🔮 Weekly commentary: Earthsuits or somaforming?

The history of humanity is a history of somaforming, of adaptation to a series of increasingly improbable environments

Hi,

Today’s Commentary is written by EV member Josh Berson. Josh is an anthropologist and novelist whose work explores the history of human niche construction with a view to elucidate the ecology of sentience, our kinship with other presences living and geospheric, and the practical demands of food and shelter. With Carla Nappi he directs Time Kitchen, a studio for exploratory thinking. Parts of this Commentary have been adapted from Josh’s 2021 book The Human Scaffold.

Enjoy Josh’s Exponential View, and thank him by sharing this essay far and wide.

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In To Be Taught, If Fortunate (2019), Becky Chambers imagines a crowdfunded effort of interstellar space exploration, a kind of act of moral courage undertaken in the face of a dismal ecological and political situation on Earth. The journey from Earth to the planetary systems selected for investigation takes decades, and from one planet to the next within the destination system takes another period of years. The astronauts of the Open Cluster Aeronautics’ missions of extrasolar exploration spend these intervals in an induced metabolic torpor. At the start of every spell of prolonged travel, the crew members apply transdermal drug delivery patches that instigate a cascade of bodywide epigenetic and genetic modulations to allow them to function in the surface conditions particular to wherever they’re headed next: thickened, squamous skin for planets that get more solar radiation than we’re accustomed to on Earth, enhanced muscle mass for planets with greater-than-Earth gravity, and, uniformly, cutaneous photosynthetic capacities to supplement their limited on-board food-growing facilities.

Chambers’ protagonists call this strategy of body modification somaforming, and they contrast it with the terraforming that had characterized an earlier generation’s vision of space exploration. Terrans, in the Open Cluster Aeronautics vision, are in space not to colonize new worlds — not, that is, to remake them to suit their own habits — but to satisfy an innate curiosity.

Space travel via Dream Studio

Contrast Chambers’ somaforming with the earthsuits that appear in Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock (2021). Stephenson’s earthsuits feature a reflective, moisture-wicking polypropylene body stocking that can be used on its own or combined with a sealed outer layer equipped with battery-powered refrigeration. They are essential in the deserts of West Texas and other places where, in Stephenson’s vision of the late 2030s, warm season daytime temperatures commonly exceed 45°C.

Earthsuits and somaforming exemplify divergent strategies for responding to the corporeal challenge posed by a changed climate. In what follows, I want to explore how they diverge, above all how they diverge in the way we view them. My perspective is that of a historian of human niche construction, the process by which, over time, as collectives and individuals, we shape the milieux, including our social and corporeal milieux, that shape us in turn. What I want to propose is that the contrast in how we think about earthsuits and somaforming highlights a limit we’ve imposed on our thinking about how we might, if we so desired, come through the cascading series of catastrophes now looming up before us — what William Gibson, in The Peripheral (2014), evocatively called the Jackpot. In forming a clearer picture of these self-imposed limits, perhaps we can take steps to relax them and so expand our collective options for responding to the Jackpot.

Thus, earthsuits and somaforming. The one is “technological” in the conventional sense: it entails coupling our bodies with a complex of stuff, as with a hammer, a pannier, a grindstone, or a cup. The other is a bit more difficult to categorize. No one today would balk at the assertion that somaforming is technological in the sense that it entails the extension of our bodily capacities via an extended chain of material procurement and manufacture — what cognitive archaeologists call an operatory chain. In this sense, somaforming represents a technological kind of thing just as vaccines do. At the same time, it feels a bit marked to refer to it as technological in the same way we would hammers or earthsuits. What makes the latter feel focally technological is that their use entails what ethologists call tooling, a continuing coupling of body and stuff that creates a new interface between the body-with-stuff and some kind of extrinsic object or patient of action. Vaccines and somaforming are technological, but to the extent they entail tooling, the tooling either represents an ephemeral rather than an abiding part of their use, or it remains at a remove from the scene of use.

Imagine now that over the next couple hundred years, humans adopt both earthsuits and somaforming and that ten thousand years from now archaeologists from a modestly humbler and more reflective society are sifting through the detritus of the Jackpot. Imagine what they would find. Earthsuits would leave a prominent signal in the archaeological record. That of somaforming, by contrast, would be subtle, easy to overlook unless it were supplemented by records of the effort to develop the strategy. Its tooling is archaeologically insignificant and — despite advances in aDNA recovery and extrapolating phenotype from genotype — its lasting effects archaeologically illegible. Say you are an archaeologist 10,000 years from now. What would you conclude about the human response to the climate catastrophe?

This is not a hypothetical question. Long before he became known as an exponent of Whig history of the human clade, the anthropologist Joseph Henrich made his name within evolutionary anthropology with a 2004 paper proposing a demographic explanation for certain remarkable facts about human habits of niche construction in Tasmania, observed both in the archaeological record and in firsthand observations by early participants in the European expropriation of Australia. Tasmanians, it transpired, despite living in a cold oceanic climate, wore no fitted clothing and made practically no dietary use of finfish. For Henrich and a number of other observers, these facts suggest a maladaptive contraction of the Tasmanian toolkit, attributable, in the hypothesis outlined in his 2004 paper, to demographic isolation — once the Bass Sill had flooded and Tasmania was cut off from the rest of Australia, Tasmanians lacked an adequate reservoir of skilled models to maintain the technological culture that had seen them through the late Pleistocene. They fell off the “demographic treadmill”. Here is how Henrich (American Antiquity 2004;69(2): 197–215 at 204) puts it:

Among Fuegians [the peoples of what is today southernmost Chile, like the Tasmanians an iconic “most primitive” people], crafting bone-tipped arrows involved a 14-step process, seven different tools (four of which were specially crafted solely for making arrows), four types of wood (which all required straightening procedures), and six other materials. [...] In contrast, the Tasmanian technique of diving for crustaceans (which was exclusively women’s work) probably requires both the development of substantial physical skills and lots of practice, but seems less likely to benefit from observing particularly skilled models. Such risky diving techniques are not, to my knowledge, used by other cold-climate foragers, and may have evolved in the absence of more complex food-procurement technologies.

There is so much going on in this passage, including tool fetishism and the barely implicit disparagement of “women’s work”. But I want to draw attention to the final sentence. In fact, we have ample evidence of apnea diving as a subsistence practice among cold-climate foragers, including two closely related traditions, that of the haenyeo of Jeju Island, Korea, and the ama-san of Japan (in both cases, “sea women”), that are still in practice. Cold-water breath-hold diving exemplifies somaforming at its finest, and as anyone who has tried to become a cold-water swimmer later in life can tell you, it entails not just physical courage but the exercise of skill, not to say the support of skilled models, comparable to that of learning a tool-making craft.

Haenyeo warming and talking in Bulteok before diving. Jeju Island, Korea, 2004/2005. Source

Physiologically, cold-water apnea diving represents one of the most extreme instances of somatic plasticity in the history of humanity. As you would expect, breath-hold divers exhibit enhanced vital capacity — the volume of air they can take in with a breath — and enhanced mobility in the thoracic cage. But these pale in comparison to the thermoregulatory conditioning they exhibit. Haenyeo working prior to the introduction of wetsuits in the late 1970s were found to have peripheral tissue insulative capacities superior to those recorded among Inuit. This was not due to subcutaneous fat deposits — in fact, haenyeo tended to be leaner than nondiving controls. Rather, they seem to have exhibited a combination of vasoconstrictive adaptation and enhanced brown adipose tissue thermogenesis.

More broadly, apnea diving presents formidable challenges both physiological and biomechanical. These include pressure: every ten meters of submersion below sea level introduces an additional burden of pressure comparable to atmospheric pressure, so at twenty meters you experience three times the pressure on the thoracic wall and eardrums than you would at the surface. Barotraumas of descent include pulmonary edema, alveolar bleeding, and atalectasis (lung collapse). These have been observed in single-bout dives as shallow as thirty meters, and evidence of pulmonary edema from prolonged surface swimming suggests that the repeated-dive pattern typical of ama and haenyeo would incur a heightened risk of edema even at relatively shallow depths. Ascent carries its own dangers, as the rapid depressurization of the lungs reduces the partial pressure of oxygen, creating a risk of hypoxia and loss of consciousness. Hypoxia of ascent is compounded by alternobaric vertigo, in which asymmetric changes in pressure in the middle ear between the two sides of the head can cause loss of awareness of one’s rotational orientation.

What these facts suggest, to me at least, is this: the history of humanity is a history of somaforming, of adaptation to a series of increasingly improbable environments. The stuff-centrism of our own day — not to say of our view of history — is a recent innovation. And perhaps, if we project ourselves 10,000 years into the future, a transient one.

Could we learn to think about “adaptation”, be it to change in climate, political atmosphere, or what have you, as something other than a prompt to swap out our existing portmanteau of stuff for a new one? What would a somaforming-type approach to the Jackpot — what, in The Human Scaffold (2021), I called an enactive approach — look like? What would it mean to think of a reliance on tooling as a kind of developmental stage in the history of the project of niche construction — a project we share, like it or not, with practically every other form of life on Earth? A stage that we pass through and leave behind.