Known unknowns, unknown unknowns, unknown knowns

Is ignorance a thing of laughing at or lamenting the inanity and mental indolence of most of us, or a thing of identifying educational failures which could be remedied?    

Daniel R DeNicola, in his book Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don't Know (MIT Press, 2017), puts ignorance under three categories:

Known unknowns: what we know we don’t know

Unknown unknowns: what we don’t know, we don’t know

Unknown knowns: what we don’t know we know    

Most of us mistakenly see ignorance as just the absence of knowledge. Given that philosophical literature lays more emphasis on having broad discussion on knowledge than ignorance, we think the latter doesn’t warrant weighty philosophical attention.    

It’s philosophically difficult to explain accurately what ignorance is. Even if it is just the absence of knowledge, ignorance has a right for philosophical attention of its own in an expanded array of philosophical debates. 

Bring Our Birds Back

A research published recently by the journal Science suggests that the total breeding population of birds across the United States and Canada has declined by 29 per cent over the last five decades.

Grassland birds are specifically worst hit, with approximately 53 per cent contraction in their population - around 720 million birds. Shorebirds, which were already at precariously low numbers, have lost more than thirty per cent of their population.

The Magpie (1868) by Claude Monet

The findings indicated that of around 2.9 billion birds disappeared since 1970, ninety per cent belong to twelve bird families, including finches, sparrows, swallows, and warblers – widespread, common species that play important roles in food webs and the functioning of ecosystem, from seed dispersal to pest control. Habitat loss is believed to be among the driving factors in these declines of avifauna population.

However, Ken Rosenberg, an applied conservation scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and who is also the lead author of the research, has optimistic views about all this. He says, ‘Even if thirty per cent of North America’s birds are lost, there are still seventy per cent left to spur a recovery if conservation measures can be implemented. I don’t think any of these really major declines are hopeless at this point, but that may not be true ten years from now.’

The disappearance of almost three billion birds bespeaks an imminent crisis that we have the ability and means to stop. The need of the hour is to bring a societal shift in the significance and values we place on living alongside healthy and sustainable natural systems.

To begin with, we can do our bit by following some simple actions to help birds, as suggested by the #BringBirdsBack movement, which is spearheaded by various agencies and groups including American Bird Conservancy, Smithsonian, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Georgetown University, which have all come together to create better protections and support for birds.  

A Silent Ecocide

Often referred to as Earth’s 'lung' because of its large swathe of forests releasing oxygen and storing carbon dioxide, the Amazon plays an instrumental role in processes that make our planet fit to live in.

The vastness and richness of the Amazon forest is such that a new species is discovered there every two or three days. Amazon expert and leading ecologist Thomas Lovejoy says, ‘every species in this incredibly biodiverse system represents solutions to a set of biological challenges — any one of which has transformative potential and could generate global human benefits. This rich wealth of species brims with promise, awaiting discovery.’

A forest fire in Para, Brazil | Photo courtesy: Victor Moriyama/AFP - Getty Images

The ongoing fires in the Amazon have provoked uproar among global leaders, celebrities, and social media users worldwide (#PrayForAmazonas has been one of the top trending topics on Twitter in recent days, as images of the fires spread across the internet). French President Emmanuel Macron has described the fires as ‘a real ecocide that is developing everywhere in the Amazon and not only in Brazil’.

The ravaging of Amazonia by fires or other forms of deforestation is not a new phenomenon. According to an estimate by the World Wildlife Fund, humans have cut down seventeen per cent of the Amazon forest cover over the last fifty years. Data released by from Brazilian satellites indicate that about three football fields' worth of Amazonian trees are falling every minute.

Debating whether the Amazon fires are a political problem or an environmental one will not help remedy the issue. According to reports, once lost, it will take around ten million years to replenish Amazon forest (the timeline is thirty-three times longer than humans, as a species, existed.

Deforestation and other environmental disasters are ecocides that are developing not just in the Amazon but in all other parts of the world. According to a report from the University of Maryland, the world in 2018 lost about thirty million acres of tree cover, including around nine million acres of rain forest, an area bigger than the size of Belgium. 

While identifying and acknowledging deforestation as a global problem by leaders, activists and the public has been easy, the tougher challenge is to implement the changes needed to rein it in, and that includes good governance, active participation of local populations and NGOs, and, most importantly, finding ways to prevent pervasive industrial deforestation.