Field studies

“We must consider the distinctive characters and the general nature of plants from the point of view of their morphology, heir behaviour under external conditions, their mode of generation, and the whole course of their life”. Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants.

From the ‘Father of Botany’ onwards, Theophrastus (c.372-288 BC), natural philosophers and scientists have understood that to understand the non-human world we need to understand in natura studies, a concept that’s today better known as ‘field studies’.

In 1997 I visited family in California for an extensive tour of the Western United States. My hosts for the trip were members of my maternal family, the late great Charlie Long and his wife Patty. The former, like many members of that lineage, had a very pragmatic and practical mind. Read through the records of our ancestors dating back to the 1500s and one finds numerous individuals whose careers involved working out complex problems, from my great grandfather, who was the master builder of one of the largest aqueducts in Southern England - that was built when its predecessor failed, and despite having been designed by Britain’s most famous civil engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to umpteen mining engineers and miners of whom many were part of the diaspora out of Redruth and wider Cornwall in the 19th century and to California, wider Western United States, South Africa, Australia, Chile, and more. Like them, Charlie was adept at working out engineering issues and used that expertise to work out the technicalities of grading roads, laying building foundations, and implementing utilities in often challenging terrains in the hills of San Diego County. However, his expertise didn’t end there. Having grown up in a place where wildfires are native, he’d learned a lot about their behaviour. His knowledge fused both his own anecdotal expertise and knowledge imparted to him from his friends and peers, including members of the native Indian community, and of whom the ancestors have lived with wildfires in the regions for many thousands of years.

Then just a year out from my Bachelors degree, it being the first interdisciplinary design degree in the UK, I was running my first business - a pret-a-porter fashion label, while also juggling an array of freelance jobs, both design and otherwise, as I was self-funding my fledgling enterprise, and which didn’t come cheap. Though I’d made my first foray into biomaterials and biodesign in the second year of my degree, when I conceived of the world’s first circular fashion collection at a time when the term ‘circular design’ had yet to be coined, I’d soon realised that it would be many years before the fashion industry would take so much as a passing interest in the likes of compostable apparel as a way to help mitigate the growing issue of waste to landfill. Hence, any notion of there being capacity to raise finance to fund biomaterials research, let alone become a commercially successful biodesigner had been parked. I was instead focused on areas of design innovation where there were a sufficient number of funding opportunities to support a career, namely digital, which was the then new horizon that industry and investors were fast getting behind. Nonetheless, it was during that trip nearly three decades ago that the seeds of one of my most important research projects of many years later would be sewn, literally.

While much of the visit was consumed by an extensive tour encompassing swathes of California, Arizona, and Nevada, the rest had been spent in and around the family home just outside the historic town of Julian. During that time I’d learned about some of the extra-ordinary native plants, of which some I had collected samples, including a Coulter pine specimen that’s a couple of inches larger than both that in London’s Natural History Museum and all other natural history museums I’ve so far visited, including those of California. My hosts had kindly imparted all manner of other knowledge on the locality, including insights about wildfires and living at the interface of wildlands more generally, such as how to avoid getting stung, bitten, or otherwise injured or killed by the many local ‘critters’. The knowledge they imparted was invaluable and timeless in its application - as relevant today or tomorrow as it was a century or more ago. Having lived in and with the likes of wildfires and potentially dangerous creatures including venomous snakes, spiders, scorpions, and more, they, like many within their community, know and understand them in a way that no amount of reading can ever replicate.

In late October 2003 the hills of San Diego Country hit the global news channels as the fiercest wildfire on modern record ripped through the region. Tuning into the television, from across The Atlantic, my family and I saw forests ablaze with flames towering tens of feet about the canopy. Looking at the map and the wind direction, we realised the wildfires were on a direct path towards Julian, and called Charlie to get an update on the situation. Having evacuated the rest of the family, he and his neighbour were preparing to defend their homes against the wildfires. They’d already make firebreaks and rigged up pumps to douse their homes and outbuildings to lower the odds of ignition. The former had been strategically placed based on their understanding of wildfire’s behaviour as it crosses terrain. In the worst-case scenario, that being that their homes and outbuildings were consumed by fire, they planned to jump in the lakes on Charlie’s land and stay there until the threat had passed over. In some parts of the Global North this level of direct action and bravery is rare, but, among the communities native to places like the hills of San Diego county it’s commonly par for the course. Those that know these places understand that when you live and work in wildlands and at the interface thereof you need to know and innately how they work, and that theory counts for nothing if it doesn’t work in practice. Though many buildings in the area were lost to the Cedar Fire, Charlie’s home and that of his neighbour were among those that were still standing in the aftermath.

Fast-forward again to 2011. By then, though fashion and digital had remained integral to my career, things had moved on. Momentum around sustainability having steadily built within industry and commerce, by the early 00s I had founded one of the world’s first sustainable innovation think tanks, laboratories, and agencies, its focus having been on sustainability at the interface of design, the arts, and media, while also holding down director and advisory roles across several other sustainability projects of various kinds. In 2009 I’d cofounded a sustainable design initiative which, engaging 30 experts across the field, and supported by a few dozen partners including several leading professional bodies, together with universities, and civic institutions, was concerned with helping to educate and inspire companies in the built environment on frontier developments in the domain. Through that endeavour it became clear that there was finally enough traction to return to the problem of finding solutions to human design problems through the study of living organisms and the ecosystems they form. Hence, in 2010 I had started a self-funded and self-designed PhD programme exploring how mimicry of organisms that have evolved to live with natural hazards could inform architectural and urban resilience. Initiated at University of Salford, I then migrated the PhD to University of Greenwich in 2011, soon after which I realised I would need to focus on one, not several natural hazards. But, which one?

Having researched the question I concluded that, with a handful of fledgling research projects concerned with the mimicry of marine ecosystems to potentially enable resilience to flooding, there was no point in pursing that avenue. Reviewing architectural and urban resilience to earthquakes, I further concluded that the Japanese had figured that problem out centuries ago, thus there was little in the way of a knowledge gap to fill. Building architectural and urban resilience to volcanic eruptions was on the short-list , but having extensively studied the data on ecosystem resilience to volcanism at sites including Mount St. Helens, some of which was presented in a series of keynotes in the early twenty teens, I concluded that the nature of volcanism is such as severely limits the potential to build resilience at many sites - a rule of thumb being, at magnitudes of five and above, when she blows the landscape goes, and everything within the immediate vicinity goes with it. What about storm systems? Certainly building greater architectural and urban resilience to cyclones and typhoons through the mimicry of biota that’s evolved to coexist with these events was possible. However, as with building resilience to earthquakes, studies of ancient, indigenous, and vernacular architectures in regions including South East Asia, had suggested that the solutions had already been found, but in many cases forgotten, hence the knowledge gap as relates to storms principally one of the politics of publishing. Thus, as with eruptions, though I crafted a few communications that published some of my findings as related to mimicry of storm-resilient plants and plant communities, such as keynotes at conferences and seminars, this avenue was likewise parked.

The decision to focus my PhD studies on the potential to build resilience to wildfires through the mimicry of biota that has evolved to live with wildfires was born of three factors, 1. it became clear that there was a glaring knowledge of considerable proportions at a time when the problem of wildfires at the urban interface was fast-scaling, 2. fire has been integral to the evolution of humans physically, intellectually, and emotionally since the prior, even, to the advent of our species, thus re-examining our relationship with wildfire posed an intellectually rich arena, and 3. the insights I had gleaned during my visit to San Diego County all those years ago, in tandem with the fact that I had a personal connection to the problem. The draft of my thesis had included an anecdote that acknowledged the pivotal role of my late relative Charlie in my choice of specialisation. Sadly, the contents of PhD theses restricted to empirical data and other sources of peer-reviewed information, I was asked to remove the anecdote, hence why it is missing from the final draft as published in 2018.

In the years since my first visit to San Diego County many have been the methods I’ve used to gain insight into fire ecology and issues of wildfire more generally, including but not limited to readership of several thousand scientific papers, surveys, and other studies, reviews of copious data gathered from sensors of many and varied kind and spread across space, aerial, land, and sea, to interviews with foremost eminent experts worldwide, and more. Yet, none of these things can ever compensate for field and other on-site studies, and not least when seeking to understand how plants and other life forms co-exist with wildfires over space and time. Now, as back in Theophrastus’ time, observation is an invaluable research tool. Ocular visits alone can imbue copious information on species, their populations, and the relations of those populations to biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living) entities, assemblies, and events in their surroundings. Furthermore, in natura observations ensure that ideas in the abstract can be held up to reality, which when dealing with phenomenon as complex and as potentially dangerous as natural hazards is imperative. As I highlighted in my PhD, fire is not to be played with. Nor for that matter are other natural hazards, as lives, properties, livelihoods, and the integrity of ecosystems are among the many things that are on the line. Furthermore, the impacts of these events are inter-related and cumulative.

But for the lockdowns of the pandemic and the general disruptions the event caused to my schedule, I would have undertaken another field trip in California sooner. However, thankfully, opportunity beckoned and in January and February of this year I was finally able to spend a few weeks at one in the same site that sparked - pun intended - inspiration all those years ago. Today, unlike in the early years of my career, scientific observations, notes, and the like are not typically recorded by hand. Instead, I use digital photography extensively, capturing digital herbariums of both static and moving images, together with voice and text notes stored in my smartphone before being migrated to my laptop among other devices. I no longer have to wait until I return home to do secondary research on specimens and other findings, and can instead instantly pull up information while in the field. Certainly, field research is not wholly digitised, but a large amount is. For me. For others. I have no doubt were the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Alexander von Humboldt here today they too would build digital herbariums and other achieves in the ether.

Though this first field trip of 2024 was concerned principally with furthering my knowledge of fire ecology, it was thanks to Charlie’s daughter that another research opportunity was illuminated: thanks to her I had the opportunity to have a number of visits to other biomes in the region, including those of the Anza-Borrego desert. Aware that deserts cover some 33% of Earth’s land surface and the fact that desertification and problems associated with deserts, including aridity and heat stress, I concluded to revisit these problem, which like other natural hazards, had been considered during the early phases of my PhD research programme, and through affiliated projects including Bionic City®. Thus, though continuing with my research into how we might build greater architectural and urban resilience to wildfire through the mimicry of species that have evolved to live with it, I am now extending my studies to explore how we can live with aridity through the mimicry of desert plants and ecologies and will be undertaking further field studies in the Anza-Borrego desert in May and early June this year.

As with my field studies more generally, research from these two studies will be used to conceptualise and develop new material and information systems, craft new architectural and urban design constructs, and more generally inform the biomimetic and ecomimetic ideas I am working with. Details of some of the developments will be shared in forthcoming keynotes, papers, and articles, and other works published on Panarchic Codex®, among other places.

Image: Coulter pine, taken during ocular site visit in January 2024.