Chapter 18 4.1 Biology - the future of machines

In the gray autumn colors, I'm standing in the middle of America's last wildflower prairies.The tawny grass rustled in the breeze.I closed my eyes and prayed to Jesus, the resurrected God.Then, I bent down, struck a match, and ignited the last prairie.The prairie was ablaze. "Grass is on the plain today, and it will be burned in the furnace tomorrow." The resurrected person said.As the fire crackled with the wind and ignited an eight-foot-high wall of fire like a wild horse, that gospel passage came to my mind.The heat from the clumps of dead weeds is awe-inspiring.I stood there, beating the flames with a rubber mat tied to a broom handle, trying to contain the perimeter of the wall of fire and stop it spreading across the yellowish fields.I am reminded of another Gospel verse: "The new comes and the old passes away."

While the prairie was burning, I thought about the machine.What is gone is the old way of the machine, and what comes is the reborn nature of the machine, a nature more alive than the lost one. I came to this fire-scorched meadow because this prairie of wildflowers showed in its own way another side of the man-made, as I shall explain in a moment.The scorched land is a testament to the fact that life is becoming artificial, and as artificial is becoming alive, they are becoming something wonderful and strange. The future of machines lies in the tangled grass beneath our feet.The once-blooming prairie was plowed step by step by the machine, and nothing was left, except for this small piece of grass under my feet.Yet, in great irony, this patch of grass holds the fate of the machines—because the future of machines is biology.

The person who brought me to this grassland fire was a very serious Steve Packard in his thirties.As we wandered the little prairie, he stroked the few dry weeds whose Latin names he knew so well.About two decades ago, Packard fell into a dream he couldn't get out of.He fantasizes that a garbage dump in a certain suburb will bloom again, restore the original colors of the colorful grassland, and become an oasis of life for the troubled world to seek peace of mind.As he likes to tell his supporters, he fantasizes about the gift of a prairie that "improves the quality of life." In 1974, Packard began to implement his dream.With a little help from skeptical environmental groups, he set out to recreate a real prairie not too far from downtown Chicago.

Packard knew that Aldo Leopold, the godfather of ecology, had successfully recreated a meager prairie in 1934.The University of Wisconsin, where Leopold attended, bought an old farm named Curtis, intending to establish a botanical garden there.Leopold persuaded the school to restore Curtis's farm to prairie.Abandoned farms will be plowed one last time, seeded with the dying, barely-named prairie seeds, and then left alone. This crude experiment isn't turning back the clock, it's turning back civilization. Every step civilization took before this naive act of Leopold was another step up the ladder of domination and isolation of nature.Homes are built to keep out nature's extreme temperatures; gardens are tended to transform naturally growing plants into tame crops; iron ore is mined to cut down trees for lumber.

This forward pace rarely stops.Occasionally, a feudal lord will keep a wild wood from destruction for his own hunting game.In this refuge, the gamekeeper may grow some wild grains to attract animals to his master's hunts.But, before Leopold's absurdity, no one deliberately "planted" the wild state.In fact, even when Leopold looked at the Curtiss project, he didn't think anyone could "plant" a wild state.As a naturalist, he believes that nature must be in charge of the land, and his job is to protect all actions of nature.With the help of colleagues and a group of farm boys hired by the National Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, Leopold maintained three hundred acres of burgeoning prairie in the first five years with buckets of water and occasional thinning plant.

Grassland plants thrive, as do non-prairie weeds.No matter what the grassland is covered with, it is not what the grassland once looked like.Saplings, Eurasian exotics, and farm weeds all flourished alongside prairie plants.Ten years after the last plowing, Leopold finally understood that the newborn Curtis Prairie was nothing more than a wilderness mongrel.To make matters worse, it slowly turned into an overgrown field.What is missing here. Perhaps a key species is missing.Once this species is reintroduced, it has the potential to restore order to the entire plant biosphere.This species was found and confirmed in the mid-1940s.It is an alert creature that once roamed the tallgrass prairies, affecting all the plants, insects and birds that made their homes.The missing member is - fire.

Fire keeps the grasslands running efficiently.It enables those seeds that need to be reborn from the ashes to germinate, wipes out those invading saplings, and discourages those "urban people" who cannot stand the test.The rediscovery of fire's important function in tallgrass prairie ecology coincides with the rediscovery of fire's role in almost all other biospheres in North America.Call it a rediscovery, because the impact of fire on nature has long been recognized and utilized by indigenous land scientists.European settlers had documented in detail the ubiquitous and indiscriminate rampage of fire on the pre-white prairies.

Although the function of fire is clear to us, it was not clear to ecologists at the time that fire was an essential part of grasslands; even less so to conservationists, what we now call environmentalists.It's ironic that Aldo Leopold, the greatest American ecologist, was vehemently opposed to allowing wildfires to burn in wildlands.He wrote in 1920: "Not only does the setting of fires do nothing to prevent serious fires, but it ultimately destroys the forests that provide timber for Western industry." None of the five reasons he cited for setting fires is bad.Leopold scolded the "burn propagandists," writing, "It is safe to say that if the burn continues for another fifty years, our remaining forest area will be further reduced substantially."

Ten years later, when the interdependence of nature was further revealed, Leopold finally acknowledged the important nature of natural fire.When he reintroduced fire on this artificial grass field in Wisconsin, the prairie ushered in the most lush growing season in centuries.Once rare species began to spread across the grasslands. However, even after fifty years of fire and sun and winter snow, today's Curtis Prairie still does not fully reflect its species diversity.Especially on the fringes—where biodiversity is often concentrated—grasslands are almost dominated by weeds that also infest other, forgotten corners.

Experiments in Wisconsin proved that one can roughly piece together an approximation of a prairie.But how can we reproduce a grassland that is true, pure and perfect in every way?Can humans grow real grasslands from scratch?Is there a way to create a self-sustaining feral state?