Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to us mortals, or so the story goes. Was this out of kindness, pity, profound genius and foresight or perhaps boredom? We'll never know. It's an emotive analogy for the Industrial Revolution and one often summoned. Most tellings of this story in this context fail to recount what happened after the great gift however. Zeus, the king of the gods, was so infuriated that he strapped Prometheus to a rock and had an eagle come every day to peck out his liver. Overnight the very same liver grew back. This too though is a useful story to tell in the context of the publication of the fifth report on the state of the climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As a result of our collective industrial activities environmental systems the world over are reeling. Atmospheric pollution, environmental degradation and growing populations are starting to be felt. We are both Prometheus and the humans to whom he gave fire. We are at the beginning of our first day on the rock. 

The story then goes that Hercules, a demigod and the greatest of Greek heroes, rescues Prometheus. Integration between the natural environment and computational technology is emerging as a potential solution to the resuscitation of the planet.

This technology has two component parts. The first comes in the form of information. Operating within environmental systems is most efficient when we have as much information as possible about what’s going on. Modern technology affords us this luxury. We can now collect and store all sorts of data. We can then use modern high-level programming tools, machine learning techniques and computational and statistical modeling to understand what’s going on. The second component is geoengineering. This is the building of systems and structures to control, or work better with, the environment. Once ridiculed by the Academy as ludicrous and ignored by government as unfeasible, geoengineering is now firmly on the agenda.  

The possibility of a cybernetic environment, that is one characterised by complete integration between artificial constructions and natural systems, has arisen in phase with its acknowledgment, discussion and exploration in literature. It also coincides with, although is arguably lagging behind, a movement away from the canonical Cartesian understanding of systems to one of complexity first introduced as early back as Vico. This is interesting as for the first time in a long time the theory and praxis of many of the disciplines that influence and control society and the human environment, such as the sciences (social and natural) and engineering, are coalescing in their thoughts.

There's lots of discussion within the geographical literature. I hope to discuss this in amongst the more physically bounded explorations in these posts. For example, Maturana and Varela have developed ideas around the sustainability of systems (their so-called autopoiesis), ‘biological stickiness’ or 'love' whereby any two systems upon encountering one another stay ‘stuck’ together’, and the difficulties surrounding the distinguishing of component parts of any system. In the light of technology these raise questions about sustainability and evolution of any implementation of the integration under discussion. For individuals too, social and political issues of autonomy and privacy are rearing. Donna Harraway (1991) first into introduced the 'cyborg' into the social sciences to escape from the constraints of gender and materialism. With bio- and wearable- technology ever pervading, individual integration with society and the environment at large is becoming more and more a commonplace reality. 

The IPCC states that the atmosphere has the capacity to store a trillion tons of carbon without altering the climate too drastically. Anthropogenic activity has already put half a trillion tons up there. The outstanding half a trillion will be produced in the next 30 years at current rates of economic growth. There are two potential outcomes to this situation. One sees civilization rallying globally and reducing carbon emissions in time to prevent any damage to the climate that inhibits us from living on a planet with any semblance of the world today. The other sees the world changing so dramatically that a complete reworking of the social, geographical, economic and political landscapes of today must ensue. Either way, computational technology will have to play a huge role.

Through this series of posts I want to explore the integration of computational technology and Nature on a range of spatial and temporal scales. I'm going to write about environmental monitoring and modeling, geoengineering, technology changing the constraints of geography, the internet of things, the politics of this movement, barriers to integrations and the spaces of technological exclusion all in the contect of environmental change. It may well be that by the time I've finished writing I'll have changed my mind, but for now my advocation is that this integration of technology with Nature, to produce a cyborg or multiple cyborgs, is one of the major solutions to the problems civilization faces.