NB: When writing a history, the hours spent in research tend to outweigh those spent shaping the narrative itself. Along the way, you collect all kinds of material — primary sources, theoretical reflections, marginalia — that never make it into the final cut. These “Chapter Notes” are for readers who want to know more about the people and events behind the story, and who don’t mind wandering down a few adjacent corridors.
(Free subscribers get a glimpse; paid subscribers ($5/year) get full access.)
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Most of the extra primary source material for in these notes relates to Gaiamesh, though one if from a 2034 journal article by Joseph Henrich, whose 2016 book I quoted in the chapter.
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Call for Participation: Gaiamesh — A Distributed Cognitive Network for Planetary Feedback (posted in multiple forums and educational outlets; archived August 2030):
“Gaiamesh is an open-source initiative to develop a cooperative cognitive architecture capable of interpreting real-time ecological signals across bioregions and domains. Our aim is not to extract or predict, but to listen — to treat planetary processes as cognitive partners, not as resources.
“We invite participation from qualified researchers, modelers, and field scientists working in ecology, climate systems, remote sensing, symbolic logic, and adjacent domains. Priority will be given to those with existing affiliations in research institutions, environmental observatories, or community science networks.
“Membership requires both technical alignment and interpretive fluency. Gaiamesh is not a plug-and-play platform; it is a collaborative schema space. Applicants should expect to contribute data, propose symbolic mappings, and help mediate interpretive resonance across fields and feedback types.
“If you are listening to the world — and want to help it listen to itself — we welcome your application.
“Contact: onboarding@gaiamesh.net (encrypted channels available)”
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Excerpt from “The Problem with Listening to Forests” — Dr. Kaelyn Brooks, Scientific American, February 2031:
“It’s one thing to monitor environmental signals. It’s another to treat them as intentional. Gaiamesh’s proponents insist they’re not anthropomorphizing, that they’re simply ‘incorporating nonhuman resonance into cognitive architectures.’ But the line between symbolic mapping and mystical projection is thinner than they admit.
“Forests don’t speak. Rivers don’t interpret. The moment we treat ecological systems as co-equal epistemic agents, we risk collapsing rigorous environmental science into narrative feedback loops.