Elephants On The Move

Over the past couple weeks, like many, I have been keeping close tabs on the wandering Asian elephants in southwest Yunnan Province.

【小题1】 A total of 144 emergency personnel and police have been deployed, as well as 139 dump trucks, 22 bulldozers, 70 emergency vehicles and 13 drones capable of real-time surveillance. More than 3,400 people from 1,329 households have been relocated, and 1 ton of food has been handed out.

To divert the elephants from densely populated towns and cities, local people have erected barriers in some places and installed electronic fences in others. To ensure the fences are safe, workers initially tested them on themselves. Most of the time people resort to more subtle tactics, such as leaving trucks of maize and pineapples in select locations to lead the animals to less- inhabited areas.

【小题2】

Promoting an ecological civilization has always been high on the government’s agenda. Since 1958 when the country set up one of its earliest national nature reserves in Xishuangbanna to protect elephants, more than 10 new reserves have been created, covering 4,253 square kilometers.

【小题3】 The elephants used to feed on sugar cane and maize, which are being replaced by pineapples and dragon fruits planted by local farmers. The change suggests the elephant-human relationship may be positive.

Thanks to protective measures, over the past three decades the number of wild Asian elephants in Yunnan has doubled from 150 to 300. During the 1990s, they were primarily found in 14 towns, but this number has grown to 55.

The gradual expansion of the species over a larger area, while a sign of improving ecology, also fuels the need for more food, which increases instances of encroachment (蚕食) on farmers’ plants. Local governments are studying how to compensate farmers who have suffered losses as a result of the migrating pachyderms.

【小题4】

Most of Earth’s freshwater sits underground. Worldwide, about 70 percent of the groundwater drawn to the surface goes for farming. But surface waters — rivers and streams — come from groundwater, too. Drawing too much groundwater over a short time can be harmful. Natural waterways can begin to empty. And that can hurt freshwater ecosystems. Scientists consider this a tipping point when small actions can begin making unusually big differences.

A new study has found that 15 to 21 percent of tapped water (自来水) areas have reached this sort of tipping point. Most of those tapped rivers and streams are in dry areas. Farmers in these areas use groundwater to water their crops. At present drawing rates, the study predicts that 42 to 79 percent of water areas around the world where groundwater is drawn up for use at the surface will reach tipping points by 2050.

A healthy groundwater aquifer (含水层) protects ecosystems against seasonal ups and downs in the use of water. That provides stability for area plants and animals. But if too much groundwater is drawn up from below, surface waters will begin to flow into the aquifer, which can harm what are living in rivers and streams.

De Graaf and the study team set up a computer model. It linked groundwater drawing and water flows within rivers. The model covered fifty years, from 1960 to 2010. Then the researchers used climate forecasts to help the model predict what might happen in future years. Throughout, they kept groundwater drawing rates sustainable. More than half of drawn water areas are likely to cross this ecological tipping point before 2050, the model finds.

“We need to be thinking about this now, not in 10 years,” De Graaf says. “Our study shows us where to target more sustainable efforts.”

Interspecies was once a technical term used in science to describe how one species got along with another. Now it is a word of more consequence: it arouses the new connections between humans and non-humans that are being made possible by technology. In Ways of Being, James Bridle, a British artist and technology writer, explores what this means for understanding the many non-human intelligences on Earth.

Mr Bridle makes clear that three kinds of minds are now interacting: human, non-human and machine. Using artificial intelligence (AI), machines will in future have the capability to interpose (使介入) themselves as translators between humans and other biological life forms.

It is true that profit is the main motive for advances in AI; as yet nature does not get much of a look in, and non-human intelligences go unexplored outside zoology departments. Computing is currently as focused on humans as ever, even as climate change and biodiversity-loss suggest it should devote much greater attention to other species.

The first step towards an interspecies future, Mr Bridle argues, is showing more appreciation for other forms of intelligence. To some extent, this is already happening. For example, through films and other sources many people now know that octopuses (章鱼) have an advanced and strange intelligence. The next step, Mr Bridle declares, is recognizing that people live in a “more than human” world. Other intelligences have developed from a common evolutionary base, and they overlap (重叠) in ways that science is just beginning to discover.

Ways of Being would have benefited from sharper editing. Yet, in making clear the patience, imagination and humility (谦卑) required to better know and protect other forms of intelligence on Earth, he has made an admirable contribution to the dawning interspecies age.