Among the ways that species spread around the world is hitchhiking. Apparently, there’s no better example of this process of moving plants and animals from their endemic habitats to exotic lands than the tsunami that struck the Fukushima reactor in Japan. Since 2011’s devastating earthquake and tsunami in eastern Japan, researchers have found hundreds of native Japanese species living in Hawaiian and western North American coastal waters. They got there by rafting, that is, by being attached to floating debris caught up in Pacific Ocean surface currents. Polystyrene foam, wood, and plastic provided the chance materials for floating rafts.*
Although some rafted organisms can’t survive in new their environments, others can find comfortable ecologies conducive to their lifestyle. The latter can establish themselves and become invasive species. The number of species from the recent tsunami that will become invasive in Hawaiian and North American coastal waters remains to be documented.
On a human scale, books have long provided the rafts of thought that have spread from points of origin to distant minds. However, the speed of idea dispersal throughout the world has increased with the wired and wireless “rafts,” so that now it is difficult to separate the endemic from the exotic. You probably have parasitic ideas in your mind, and you are also probably unaware that they are there. They arrived on some electronic raft, maybe in just a flash of subliminal imagery acquired during some channel surfing. Your intellectual surfboard also picks up some invisible organic idea that has the potential to grow in its new home.
You could, of course, try to clean your surfboard regularly, but who has time for that? You’re in the ocean every day, and the waters are filled with the plankton of both younger and older ideas, not to mentioned the dissolved substances that have become a part of the water itself.** Immersed in and floating on the ocean of ideas, you can’t always avoid picking up something you didn’t have in your head before you entered the water.
Adding to the influxes of thought that arrive on traditional currents over the course of years, a tsunami of ideas hits your shore, overruns your landscape, and forces you to deal with whatever the water carries to your mental threshold. In our milieu, such tsunamis seem to occur with more frequency than they did in the past. We have waters overrunning waters and organic ideas invading endemic ideas, sometimes fully replacing native species with invasive ones. At times the effects of such tsunamis are welcome changes to our intellectual environments, but no endemic species wants to give up its traditional ecology for an intruder.
We can’t stop the tsunamis of ideas whether or not we deem them “good” or “bad,” “constructive” or “destructive.” Tsunamis will occur, and the currents will continue to move the debris they displace. As a consequence of more frequent episodes of rafting, all of us need to look at what species of ideas have arrived on our shores. It’s time for each of us to become oceanographers in the ocean of ideas, not necessarily to kill all the microscopic and macroscopic organic ideas that have invaded our coasts, but rather to study them to see which have a potential to improve our mental environments.
Each of us also might consider that all of our ideas, even those that we consider traditional and endemic to our philosophical environments, probably derived from previous rafting events. Studying the currents that carried ideas to our mental shores will provide clues to the origins of our thoughts and give us insights into the intellectual ecology we now find comforting.
* http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/japanese-tsunami-transported-hundreds-species-united-states-and-canada-video-reveals
**Trivia stuff: The ocean is on average 3.5% dissolved solids. What you see when you look over the sea isn’t just water.
Although some rafted organisms can’t survive in new their environments, others can find comfortable ecologies conducive to their lifestyle. The latter can establish themselves and become invasive species. The number of species from the recent tsunami that will become invasive in Hawaiian and North American coastal waters remains to be documented.
On a human scale, books have long provided the rafts of thought that have spread from points of origin to distant minds. However, the speed of idea dispersal throughout the world has increased with the wired and wireless “rafts,” so that now it is difficult to separate the endemic from the exotic. You probably have parasitic ideas in your mind, and you are also probably unaware that they are there. They arrived on some electronic raft, maybe in just a flash of subliminal imagery acquired during some channel surfing. Your intellectual surfboard also picks up some invisible organic idea that has the potential to grow in its new home.
You could, of course, try to clean your surfboard regularly, but who has time for that? You’re in the ocean every day, and the waters are filled with the plankton of both younger and older ideas, not to mentioned the dissolved substances that have become a part of the water itself.** Immersed in and floating on the ocean of ideas, you can’t always avoid picking up something you didn’t have in your head before you entered the water.
Adding to the influxes of thought that arrive on traditional currents over the course of years, a tsunami of ideas hits your shore, overruns your landscape, and forces you to deal with whatever the water carries to your mental threshold. In our milieu, such tsunamis seem to occur with more frequency than they did in the past. We have waters overrunning waters and organic ideas invading endemic ideas, sometimes fully replacing native species with invasive ones. At times the effects of such tsunamis are welcome changes to our intellectual environments, but no endemic species wants to give up its traditional ecology for an intruder.
We can’t stop the tsunamis of ideas whether or not we deem them “good” or “bad,” “constructive” or “destructive.” Tsunamis will occur, and the currents will continue to move the debris they displace. As a consequence of more frequent episodes of rafting, all of us need to look at what species of ideas have arrived on our shores. It’s time for each of us to become oceanographers in the ocean of ideas, not necessarily to kill all the microscopic and macroscopic organic ideas that have invaded our coasts, but rather to study them to see which have a potential to improve our mental environments.
Each of us also might consider that all of our ideas, even those that we consider traditional and endemic to our philosophical environments, probably derived from previous rafting events. Studying the currents that carried ideas to our mental shores will provide clues to the origins of our thoughts and give us insights into the intellectual ecology we now find comforting.
* http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/japanese-tsunami-transported-hundreds-species-united-states-and-canada-video-reveals
**Trivia stuff: The ocean is on average 3.5% dissolved solids. What you see when you look over the sea isn’t just water.
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