individuals and their environments, rather than just isolated internal cognition. Places actively shape decisions through the physics of the world and all its constraints. Actions, in turn, then reshape those surroundings in ongoing loops. This approach to cognition shifts focus from isolated mental maps to lived, constitutive engagements. It treats the world as a partner in our own competence. Before brains, gradients existed. Living systems navigated heat, cold, salt, sugar, thirst, dark, and light to persist. The first cognitive problems were biophysical. Surviving in a world that constantly disrupted viability relied on basic mechanisms like membrane flows, chemical reactions, and feedback. These primordial loops coupled an organism to a given environment directly. There were not yet any neural intermediaries. These were protozoa drifting toward nutrients or recoiling from toxins. It is in this raw attunement that world-involving coupling emerges. In 1932, physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term “homeostasis” to describe the body’s active pursuit of stability amidst environmental pressures. Living systems, whether single-celled or more complex, maintain survival variables within narrow bands. Cells detect changes in these variables, which affect molecular states. Temperature, acidity, pressure, osmosis, and metabolic concentrations all influence reaction rates. Feedback loops alter cell-environment interactions through heat transfer, ion flux, water movement, and gas exchange, ultimately restoring the system to a viable band. Organisms are not passive vessels but actively engage with these detection loops, triggering adjustments like a wilting plant drawing water. Sensing and action are fused operations for persistence. About 600 million years ago, cells in an ancient sea sensed electrical fields or chemical plumes on microbial mats. These pioneering cells formed diffuse nerve nets, evolving into jellyfish and anemones. Simple meshes firing to contract thin membranes in bell-shaped forms, they lacked a brain but coordinated propulsive pulses to keep the organism in bounds or sting prey. Within 10s of millions of years, bilateral animals evolved. Flatworms like planaria emerged with nerve cords laddered along their undersides, thickening toward their tips. These proto-brains sped signal spread across their elongated forms. As vertebrates appear, control becomes more layered. Circuits in the brainstem evolve to coordinate breathing, heart rate, posture, and basic orienting reflexes. The cerebellum emerges to sharpen timing and coordination. Competing actions, drives, and habits become sorted with the help of the basal ganglia. With mammals — and especially primates — the cortex expands. Perception and action become more flexible across situational contexts and with it comes longer-horizon learning, social inference, and planning. But at every milestone, bodies are still constrained and governed by gradients and fields related to gravity, friction, heat, oxygen, hydration, predators, prey, and terrain. The cortex sits on top of these older loops, stretching them in time and recombining them in new ways. Even the most “abstract” human cognition still rides on the same foundation of reflexes and sensorimotor sampling. This is what keeps an organism in operable biochemical ranges while it propels itself through an environment that perpetually pushes and pulls. BOXED BRAINS BEGET BIG BELIEFS The field of physiology deepened this bio-chemical inquiry through the early 20th century. Physiologist and neurologist Ivan Pavlov revealed how sensory cues could chain to responses through neural rerouting creating conditioned ‘Pavlovian’ reflexes. Neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington coined the term “synapse” as he dissected and described them as switches in these loops coupled to the world. Through this inquiry, the autonomic nervous system emerged as a kind of homeostatic controller. Sympathetic surges in the system were found to create fight or flight reactions as our parasympathetic system kicks in to dial us back. This can be seen as a more complex version of the same push-pull of Cannon’s original homeostasis. By the mid-20th century, mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener, working closely with physiologists and engineers, compared the nervous system to a servomechanism — a self-correcting governor found in engines. He coined the term cybernetics in his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine where he treated animals and machines as systems that regulate themselves through feedback. He and his collaborators argued this was a form of “purposeful behavior” or goal-directed action — a kind of negative feedback loop that reduces the difference between a current state and a target state. These ideas hardened in engineering fields during wartime as they were used in weapon systems for prediction and control of trajectories by compensating for delay and uncertainty. Cybernetics helped make the physiological regulation of Cannon’s biological homeostasis structurally analogous to engineering. This mechanical metaphor sparked a long-standing debate, dating back to Descartes’ 17th-century mind-body split. Dualism posited an immaterial mind as a rule-following pilot controlling mechanical flesh. Alan Turing’s 1936 paper had already formalized this possibility, presenting a “machine” capable of computing any algorithm. Two decades later, the Dartmouth summer workshop coined “artificial intelligence” and encouraged the idea of engineering minds as programs. Around the same time, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell built early “logic theorist” programs that proved theorems, making intelligence seem like a boxed process involving symbols and reasoning. That lineage hasn’t disappeared. This is largely the default engineering posture of AI. Even when the machinery shifts from hand-coded rules to learned statistical patterns, we still talk as if intelligence lives inside a system. AI models claim to “form representations,” “build a world model,” “store knowledge,” “plan,” and “reason.” Contemporary training methods reward this language because they really do produce rich internal states that can be probed, steered, and reused across tasks. Less discussed is the metaphysical shift from “the system has internal structure supporting performance” to “the system contains an inner arena where meaning emerges and is inspected before action.” Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who dismantled this intuition in theories of mind and consciousness, called this picture the “Cartesian theater.” He noticed that scientific explanations often subtly reintroduce the central place where “it all comes together” for an internal witness. Dennett believes this inner stage is a comforting fiction derived from Descartes’ split between observer and world. Brain imaging reveals coordinated network activity, but not a literal inner ‘screen’ presenting a unified world-model. Many neuroscientists describe cognition as emerging from distributed, parallel, and recurrent processes, sometimes with large-scale integration. Dennett’s point is not that internal processing is unreal, but that our language tempts us towar

    23 Min.

  3. 15.12.2025

    Trains, Planes, and Paved-Over Promises

    Hello Interactors, Spain’s high-speed trains feels like a totally different trajectory of modernity. America prides itself on being the tech innovator, but nowhere can we blast 180 MPH between city centers with seamless transfers to metros and buses…and no TSA drudgery. But look closer and the familiar comes into view — rising car ownership, rush-hour congestion (except in Valencia!), and growth patterns that echo America. I wanted to follow these parallel tracks back to the nineteenth-century U.S. rail boom and forward to Spain’s high-spe ed era. Turns out it’s not just about who gets faster rail or faster freeways, but what kind of growth they lock in once they arrive. TRAINS, CITIES, AND CONTRADICTIONS My wife and I took high-speed rail (HSR) on our recent trip to Spain. My first thought was, “Why can’t we have nice things?” They’re everywhere. Madrid to Barcelona in two and a half hours. Barcelona to Valencia, Valencia back to Madrid. Later, Porto to Lisbon. Even Portugal is in on it. We glided out of city-center stations, slipped past housing blocks and industrial belts, then settled into the familiar grain of Mediterranean countryside at 300 kilometers an hour. The Wi-Fi (mostly) worked. The seats were comfortable. No annoying TSA. Where HSR did not exist or didn’t quite fit our schedule, we filled gaps with EasyJet flights. We did rent a car to seek the 100-foot waves at Nazaré, Portugal, only to be punished by the crawl of Porto’s rush-hour traffic in a downpour. Within cities, we took metros, commuter trains, trams, buses, bike share, and walked…a lot. From the perspective of a sustainable transportation advocate, we were treated to the complete “nice things” package: fast trains between cities, frequent rail and bus service inside them, and streets catering to human bodies more than SUVs. What surprised me, though, was the way these nice things coexist with growth patterns that look — in structural terms — uncomfortably familiar. In this video 👆 from our high-speed rail into Madrid, you see familiar freeway traffic but also a local rail running alongside. This site may be more common in NYC, DC, Boston, and even Chicago but less so in the Western US. Spain now operates one of the world’s largest high-speed networks. Spaniards reside inside a country roughly the size of Texas and enjoy about 4,000 kilometers of dedicated lines. This is Europe’s largest HSR system and one of only a handful of “comprehensive national networks” worldwide (Campos & de Rus, 2009; Perl & Goetz, 2015; UIC, 2024). Yet, like most of Europe, it has also seen a steady rise in car ownership. Across the EU, the average number of passenger cars per capita increased from 0.53 to 0.57 between 2011 and 2021, with Spain tracking that upward trend (Eurostat, 2023). Inland passenger-kilometers remain dominated by private cars, with rail — high-speed and conventional combined — taking a modest minority share (European Commission, 2021). Spain, in other words, has both extensive HSR and rising car ownership. The tension between the pleasant micro-geographies of rail stations, sidewalks, and metro lines and the macro-geography of an ever-familiar car-dependent growth regime makes it interesting from an economic geography standpoint. HSR in Spain is not so much an alternative to growth but a particular way of organizing it. America was once organized around rail. But our own car-dependent growth regime pushed it away. In the late nineteenth century, the United States was the HSR superpower of its time. From the 1830s through the early twentieth century, a dense mesh of rail lines shortened distances across the continent. By 1916, the U.S. rail network peaked at roughly 254,000 route miles — enough track to circle the globe multiple times. It then went into steep decline under competition from cars and trucks (Stover, 1997; The RAND Corporation, 2008). Rail was not merely a mode of transport. It was the primary infrastructure for integrating an entire continent’s economy. Chicago was the canonical beneficiary. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis makes the case that rail-driven “time–space compression” did as much as natural endowments to elevate Chicago from muddy frontier town to the pivot of a continental system of grain, lumber, and meat (Cronon, 1991). Rail lines did not simply connect places that already mattered; they reorganized what mattered by funneling resources, capital, and people through specific nodes. Economic geography here is not just about location, but about which locations are made central by network design. This “time–space compression” traces back to Karl Marx’s 1857–58 Grundrisse, where he described the “annihilation of space by time” as capitalism’s drive to overcome spatial barriers through faster transport like railroads to enable quicker turnover of capital. Geographer David Harvey formalized the term “time–space compression” in his 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity, building on Marx to analyze how nineteenth-century rail networks (alongside telegraphs) shrank perceived distances during the first major wave of compression from the mid-1800s to World War I. At the metropolitan scale, those same rail technologies produced an earlier generation of “nice things” that sustainable transportation advocates now associate with Europe. Horsecar, cable car, and later electric streetcar networks radiated from downtowns into the countryside, creating early “rail suburbs” connected by frequent service and walkable main streets (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987). Streetcar suburbs offered middle-class households a promise of a commuter train to a walkable compact neighborhood with quiet residential streets, relatively clean air, and quick access back to the city. But these “nice things” were never neutral amenities. Rail suburbs became instruments of class and, in the U.S. context, racial segregation. (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987) Access to frequent rail service and detached houses on leafy streets was tightly bound to property ownership and exclusionary practices. Chicago’s rail-driven boom reshaped hinterlands into “commodity frontiers.” It, like many other cities later, externalized environmental costs onto landscapes far from the city’s sidewalks, station concourses, and less than desirable living conditions. RAILS, ROADS, AND REGIMES The core paradox of economic growth is already visible here. Rail dramatically reduced transport costs and enabled agglomeration economies — thick labor markets, specialized firms, information spillovers — that enriched certain cities and classes. At the same time, those very efficiencies intensified resource extraction, spatial inequality, and political conflicts. Capital and power decided who could benefit and who would be pushed to the margins. America once ran on rails — dense, local, and linked — its own version of the “nice things” seen in Spain. But they carried with them the costs of congestion and expansion, sending us on a different path for mobility. The transition from rail to road in the twentieth-century United States is not just a story of transportation technology. It’s a story of how a country decided to scale itself. As motor vehicles diffused in the early 1900s, they interacted with existing urban and regional patterns largely established by rail networks. Postwar sprawl is largely a confluence of car-based living. Rising incomes, coupled with finance institutions rewarding new developments and cheaply manufactured cars, led households and corporate firms to trade close proximity for space (Glaeser & Kahn, 2004). Cars did not invent the desire for separation from industrial cities, but they multiplied the potential configurations. Federal policy amplified that shift. The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act created a 41,000-mile limited-access network funded primarily by federal fuel taxes. This embedded a new high-speed system on top of the pre-existing rail grid (National Archives, 2022; Weingroff, 1996). While railroads remained vital for freight, the intercity passenger market was increasingly organized around airports and interstates. Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier documents how federal mortgage guarantees, tax incentives, and highway construction converged to make owner-occupied suburban homes the normative “good life” for white middle-class Americans (Jackson, 1985). Robert Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias similarly traces how suburban landscapes became aspirational geographies of domestic desire separated from the din and drive of the urban mire, rising from London to Los Angeles (Fishman, 1987). From an economic geography perspective, the postwar highway and aviation regime did not end agglomeration; it reconfigured it. Metropolitan regions sprawled outward along radial freeways and beltways. Airports became new nodes of connectivity, often surrounded by logistics parks and office clusters. The benefits of scale — large labor markets, diversified industries, hordes of consumers — remained, but the physical form of cities stretched into low-density, car-centric webs of cul-de-sacs. This system has its own “nice things” that I enjoy every day: door-to-door convenience on your own schedule, cheap flights between distant cities, and a logistic network that will deliver almost anything in two days…or even the next hour. But it also hardened a built environment that is difficult to retrofit for different “nice things” like rail. The very success of car-based ascendence created a geography whose path dependence only leaves alternatives of prohibitive transcendence. HSR projects worldwide tend to cluster where dense city pairs sit 300–800 km apart, with strong pre-existing travel demand and robust local transit systems (Campos and de Rus, 2009). National HSR strategies lead to “exclusive corridors,” “hybrid

    24 Min.

  4. 23.11.2025

    An Economic Geography of Complicity and Control

    Hello Interactors, I’m back! After a bit of a hiatus traveling Southern Europe, where my wife had meetings in Northern Italy and I gave a talk in Lisbon. We visited a couple spots in Spain in between. Now it’s time to dive back into our exploration of economic geography. My time navigating those historic cities — while grappling with the apps on my phone — turned out to be the perfect, if slightly frustrating, introduction to the subject of the conference, Digital Geography. The presentation I prepared for the Lisbon conference, and which I hint at here, traces how the technical optimism of early desktop software evolved into the all-encompassing power of Platform Capital. We explore how digital systems like Airbnb and Google Maps have become more than just convenient tools. They are the primary architects of urban value. They don’t just reflect economic patterns. They mandate them. They reorganize rent extraction by dictating interactions with commerce and concentrating control. This is the new financialized city, and the uncomfortable question we must face is this: Are we leveraging these tools toward a new beneficial height, or are the tools exploiting us in ways that transcends oversight? CARTOGRAPHY’S COMPUTATIONAL CONVERGENCE I was sweating five minutes in when I realized we were headed to the wrong place. We picked up the pace, up steep grades, glissading down narrow sidewalks avoiding trolley cars and private cars inching pinched hairpins with seven point turns. I was looking at my phone with one eye and the cobbled streets with the other. Apple Maps had led us astray. But there we were, my wife and I, having emerged from the metro stop at Lisbon’s shoreline with a massive cruise ship looming over us like a misplaced high-rise. We needed to be somewhere up those notorious steep streets behind us in 10 minutes. So up we went, winding through narrow streets and passages. Lisbon is hilly. We past the clusters of tourists rolling luggage, around locals lugging groceries. I had come to present at the 4th Digital Geographies Conference, and the organizers had scheduled a walking tour of Lisbon. Yet here I was, performing the very platform-mediated tourism that the attendees came to interrogate. My own phone was likely using the same mapping API I used to book my AirBnB. These platforms were actively reshaping the Lisbon around us. The irony wasn’t lost on me. We had gathered to critically examine digital geography while simultaneously embodying its contradictions. That became even more apparent as we gathered for our walking tour. We met in a square these platform algorithms don’t push. It’s not “liked”, “starred”, nor “Instagrammed.” But it was populated nonetheless…with locals not tourists. Mostly immigrants. The virtual was met with reality. What exactly were we examining as we stood there, phones in hand, embodying the very contradictions we’d gathered to critique? Three decades ago, as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, I would have understood this moment differently. The UCSB geography department was riding the crest of the GIS revolution then. Apple and Google Maps didn’t exist, and we spent our days digitizing boundaries from paper maps, overlaying data layers, building spatial databases that would make geographic information searchable, analyzable, computable. We were told we were democratizing cartography, making it a technical craft anyone could master with the right tools. But the questions that haunt me now — who decides what gets mapped? whose reality does the map represent? what work does the map do in the world? — remained largely unasked in those heady days of digital optimism. Digital geography, or ‘computer cartography’ as we understood it then, was about bringing computational precision to spatial problems. We were building tools that would move maps from the drafting tables of trained cartographers to the screens of any researcher with data to visualize. Marveling at what technology might do for us has a way of stunting the urge to question what it might be doing to us. The field of digital geography has since undergone a transformation. It’s one that mirrors my own trajectory from building tools and platforms at Microsoft to interrogating their societal effects. Today’s digital geography emerges from the collision of two geography traditions: the quantitative, GIS-focused approach I learned at UCSB, and critical human geography’s interrogation of power, representation, and spatial justice. This convergence became necessary as digital technologies escaped the desktop and embedded themselves in everyday urban life. We no longer simply make digital maps of cities and countrysides. Digital platforms are actively remaking cities themselves…and those who live in them. Contemporary digital geography, as examined at this conference, looks at how computational systems reorganize spatial relations, urban governance, and the production of place itself. When Airbnb’s algorithm determines neighborhood property values, when Google Maps’ routing creates and destroys retail corridors, when Uber’s surge pricing redraws the geography of urban mobility — these platforms don’t describe cities so much as actively reconstruct them. The representation has become more influential or ‘real’ than the reality itself. This is much like the hyperreality famously described by the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard — a condition where the simulation or sign (like app interfaces) replaces and precedes reality. In this way, the digital map (visually and virtually) has overtaken the actual territory in importance and impact, actively shaping how we perceive and interact with the real world. As digital platforms become embedded in everyday life, we are increasingly living in a simulation. The more digital services infiltrate and reconstitute urban systems the more they evade traditional governance. Algorithmic mediation through code written to influence the rhythm of daily life and human behavior increasingly determines who we interact with and which spaces we see, access, and value. Some describe this as a form of data colonialism — extending the logic of resource extraction into everyday movements and behaviors. This turns citizens into data subjects. Our patterns feed predictive models that further shape people, place…and profits. These aren’t simple pipes piped in, or one-way street lights, but dynamic architectures that reorganize society’s rights. LISBON LURED, LOST, AND LIVED The scholars gathered in Lisbon trace precisely how digital platforms restructure housing markets, remake retail ecologies, and reformulate the rights of humans and non-humans. Their work, from analyzing platform control over cattle herds in Brazil to tracking urban displacement, exemplifies the conference’s focus: making visible the often-obscured mechanisms through which platforms reshape space. Two attendees I met included Jelke Bosma (University of Amsterdam), who researches Airbnb’s transformation of housing into asset classes, and Pedro Guimarães (University of Lisbon), who documents how platform-mediated tourism hollows out local retail. At the end of the tour, when a group of us were looking to chat over drinks, Pedro remarked, “If you want a recommendation for an authentic Lisbon bar experience, it no longer exists!” Yet, even as I navigated Lisbon using the very interfaces these scholars’ critique, I was reminded of this central truth: we study these systems from within them. There is no outside position from which to observe platform urbanism. We are all, to varying degrees, complicit subjects. This reflection has become central to digital geography’s method. It’s impossible to claim critical distance from systems that mediate our own spatial practices. So, instead, a kind of intrinsic critique is developed by understanding platform effects through our own entanglements. Lisbon has become an inadvertent laboratory for this critique. Jelke Bosma’s analysis of AirBnB reveals how the platform has facilitated a shift from informal “home sharing” to professionalized asset management, where multi-property hosts control an increasing share of urban housing stock. His research shows “professionally managed apartments do not only generate the largest individual revenues, they also account for a disproportionate segment of the total revenues accumulated on the platform”. This professionalization is driven by AirBnB’s business model and its investment in platform supporting “asset-based professionalization,” which primarily benefits multi-listing commercial hosts. He further explains that AirBnB’s algorithm “rewards properties with high availability rates,” creating what he calls “evolutionary pressures” on hosts to maximize their listings’ availability. This incentivizes them to become full-time tourist accommodations, reducing the competitiveness of long-term residential renting. The complexity of this ecosystem was also apparent during our Barcelona stop. What I booked as an “Airbnb” was a Sweett property — a competitor platform that operates through AirBnb’s APIs. This apartment featured Bluetooth-enabled locks and smart home controls inserted into an 1800s building. Sweett’s model demonstrates how platform infrastructure not only becomes an industry standard but is leveraged and replicated by competitors in a kind of coopetition based on the pricing algorithms AirBnB normalized. In Lisbon, my rental sat in a building where every door was marked with AL (Alojamento Local), the legal framework for short-term rentals. No permanent residents remained; the architecture itself had been reshaped to platform specifications: fire escape signage next to framed photos, fire extinguishers mounted to the wall, and minimized common spaces upon entry. It’s more like a hotel disaggregated into independent

    28 Min.

  5. 05.10.2025

    Spirals of Enclosure

    Hello Interactors, Fall is in full swing here in the northern hemisphere, which means it’s time to turn our attention to economics and economic geography. Triggered by a recent podcast on the origins of capitalism, I thought I’d kick off by exploring this from a geography perspective. I trace how violence, dispossession, and racial hierarchy aren’t simple externalities or accidents. They emerge out of a system that organized itself and then spread. Capitalism grew out of dispossession of land and human autonomy and became a dominant social and economic structure. It’s rooted in violence that became virtuous and centuries later is locked-in. Or is it? EMERGING ENGLISH ENCLOSURES The dominant and particular brand of capitalism in force today originates in England. Before English landlords and the state violently seized common lands back in the 1300s, economic life was embedded in what historian E.P. Thompson called “moral economies”.(1) These were systems of survival where collective responsibility was managed through custom, obligation, and shared access to resources. Similar systems existed elsewhere. Long before Europeans arrived at the shores of what is now called North America, Haudenosaunee longhouse economies were sophisticatedly organized around economies of reciprocity. Further south, Andean ayllu communities negotiated labor obligations and access to land was shared. West African systems featured land that belonged to communities and ancestors, not individuals. Back in medieval English villages, commons weren’t charity, they were infrastructure. Anyone could graze animals or gather firewood. When harvests failed, there were fallbacks like hunting and gathering rights, seasonal labor sharing, and kin networks. As anthropologist Stephen Gudeman shows, these practices reflected cultures of mutual insurance aimed at collective resilience, not individual accumulation.(2) Then landlords, backed by state violence, destroyed this system to enrich themselves. From 1348-1349, the bubonic plague killed perhaps half of England’s population. This created a labor shortage that gave surviving so-called peasants leverage. For the first time they could demand higher wages, refuse exploitative landlords, or move to find better conditions. The elite mobilized state violence to reverse this. In 1351 the state passed The Statute of Labourers — an attempt to freeze wages and restrict worker movement. This serves as an early signal that reverberates today. When property and people come in conflict, the state sides with property. Over the next two centuries, landlords steadily enclosed common lands, claiming shared space as private property. Peasants who resisted were evicted, sometimes killed. Initial conditions mattered enormously. England had a relatively weak monarchy that couldn’t check landlord aggression like stronger European states did. It also had growing urban markets creating demand for food and wool and post-plague labor dynamics that made controlling land more profitable than extracting rents from secure peasants. As historian J.M. Neeson details, enclosure — fencing in private land — destroyed social infrastructure.(3) When access to common resources disappeared, so did the safety nets that enabled survival outside of market and labor competition. People simply lost the ability to graze a cow, gather fuel, glean grain, or even rely on neighbors’ obligation to help. This created a feedback loop: Each turn made the pattern stronger. Understanding how this happens requires grasping how these complex systems shaped the very people who reproduced them. The landlords driving enclosure weren’t simply greedy villains. Their sense of self, their understanding of what was right and proper, was constituted through relationships to other people like them, to their own opportunities, and to authorities who validated their actions. A landlord enclosing commons likely experienced this as “improvement”. They believed they were making the land productive while exercising newly issued property rights. Other landlords were doing it, parliament legalized it, and the economics of the time justified it. The very capacity to see alternatives was constrained by relational personal and social positions within an emerging capitalistic society. This doesn’t excuse the violence or diminish responsibility. But it does reveal how systems reproduce themselves. This happens not primarily through individual evil but through relationships and feedback loops that constitute people’s identities and sense of what’s possible. The moral judgment remains stark. These were choices that enriched someone by destroying someone else’s means of survival. But the choices were made by people whose very selfhood was being constructed by the system they were creating. Similarly, displaced peasants resisted in ways their social positions made possible. They rioted, appealed to historical customary rights, attempted to maintain the commons they relied on for centuries. Each turn of the spiral didn’t just move resources, it remade people. Peasants’ children, born into a world without commons, developed identities shaped by market dependence — renting their labor in exchange for money. What had been theft became, over generations, simply “how things are.” By the mid-16th century, England had something new. They’d created a system where most people owned no land, had no customary rights to subsistence, and had to compete in labor markets to survive. This was the essence of capitalism’s emergence. It wasn’t born out of markets (they existed everywhere for millennia) but as market dependence enforced through dispossession. Out of this emerged accumulated actions of actors whose awareness and available alternatives were themselves being shaped by the very system they were simultaneously shaping and sustaining. REPLICATING PATTERNS OF PLANTATIONS Once capitalism emerged in England through violent enclosure, its spread wasn’t automatic. Understanding how it became global requires distinguishing between wealth extraction (which existed under many systems) and capitalist social relations (which require specific conditions). Spain conquered vast American territories, devastating indigenous populations through disease, warfare, and forced labor. Spanish extraction from mines in the 16th century — like Potosí in today’s Bolivia — were worked by enslaved indigenous and African peoples under conditions that killed them in staggering numbers. Meanwhile, Portugal developed Atlantic island sugar plantations using enslaved African labor. This expansion of Portuguese agriculture on Atlantic islands like Madeira and São Tomé became a blueprint for plantation economies in the Americas, particularly Brazil. The brutally efficient system perfected there for sugar production — relying on the forced labor of enslaved Africans — was directly transplanted across the ocean, leading to a massive increase in the scale and violence of the transatlantic slave trade. Both empires generated massive wealth from these practices. If colonial plunder caused capitalism, Spain and Portugal should have industrialized first. Instead, they stagnated. The wealth flowed to feudal monarchies who spent it on palaces, armies, and wars, not productive reinvestment. Both societies remained fundamentally feudal. England, with virtually no empire during its initial capitalist transformation, developed differently because it had undergone a different structural violence — enclosure of common land that created landless workers, wage dependence, and market competition spiraling into self-reinforcing patterns. But once those capitalist social relations existed, they became patterns that spread through violent imposition. These patterns destroyed existing economic systems and murdered millions. English expansion first began close to home. Ireland and Scotland experienced forced enclosures as English landlords exported the template — seize land, displace people, create private regimes, and force the suffering to work for you. This internal colonialism served as testing ground for techniques later deployed around the world. When English capitalism encountered the Caribbean — lands where indigenous peoples had developed complex agricultural systems and trade networks — the Spanish conquest had already devastated these populations. English merchants and settlers completed the destruction, seizing lands indigenous peoples had managed for millennia while expanding the brutal, enslaved-based labor models pioneered by the Spanish and Portuguese for mining and sugar production. The plantations English capitalists built operated differently than earlier Portuguese and Spanish systems. English plantation owners were capitalists, not feudal lords. But this was also not simply individual choice or moral character. They were operating within and being shaped by an emerging system of capitalist social relations. Here too they faced competitive pressures to increase output, reduce costs, and compete with other plantation owners. The system’s logic — accumulate to accumulate more — emerged from relational dynamics between competing capitalists. The individual identities as successful plantation owners was constituted through their position within the competitive networks in which they coexisted. New location, same story. Even here this systemic shaping doesn’t absolve individual responsibility for the horrors they perpetrated. Enslaved people were still kidnapped, brutalized, and worked to death. Indigenous peoples were still murdered and their lands still stolen. But understanding how the system shaped what seemed necessary or moral to those positioned to benefit helps explain how such horror could be so widespread and normalized. This normalization created new spirals: This pattern then replicated across even more geographies — Jamaica, Bar

    36 Min.

  6. 24.08.2025

    Masters of Mess Making and Meaning

    Hello Interactors, My wife and I recently started watching the mini-series 100 Foot Wave, which follows extreme surfer Garrett McNamara’s quest to ride the mythical 100-foot breaker. The show has put Nazaré, Portugal on the map — not just as a place, but as a symbol of human daring against forces far larger than ourselves. At the same time, I’ve been listening to physicist-philosopher Sean Carroll’s recent “solo” podcast on the emergence of complexity, tracing how the universe began in simplicity and blossomed into stars, life, and consciousness. These two threads — towering waves and cosmic arcs — collided in my mind, stirring something that has been swelling in me for years: how to reconcile wonder at life’s improbable flourishing with despair at its accelerated unraveling on Earth. Should despair be the only response? Or is it possible, like the surfers at Nazaré, to recognize the peril without surrendering to it — to ride, however briefly, the wave that could also destroy us? THE COSMIC WAVE Beneath the lighthouse bluff at Nazaré, Portugal opens a canyon 140 miles long and three miles deep — three times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Born of tectonic fractures and sculpted over millions of years, it is less a static feature than a force in its own right: a conduit that gathers the ocean’s momentum and hurls it shoreward. Swells that elsewhere would pass unnoticed are here magnified into walls of water, indifferent to whether they become playground or grave. Geography conspires — wind, current, and rock — but the canyon itself is an accomplice, a reminder that Earth is never merely stage but actor. For today’s surfers, this is possibility. For centuries of fishermen, it was peril. The waves have not changed, but the stance we take toward them has — and that, too, becomes part of the story the canyon tells. So it is with complexity. Every wave begins simple, a long low swell born of distant winds, that crescendos into chaos at the shoreline. It swirls and curls into turbulent foam piqued in curious but dangerous beauty, only to dissolve back into undertow, bubbles, and silence. Our own cosmos follows the same rhythm, driven by the logic of entropy — the tendency of energy to spread, of order to give way to disorder. In the beginning, we know the universe was astonishingly simple and ordered: a hot, uniform plasma, almost featureless in its smoothness. Imagine the origin of life sitting at origin of a graph. It exists orderly in low entropy and low complexity. But entropy is restless. As it advanced diagonally up and to the right disorder increases in a straight line. This opens space for complexity to emerge. Early on in the cosmos tiny quantum fluctuations stretched into patterns, atoms gathered into stars, stars fused new elements as galaxies spun, coalesced, and collided. Imagine this as the complexity line on our graph. It also grows with time but takes the shape of a parabolic wave climbing upward to a smooth crest as it increases in complexity. Meanwhile, entropy ticks steadily up and to the right as a straight arrow of time forever growing in disorder as our universe continues to increase in complexity. We are now somewhere on this complexity curve. And this is the paradox of our middle epoch. Entropy never reverses course — disorder always increases — yet along that trajectory the complexity within we live crests, like a wave gathering its final height. For a sliver of cosmic time, the universe has been rich, complex, and with structure. On at least one world in the cosmos, life emerges and even creates complex organisms like us. But if entropy pushes inexorably forward, complexity will not hold indefinitely. Stars will exhaust their fuel, galaxies will drift into darkness, and matter itself may decay. This diagram reminds us that complexity rises only to fall again, tracing an arc back toward simplicity even as entropy continues its steady climb. In this framing, the universe is not a march from order to chaos but a cycle of simple-to-complex-to-simple played out against entropy’s one-way slope. We live in a fleeting middle where complexity momentarily flourishes. Like the wave at Nazaré, born as a long low swell, steepening into a towering wall of water, then dissolving again into foam, undertow, and silence, our cosmos crests only once. The question is not whether entropy wins — it does — but how we dwell, and what we make of meaning, within the brief surge of complexity it permits. It took a lot to get us to this point. This complex space that entropy has carved within cosmic time leaves room for novelty. Complexity flourishes locally even as disorder deepens globally. Out of this novel initial imbalance, life emerged — fragile metabolisms harvesting energy from their surroundings, weaving temporary order against the grain of entropy. From single-celled organisms to multicellular bodies, from photosynthesis to predation, biology layered new strategies of survival atop older ones. Evolution diversified life into forests and reefs, wings and fins, neural nets and circulatory systems. These proliferations multiplied niches where order could briefly hold, even as the larger cosmos drifted toward disorder. Only much later did consciousness arise, one of evolution’s rarest experiments: a capacity not merely to metabolize energy but to reflect upon the arc of complexity itself. With awareness came memory, imagination, culture — tools for navigating the turbulence of entropy’s middle chapter. Entropy still holds the reins: the universe will drift back toward simplicity, whether into a thin uniform haze or some other quiet ending. Yet here, in the middle, entropy’s detour has produced extravagant complexity — including beings capable of gazing back at the wave that carries them and wondering what it means. THE INDIFFERENT EARTH This same gaze can also induce speculation. Like speculative realism. Emerging in the early 2000s as a reaction against a tendency to keep reality tethered to human thought and language, its central claim is stark: the world is indifferent to us. Planets orbit, tectonic plates shift, and waves break whether or not anyone is there to see them. From this view, complexity arises from imbalances in matter and energy, from unfinished processes that unfold far beyond human agency. The wave doesn’t care whether it is surfed or feared; it builds from wind, water, and terrain, cresting and dissolving with no meaning to maintain. Animated globe of tectonic plates shifting across hundreds of millions of years, reminding us that Earth’s movements unfold indifferent to human presence or perception. Source: Reddit. And below is where we go from here: This speculation hits another conscious reality — optimism. Human optimism is as hard to contain as its constant refrain. Born of the Enlightenment but rebirthed amid the industrial expansion, world wars, and scientific breakthroughs of the early 1900s, modernist optimism leaned confidently on reason and science — a conviction that human ingenuity could transcend natural limits and bend uncertainty toward progress. Time and again, human ingenuity has found ways to stretch the boundaries of what seemed natural limits. Agricultural revolutions multiplied food production beyond what Malthus thought possible. Industrialization transformed energy regimes, substituting fossil carbon for dwindling forests. Urban innovations — from sanitation to electrification — allowed cities to grow far past the thresholds that once doomed them to collapse. Each leap suggested that collapse was not destiny but averted through cleverness. This pattern sustains modernist faith: that humans can intervene wisely in the unfolding of complexity. Where speculative realism emphasizes the indifference of natural forces — entropy driving stars and systems toward disorder regardless of our designs — modernist thought wagers otherwise. It insists that ingenuity allows us not merely to endure the swell but to ride it, to carve temporary stability out of turbulence. In this view, the challenge of complexity is not simply to recognize its inevitabilities but to cultivate the foresight, restraint, and imagination that let human life persist in its fragile middle. That is if humans “don’t do dumb things.” In other words, humans can and should preserve the conditions that let life and intelligence persist locally, even as the universal drift of entropy continues. Armed with the mathematical models that fuel both scientific confidence and human hubris, the world can appear elegant — even in its ugliness. Amidst entropy following a relentless trajectory we see scaling laws enfold organisms, cities, and civilizations alike. The planet itself is rendered as a singular complex system drifting through cosmic time. The physicist’s gaze simplifies this by design — reducing frictions, stripping away differences, until only lawlike arcs remain. As the polymath Heinz von Foerster once put it, “Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.” Geography, by contrast, cannot ignore what falls through those cracks. The sweep of cosmology may remind us that complexity is not uniquely human — stars ignite, galaxies cluster, black holes churn — but such vistas stretch horizons so far that human lifetimes blur into insignificance. Civilizations, like waves, crest and crash in an instant against the span of cosmic time. To move closer in, at a planetary scale, complexity narrows to the thin envelope where oceans, land, and atmosphere intertwine. It is within this fragile band that agriculture took root, cities rose, and civilizations flourished. Yet scientists, equipped with hard science, warn that this Holocene balance has already been breached. The “safe operating space” is no longer secure; the planetary is alre

    24 Min.

  7. 10.08.2025

    Native or Not? How Science, Politics, and Physics Decide Who Belongs

    Hello Interactors, It’s been awhile as I’ve been enjoying summer — including getting in my kayak to paddle over to a park to water plants. Time on the water also gets me thinking. Lately, it’s been about what belongs here, what doesn’t, and who decides? This week’s essay follows my trail of thought from ivy-covered fences to international borders. I trace how science, politics, and even physics shape our ideas of what’s “native” and what’s “invasive.” INVASION, IVY, AND ICE As I was contemplating this essay in my car at a stop light, a fireweed seedling floated through the sunroof. Fireweed is considered “native” by the U.S. Government, but when researching this opportunistic plant — which thrives in disturbed areas (hence it’s name) — I learned it can be found across the entire Northern Hemisphere. It’s “native” to Japan, China, Korea, Siberia, Mongolia, Russia, and all of Northern Europe. Because its primary dispersal is through the wind, it’s impossible to know where exactly it originated and when. And unlike humans, it doesn’t have to worry about borders. So long as a species arrives on its own accord through wind, wings, currents, or chance — without a human hand guiding it — it’s often granted the status of “native.” Never mind whether the journey took decades or millennia, or if the ecosystem has since changed. What matters is that it got there on its own, as if nature somehow stamped its passport. As long time Interactors may recall, I spend the summer helping water “native” baby plants into maturity in a local public green space. A bordering homeowner had planted an “invasive species”, English Ivy, years ago and it climbed the fence engulfing the Sword Ferns, Vine Maples, and towering Douglas Fir trees common in Pacific Northwest woodlands. A nearby concerned environmentalist volunteered to remove the “alien” ivy and plant “native” species through a city program called Green Kirkland. Some of the first Firs he planted are now taller than he is! Meanwhile, on the ground you see remnants of English Ivy still trying to muster a comeback. The stuff is tenacious. This is also the time of year in the Seattle area when Himalayan Black Berries are ripening. These sprawls of arching spikey vines are as pernicious as they are delicious. Nativist defenders try squelching these invaders too. But unlike English Ivy, these “aliens” come with a sugary prize. You’ll see people walking along the side of roads with buckets and step stools trying their darnedest to pluck a plump prize — taking care not to get poked or pierced by their prickly spurs. This framing of “invasive” versus “native” has given me pause like never before, especially as I witness armed, masked raids on homes and businesses carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. These government officials, who are also concerned and deeply committed citizens, see themselves as removing what they label “invasive aliens” — individuals they fear might overwhelm the so-called “native” population. As part of the Department of Homeland Security, they work to secure the “Homeland” from what is perceived as an invasion by unwanted human movement. In reflecting on this, I ask myself: how different am I from an ICE agent when I labor to eradicate plants I have been taught to call “invasive” while nurturing so-called “native” species back to health? Both of us are acting within a worldview that categorizes beings as either threats or treasures. At what cost, and with what consequences? According to a couple other U.S. agencies (like the National Park Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture) species are considered native if they were present before European colonization (i.e., pre-1492). The idea that a species is “native” if it was present before 1492 obviously reflects less a scientific ecological reality than a political opinion of convenience. Framing nativity through the lens of settler history rather than ecological process ignores not only millennia of Indigenous land stewardship, but prehistoric human introductions and natural migrations shaped by climate and geology. Trying pin down what is “native” is like picking up a squirming earthworm. These little critters, which have profoundly altered soil ecosystems in postglacial North America, are often labeled “naturalized” rather than “native” because their arrival followed European colonization. Yet this classification ignores the fact that northern North America had no earthworms at all for thousands of years after the glaciers retreated. There were scraped away with the topsoil. What native species may exist in North America are confined to the unglaciated South. What’s disturbing isn’t just the worms’ historical presence but the simplistic persistent narrative that ecosystems were somehow stable until 1492. How is it possible that so many people still insist it was colonial contact that supposedly flipped some ecological switch? In truth, landscapes have always been in motion. They’ve been shaped and reshaped by earth’s systems — especially human systems — long before borders were drawn. Defining nativity by a colonial decree doesn’t just flatten ecological complexity, it overwrites a deep history of entangled alteration. MIGRATION, MOVEMENT, AND MEANING If a monarch butterfly flutters across the U.S. border from Mexico, no one demands its papers. There are no butterfly checkpoints in Laredo or Yuma. It rides the wind northward, tracing ancient pathways across Texas, the Midwest, all the way to southern Canada. The return trip happens generations later — back to the oyamel forests in the state of Michoacán. This movement is a marvel. It’s so essential we feel compelled to watch it, map it, and even plant milkweed to help it along. But when human beings try to make a similar journey on the ground — fleeing drought, violence, or economic collapse — we call it a crisis, build walls, and question their right to belong. This double standard starts to unravel when you look closely at the natural world. Species are constantly on the move. Some of the most astonishing feats of endurance on Earth are migratory: the Arctic tern flies from pole to pole each year; caribou migrate thousands of miles across melting tundra and newly paved roads. GPS data compiled in Where the Animals Go shows lions slipping through suburban gardens and wolves threading through farmland, using hedgerows and railways like interstates. Animal movement isn’t the exception; it’s the ecological norm. And it’s not just animals. Plants, too, are masters of mobility. A single seed can cross oceans, whether on the back of a bird, in a gust of wind, or tucked into a canoe by a human hand. In one famous case, researchers once proposed that a tree found on a remote Pacific Island must have arrived via floating debris. But later genetic and archaeological evidence suggested a different story: it may have arrived with early Polynesian voyagers — people whose seafaring knowledge shaped entire ecosystems across the Pacific. DNA evidence and phylogeographic studies (how historical processes shape the geographic distribution of genetic lineages within species) now support the idea that Polynesians carried plants such as paper mulberry, sweet potato, taro, and even some trees across vast ocean distances well before the Europeans showed up. What was once considered improbable — human-mediated dispersal to incredibly beautiful and remote islands — is now understood as a core part of Pacific ecological and cultural history. Either way, that plant didn’t ask to be there. It simply was. And with no obvious harm done, it was allowed to stay. We humans can also often conflate our inability to perceive harm with the idea that a species “belongs.” We tend to assume that if we can’t see, measure, or immediately notice any negative impact a species is having, then it must not be causing harm — and therefore it “belongs” in the ecosystem. But belonging is contextual. It can be slow to reveal and is rarely absolute. British ecologist and writer Ken Thompson has spent much of his career challenging our tidy categories of “native” and “invasive.” In his book Where Do Camels Belong?, he reminds us that the “belonging” question is less about biology than bureaucracy. Camels originated in North America and left via the Bering land bridge around 3–5 million years ago. They eventually domesticated in the Middle East about ~3,000–4,000 years ago to be used for transportation, milk, and meat. Then, in the 19th century, British colonists brought camels to Australia to help explore and settle the arid interior. Australia is now home to the largest population of feral camels in the world. So where, exactly, do they “belong”? Our ecological borders, like our political ones, often make more sense on a map than they do in the field. Even the language we use is steeped in militaristic and xenophobic overtones. Scottish geographer Charles Warren has written extensively on how conservation debates are shaped by the words we choose. In a 2007 paper, he argues that terms like invasive, alien, and non-native don’t just describe, but pass judgment. They carrying moral and political weight into what should be an ecological conversation. They conjure feelings of threat, disorder, and contamination. When applied to plants, they frame restoration as a battle. With people, they prepare the ground for exclusion. Which is why I now hesitate when I yank ivy or judge a blackberry bramble. I still do it because I believe in fostering ecological resilience and am sensitive to slowing or stopping overly aggressive and harmful plants (and animals). But now I do it more humbly, more questioningly. What makes something a threat, and who gets to decide? What if the real harm lies no

    26 Min.

  8. 13.07.2025

    When the Sky Swells, the Land Breaks

    Hello Interactors, It’s hard to ignore the situation in Texas, especially as I turn my attention to physical geography. 'Flash Flood Alley', as it’s called by hydrologists, had already been pounded by days of relentless rain, soaking the soil and swelling the rivers. It left the region teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Then came the deluge. A torrent so sudden and intense it dumped a month’s worth of rain in under an hour. Roads turned to rivers. Homes were lost. Lives were too. As the floodwaters recede, what remains isn’t just devastation — it’s a lesson. One about a changing water cycle, a shifting climate, and a stubborn way of thinking that still dominates how we plan for both. DROUGHT AND DELUGE Is Texas drowning due to climate change? Just three years ago, we were told it’s drying up. That’s when a record drought emptied reservoirs and threw aquifers into steep decline. From 2011 to 2015, 90% of the state was in extreme drought. This seesaw between soaked and scorched is the kind of muddled messaging that lets climate deniers laugh all the way to the comment section. The truth is Texas is drying up AND drowning. This paradox isn’t just Texas-sized — it’s systemic. Our habit of translating global climate shifts into local weather soundbites is failing us. According to hydrologist Benjamin Zaitchik and colleagues, writing in Nature Water in 2023, two dominant narratives frame how these events are explained. Public and policy reporting on patterns like those in Texas usually falls into two camps: * The "Wet-Get-Wetter, Dry-Get-Drier" (WWDD) hypothesis — climate change intensifies existing hydrological patterns, bringing more rain to wet regions and more drought to dry ones. * The "Global Aridification" (GA) hypothesis — warming increases the atmosphere's "thirst," drying out land even where rainfall remains steady. Both frameworks can explain real conditions, but the recent Texas floods expose their limits. If a region long seen as drying can also produce one of the most intense floods in U.S. history, are these ideas flawed — or just too rigidly applied? WWDD and GA aren’t competing truths. They’re partial heuristics for a nonlinear, complex water system. Yet our brains favor recent events, confirm existing beliefs, and crave simple answers. So we latch onto one model or the other. But these simplified labels often ignore scale, context, and the right metrics. Is a region drying or wetting based on annual rainfall? Soil moisture? Streamflow? Urbanization? Atmospheric demand? Texas — with its sprawling cities, irrigated farms, and dramatic east–west gradient in rainfall and vegetation — resists binary climate narratives. One year it exemplifies GA, with depleted aquifers and parched soil. The next, like now, it fits WWDD, as Tropical Storm Barry — arriving after days of relentless rainfall — stalled over saturated land, unleashing a torrent so fierce it overwhelmed the landscape. Zaitchik and his team call for a clarification approach. Instead of umbrella labels, we should specify which variables and timeframes are shifting. A place can be parched, pummeled, and primed to flood — sometimes all in the same season. And those shifting moods in the water set the stage for something deeper — a mathematical reckoning. MATH MEETS MAYHEM This debate boils down to three basic equations — one for the land, one for the sky, and one for how the system changes over time. But that means prying open the black box of math symbols still treated like sacred script by academics and STEM pros. Let’s be clear, these equations aren’t spells. They’re just shorthand — like a recipe or a flowchart. The symbols may look like hieroglyphs, but they describe familiar things. Precipitation falls (P). Water evaporates or gets sucked up by plants — evapotranspiration (E). Some runs off (R). Some sinks in (S). Time (t) tells us when it’s happening. The 'd' in dS and dt just means "change in" — how much storage (S) increases or decreases over time (t). The Greek letters — ∇ (nabla) and δ (delta) — simply mean change, across space and time. If you can track a bank account, you can follow these equations. And if you’ve ever watched a lawn flood after a storm, you’ve seen them in action. You don’t need a PhD to understand water, just a willingness to see through the symbols. * LAND: The Water Balance EquationP − E = R + dS/dtPrecipitation (P) minus evapotranspiration (E) equals runoff (R) plus the change in stored water (dS/dt). * SKY: The Vapor Flux EquationP − E = ∇ ∙ QThis links land and atmosphere. ∇ (nabla) tracks change across space, and Q is vapor flux — the amount of moisture moving through the atmosphere from one place to another, carried by winds and shaped by pressure systems. The dot product (∙) measures how much of that vapor is moving into or out of an area. So ∇ ∙ Q shows whether moist air is converging (piling up to cause rain) or diverging (pulling apart and drying). * SYSTEM: The Change Equationδ(∇ ∙ Q) = δ(P − E) = δ(R + dS/dt)This shows how if vapor movement in the sky changes (δ(∇ ∙ Q)), it leads to changes in net water input at the surface (δ(P − E)), which in turn changes the balance of runoff and stored water on land (δ(R + dS/dt)). It’s a cascading chain where shifts in the atmosphere ripple through the landscape and alter the system itself. In a stable climate, these variables stay in sync. But warming disrupts that balance. More heat means more atmospheric moisture (E), and altered winds move vapor differently (∇ ∙ Q). The math still balances — but now yields volatility: floods, droughts, and depleted storage despite “normal” rainfall. The equations haven’t changed. The system has. Texas fits this emerging pattern: * Rainfall extremes are up: NOAA shows 1-in-100-year storms are now more frequent, especially in Central and East Texas. * Soil and streamflow are less reliable: NASA and USGS report more zero-flow days, earlier spring peaks, and deeper summer dry-outs. * Urban growth worsens impacts: Impervious surfaces around Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas accelerate runoff and flash floods. These shifts show how climate and land use intersect. It’s not just wetter or drier — it’s both, and more volatile overall. In 2008, hydrologist Peter Milly and colleagues declared: “Stationarity is dead.”For decades, water planning assumed the future would mirror the statistically stationary and predictable past. But flood maps, dam designs, and drought plans built on that idea no longer hold. We laid out land with rulers and grids, assuming water would follow. But floods don’t care about straight lines, and drought ignores boundaries. Modern hydrology rested on Cartesian geometry — flat, fixed, and predictable. But the ground is moving, and the sky is changing. The first two equations describe water in place. The third captures it in motion. This is a geometry of change, where terrain bends, vapor thickens, and assumptions buckle. To keep up, we need models shaped like rivers, not spreadsheets. The future doesn’t follow a line. It meanders. And yet, we keep describing — and planning and engineering — for a world that no longer exists. Somehow, we also need journalists — and readers — to get more comfortable with post-Cartesian complexity. Soundbites won’t cut it. If we keep flattening nuance for clarity, we’ll miss the deeper forces fueling the next flood. VAPOR AND VELOCITY If Texas is drying and flooding at once, it’s not a local contradiction but a symptom of a larger system. Making sense of that means thinking across scales — not just in miles or months, but how change moves through nested systems. Cartesian thinking fails again here. It craves fixed frames and tidy domains. But climate operates differently — it scales across time and space, feeds back into itself, and depends on how systems connect. It’s scalar (different behaviors emerge at different sizes), recursive (what happens in one part can echo and evolve through others), and relational (everything depends on what it touches and when). What looks like local chaos may trace back to a tropical pulse, a meandering jet stream, or a burst of vapor from halfway across the world. Zaitchik’s team shows that local water crises are often global in origin. Warming intensifies storms — but more crucially, it shifts where vapor moves, when it falls, and how it clusters[1]. The water cycle isn’t just speeding up. It’s reorganizing. Thanks to the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship — a principle from thermodynamics that describes how warmer air effects vapor — each 1°C of warming allows the atmosphere to hold about 7% more moisture. That supercharges storms. Even if rain events stay constant, their intensity rises. The sky becomes a loaded sponge — and when it squeezes, it dumps. But it’s not just about capacity. It’s about flow. Moisture is moving differently, pooling unpredictably, and dumping in bursts. That’s why Texas sees both longer dry spells and shorter, more intense storms. Systems stall. Jet streams wander. Tropical remnants surge inland. These aren’t bugs. They’re features. The July 2025 Texas flood may have begun with Gulf moisture: its roots trace to warming oceans, trade wind shifts, and a migrating Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) — the low-latitude belt where trade winds converge and drive global precipitation patterns. As these systems reorganize, mid-latitude regions like Texas face more extreme rains punctuated by longer droughts[1]. More extremes. Fewer in-betweens. So Texas’s water future isn’t just about reservoirs and runoff. It’s about vapor, velocity, and vertical motion and the hidden machinery of a water cycle behaving in unfamiliar ways. This NOAA satellite (GOES-19 captures imagery every 5-10 minutes) loop captures the moisture swirling thro

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Interplace explores the interaction of people and place. It looks at how we move within and between the places we live and what led us here in the first place. interplace.io

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