Earth’s Memory, Part One Abstract Every rock carries a fragment of Earth’s memory. Collectively, these fragments preserve an extraordinary geological record spanning more than 4.5 billion years of planetary evolution. This article traces that record through the deep-time history of our planet—from the formation of Earth’s earliest crust and the Great Oxidation Event, when microbial life transformed the planet’s atmosphere, to the five great mass extinctions that repeatedly reset the trajectory of life, and the Snowball Earth episodes, when our planet experienced its most extreme glaciation. Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork across Himalaya and Peninsular India, among ancient rocks, minerals, and fossils that bear direct witness to these planetary transformations, it explores how geologists reconstruct Earth’s early history from evidence preserved in the geological archives. Taken together, these geological events reveal a recurring pattern: Earth is a dynamic system in which every major crisis has also created the conditions for new and often more complex forms of life to evolve. That pattern, written into rocks billions of years old, continues to shape the planet today.    I first learned to listen to rocks long before I had the words to describe what that meant.  It began in the Himalaya, the youngest mountain range on Earth, still rising, still deforming, and still recording the ongoing collision between continents. During my early fieldwork, I spent long days mapping folded strata, tracing fault scarps, and trying to understand how landscapes preserve evidence of processes operating across vastly different geological timescales. At that time, I often felt that the mountains were trying to say something in a language I had not yet learned. Over time, through fieldwork, mapping, and countless hours spent among rocks and sediments, I began to decipher that silent language.  The lesson deepened across many other landscapes of India....

Is self-organization the answer to the foundational question of why life exhibits such complexity? And can it also serve as a guiding framework for how best to save complex webs of biodiversity amid the onslaughts of the modern world? Self-organization exists throughout nature and socioeconomic structures. It refers to the spontaneous emergence of collective, complex order within a disordered system, due to localized interactions that follow simple rules, and occurring without external controls. While conceptually abstract, given that uncertainty lies at its core, the applications of self-organization are everywhere. Advancing our understanding of the non-linear processes within complex systems that drive self-organization is also becoming increasingly important for developing evidence-based policies in a world defined by interdependence and escalating stressors. Indigenous cultures, such as those that live within complex socio-ecological systems in the Amazon ecoregion, have long embraced these principles of uncertainty, interconnectedness, and non-linear dynamics. How will their wisdom, experience, and models of socio-ecological systems integrate with evidence-based policies for protecting the Amazon ecoregion? Safeguarding the Amazon is one of our world’s most pressing, complex, and vital global challenges. Among the strategies gaining traction, supported by increasing financial investment, is the intriguing proposition to transform a portion of the region’s immense biodiversity into a sustainable “bioeconomy.” However, these proposals, and the policy makers responsible for negotiating their implementation across boundaries and cultures, often lack an understanding of how both economies and ecologies self-organize and scale. Data-driven models of self-organization and critical collective phenomena in the natural world and within traditional Indigenous sociocultural structures, along with adaptive context-based frameworks, can help guide the transboundary development of a decentralized and circular socio-bioeconomy for the Amazon. Self-Organized Criticality and the Edge of Chaos Pioneering research on self-organized criticality (SOC) began in the 1980s and was made accessible to a wider audience by...

In the context of risk management and in the face of environmental and economic challenges such as climate change, coastal erosion, water insecurity, and the accelerated loss of biodiversity, among others, the concept of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) has emerged. Over the past decade, this appealing concept has been consolidated as an integrative approach that seeks to address socio-environmental challenges through the sustainable management of socio-ecological systems.  The United Nations Environment Assembly defines NbS as “actions that protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems to effectively and adaptively address societal challenges, simultaneously providing benefits for human well-being and biodiversity.” In this way, NbS represents a paradigm shift from traditional solutions based exclusively on grey infrastructure, which are now insufficient in facing many large and complex contemporary challenges. The relevance of NbS resides in their capacity to generate multiple, synergistic benefits through ecosystem services and the strengthening of socio-ecological resilience. This approach recognizes the interdependence of nature and culture, and much of its success depends on how communities perceive and acknowledge the multiple benefits socio-ecological systems provide for human well-being. Therefore, NbS must emphasize the need for participatory, equitable, and inclusive processes to ensure their legitimacy and long-term sustainability. NbS encompass actions for the protection, restoration, and sustainable management of ecosystems. Although they offer multifunctional and cost-effective benefits, their implementation faces diverse challenges. Several international frameworks acknowledge NbS as priority strategies to confront climate change and biodiversity loss, promoting guidelines for their adoption at different scales. Among these frameworks are the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), the Sendai Framework (2015–30), and the Paris Agreement (2015). However, it is not enough to only secure financing or display technical feasibility. It is also necessary to establish a coherent legal framework, generate open and...

Investment in science is a pillar for any dynamic, equitable modern society, and promoting scientific literacy across all levels of society can help foster innovation, dialogue, and consensus that crosses disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Science also helps to uncover answers to foundational questions that have captivated, confounded, and divided our species for millennia. But what is “science,” and what kind of “evidence” ensures that an approach is scientific? If we take “science” to broadly mean, in its purest sense, a “dynamic search for the truth,” or more explicitly, “the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence,” as the Science Council aptly defines it, then science extends beyond the established, highly specialized disciplines of reductionist natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geoscience, and space science) that have been so successful in fostering our understanding of our planet and the cosmos. Under this definition, science also includes the rigorous data-driven (qualitative and quantitative) social sciences, the inherently non-reductionist “holistic” sciences such as ecological and Earth system sciences, and the budding interdisciplinary field of complex systems science, as well as robust traditional knowledge systems based on multi-generational experiences, observations, and reasoning. As with science, “evidence” can mean a lot of things as well, including primary research, pre-existing data, past and planned experiments, and the referencing of peer-reviewed publications and primary sources. It can also include local and traditional knowledge, thought experiments, theoretical proofs, contemplation, verifiable personal experience, and empirical observation. Broadening and weaving together these forms of scientific evidence holds the potential to address complex, interconnected global challenges and explain deep mysteries that could help unify our polarized societies around foundational understandings. Foundational Questions Foundational questions can transcend the divides of generations and cultures: Cosmology, physics, and evolutionary biology have shed...

Earth Observation technologies are becoming increasingly valuable for understanding our changing world. They are also critical for formulating policies to protect ecosystems and support local communities. The availability of imagery taken from satellites, airplanes, and drones offers opportunities to detect deforestation, glacier melting, crop productivity, hurricane alerts, ocean temperatures, and much more. These applications have become wide-spread and are commonly featured in the news and on social media; an informed public can now be acutely aware of the significant effects that humans have on the landscape. However, other processes of land use change are too complex to be detected and understood solely from space. For example, detecting rich minerals, tracking illicit land activities (e.g., coca farming), and monitoring water salinity. For these and other complex land changes, the imagery itself might not be enough to understand the processes shaping these changes in the landscape. New ways of addressing these are needed. About 26 years ago, Jacqueline Geoghegan and her co authors wrote a chapter in the book People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science, titled “Socializing the Pixel and Pixelizing the Social in Land-Use and Land-Cover Change.” This chapter was a pioneering step forward in extracting more information from images and linking them with the social processes behind them. It helped me during my PhD studies and subsequent research to develop a strategy for connecting quantitative data from pixels with social mechanisms that impact land change. But how do these two approaches work together? The full Interdialogue with Paulo Murillo. The role of classification in traditional land use science relies on how effectively we can classify elements on the land surface. Classification is the most relevant task in remote sensing. We want to classify or differentiate between forests and agricultural fields or among diverse types of crops using...

Why life is complex and — most importantly — what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, “is screaming to be answered but seldom is even being asked.” In this three-article series, we review recent attempts across several scales to understand the origins of complex biological problems from the perspective of critical phenomena. Following a broad introduction to complexity, criticality and universality in Part 1, to illustrate the approach, three cases will be discussed in Parts 2 and 3; large scale brain dynamics, the characterization of spontaneous fluctuations of proteins, and the physiological complexity of the cell mitochondria network. Introduction In the last decade, we have witnessed an escalating interest in complex biological phenomena at all levels including macroevolution, neuroscience at different scales, and molecular biology. Potential progress is of paramount importance, thus we shall examine a bit how we are currently proceeding to carve out these new areas, starting with asking whether biological phenomena are more or less complex than other fundamental problems in physics. The answer is not clear at first, however striking differences exist in the approaches as well as in the sociology of both fields.  The history of physics records many important efforts in search for universality; large classes of phenomena must be explained in terms of a few fundamental laws. In contrast, biology more often seems to emphasize unique and singular aspects; because not all organisms are alike, there is a large diversity of species, families, etc… such that taxonomy ends up prevailing over integration of knowledge. This apparent uniqueness of each biological phenomena in some cases leads to overspecialization, which may, from time to time, encourage the creation of a sub-discipline for each new group of complex biological...

As an official in Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office, I was a member of an interdisciplinary team that documented the issues faced by artisanal fishermen. I soon became aware of a serious widespread problem which receives minimal public attention. Those who engage in fishing activities in lentic inland waters, such as lakes, ponds and “ciénagas”, often share a common concern: the waters on which they depend have not been properly demarcated. In other words, the delineation process, known locally as “deslinde,” has not been completed to define the boundaries between ecosystems belonging to The Colombian State and those areas where private property rights apply. This is not a recent issue, on the contrary, this represents a long-standing information gap. The State does not have clear data in regards to delimited wetlands and academia has not extensively explored the problems associated with this process. The consequences of this lack of information are severe. Some of the most well-known include the appropriation of amphibious shores (floodplain lakes referred to in Colombia as “playones”), the loss of fauna and flora due to changes in land use, an increase in property concentration, and the abandonment of collective practices in flood-prone areas. This situation particularly affects the ciénagas, which are wetlands that play a crucial role in mitigating rising water levels during periods of heavy precipitation. They also help to regulate river flows and support the reproductive cycles of fish. Furthermore, there has not been a participatory process to delimit the ciénagas, where the limits of the wetlands are decided with the support of the local population. It is essential to recognize that rural communities are an integral part of these ecosystems, but the Colombian State fails to acknowledge the interdependence that exists between wetland ecosystems and artisanal fishermen. These fishermen, in many cases, have lived in...

Traditional Indigenous territories are complex, adaptable, and resilient socio-ecological systems that contain the majority of the world’s biocultural diversity. But can Indigenous Peoples play a leading role in both combating climate change and preventing the next pandemic? Right now, there is a fair amount of rhetoric being flung about connecting, comparing, and contrasting the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change and the “sixth extinction” of biodiversity. In Indigenous worldviews—as well as in complex systems science—all these crises represent “maladies” caused by the profound unbalancing of our interconnected living planet. From his home in self-isolation in the Colombian Amazon, Koreguaje Indigenous leader Juven Piranga recently told me: “Our Elders agree that Mother Earth is causing this pandemic to clean the present state of the world, to rid us of the bad energies, and to counteract the pervasive greed and exploitation and disrespect. White people come here to our territories to exploit Mother Earth, for gold and timber and much more, and this affects everyone, and it is our responsibility to protect Mother Earth, so we are also punished. We need to reinforce our autonomy to stop these practices and restore balance.” While still not garnering nearly as much attention as it deserves, Indigenous Peoples’ role as partners in climate change mitigation is fairly well established in research, and gaining more attention internationally from both policymakers and the general public. The “Guardians of the Forest” paradigm recognizes Indigenous communities as stewards of the immense biodiversity and “ecosystem services” (or better, ecosystem functions) of tropical forests. Globally, the forested territories of Indigenous communities store at least 300 billion metric tons of carbon, above and below ground. Mounting evidence has shown that Indigenous communities with secure rights and tenure to their collectively held lands have extremely low rates of deforestation and land degradation. Additionally, while...