IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

on passive consumption of authoritative data.’’ 16 The goal of this project
is a collective one: to enable ongoing monitoring and intelligent interpretation
of data thereby gathered by many interested persons, lay and expert
alike. For instance, a local perfume developer, Yosh Han, anticipates that
leaves from the different sites of these genetically identical trees will have
different smells; researchers interested in asthma rates in varying neighborhoods
can monitor the absorption of particulate matter, or grime (which
clogs the stomata in leaves and irritates the alveoli in our lungs), on the
leaves of the genetically identical trees. In another project, the Map for
Bikes and Birds, Jeremijenko and colleagues will facilitate the collective observation
and volunteer monitoring of many other environmental interactions
that create the dynamic spectacle of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Anyone can upload his or her observations, speculations, and ideas onto
each site’s blogservatory.
Harvesting accurate data is one thing; deciding what the data mean, and
what to do about them, is another. Environmental sensing—by humans,
by remote sensors, or by trees—raises tricky issues of calibration. Who
determines where the red line starts that indicates when the measurements
of a variable have reached a level that shows it is harmful? People and cultures
evaluate data in different ways. An Eskimo might judge to be too hot a
room that a child from New York would find just right. Comparable differences
of interpretation occur on a planetary scale. Violent arguments
greeted publication of the Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical
Environmentalist in 2001 because Lomborg questioned the way ecological
data had been interpreted. 17 For me, the Lomborg debate missed the point.
Without defending sloppy scientific reporting, I question whether it is necessary
for ecological doomsday scenarios to be true for them to be important.
Uncertainty is a persistent feature of a complex world. We cannot
prove that the world will become uninhabitable for humans. Neither can
we prove that it will not. 18
Planetary Dashboards
Literacy 167
Systems literacy is not just about measurement. The learning journey up the
ladder of complexity—from quarks, to atoms, to molecules, to organisms,
to ecosystems—will be made using judgment as much as instruments. Simulations
about key scientific ideas and visualizations of complex knowledge