This post is a work in progress
Recommended music to listen to while reading this: Skagos - Anarchic (especially Movement IV)
Every time I see a plant growing out of a crack in the ground, rocks, asphalt, or the side of a building - somewhere it has no place being - it fills me with a sense of delight and joy. I’m sure this appreciation is widespread - but where does it come from, and what does it mean? I call this vibe I like so much ‘crack plant energy’, and in this love letter to plants growing out of cracks I’ll attempt to distill what it is about it I find so captivating. We’ll touch on themes of evolutionary biology, a thermodynamic view of ecology, solarpunk, the human condition, satanism, and black metal.
The short version - crack plant energy is:
- Resilience and adaptability - thriving in the face of hostile conditions, with creative approaches in this pursuit.
- Recognition of how things form - their history and how its shapes them and their unique qualities.
- A reminder of the fragility of our concrete wastelands, and a glimpse of rebirth from their ashes.
- Something about entropy
Origin stories: a link to the past
“Being comfortable growing out of a crack” is an ecological niche, a place in the ecosystem a species occupies through its adaptations which enable it to thrive in that niche. Niches are shaped by adaptation to limited resources and environmental stressors, along with competitive and symbiotic relationships within their ecosystems, and the species that occupy them evolve guided by these factors.
Some adaptations plants evolve to be comfy growing out of cracks include:
- Specialized root systems to anchors themselves in crevices and extract moisture and nutrients from them.
- Extreme temperature, moisture or drought tolerance to survive in periods of hardship and harsh conditions.
- Seed dispersal mechanisms that allow them to find and lodge in cracks, environments where they may outcompete generalist plants and propagate themselves.
- Symbiotic relationships with pioneer species like mosses or lichens which stabilize and enrich their environment with respect to the resources they need.
These adaptations don’t arrive all at once - plants obtain them through a long, gradual process of co-evolution with their ecosystems. Their evolutionary history can be traced to simpler, more widespread species that occur in more forgiving conditions, gradually adapting to conquer previously unclaimed territory and solidify their claim on an ecological niche.
TODO: another example, more cracky
While not strictly crack plants, check out these boreal forests in Karelia. Trees, ferns and mosses living their best lives on the side of a cliff overlooking Lake Onega:
A whole pine forest on the rocky banks of a river near Girvas:
The ground is mostly bare rock with the thinnest layer of accumulated detritus and soil as you can see from the fallen tree, and it’s covered in snow for most of the year, yet this short bust of sunlight and productivity allows the system as a whole to survive and burst forth with life come spring, hosting large animals like bears and moose. Without mosses and lichens to kickstart the process of accumulating organic matter, these spots would be barren wastelands. Each species has its own place within the system, and the diversity of species and their interactions with each other make the system as a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
We’ve seen a few examples of how evolutionary processes guide adaptation and specialization to ecological niches. Evolutionary biologists have uncovered these laws through an empirical approach - historically by observing and dissecting organisms (including fossilized ones), and figuring out common threads that link their evolutionary histories. More recently the structure of the evolutionary tree of life has been more explicitly modelled with phylogenetic studies that look the overlaps in species’ genetic code to figure out points of divergence. So we have a pretty good idea of how the tree of life on our planet came to be the way we see it today (except for the very beginning) - how it matured from simple organisms to more complex ones, how it adapted to changing conditions on our planet with branches being chopped off by extinction events with new ones sprouting to occupy previously unreachable niches. This is very cool, but it feels incomplete - like getting a peek into the inner workings of the mechanism, but being oblivious to the principles that went into its design. And for a more fundamental view, I’m afraid we’ll have to turn to physics.
Entropic ecology: guided by chaos
The question of what life is has long fascinated physicists. Notably, Erwin Schrödinger popularized the idea of looking at life through the lens of thermodynamics and entropy in his 1944 book ‘What is Life’ (not sure I’d be thinking about the fundamental nature of life if I were around in 1944, but hey, you go Erwin!).
Thermodynamic entropy
Entropy is a measure of disorder within a systems. High entropy = chaotic, low entropy = ordered. For example, take water. In ice form it has a neat crystal structure (low entropy), in liquid form its molecules move around within the volume of the liquid (higher entropy), and when it evaporates to steam its molecules bounce around even more chaotically (even higher entropy). These transitions are driven by an energy input in the form of heat. The Second Law of Thermodynamics roughly states that the entropy of closed system always increases. Any local decrease in entropy is only made possible by a larger increase of entropy elsewhere. For example we can freeze water into ice lowering its entropy, but freezers (and any cooling mechanisms) consume energy in their operation and give off heat, which leads to an overall increase in entropy.
From a thermodynamic point of view, living organisms can be seen as self-replicating dissipative structures, consuming free energy though their metabolism and dissipating it to their environment increasing entropy. Plants capture sunlight (low-entropy energy) and convert it into glucose (low-entropy molecules storing chemical energy) at the cost of increasing overall entropy by dissipating heat and water vapor. Herbivores get their energy by consuming and metabolizing these plants, and are in turn a food source for carnivores. At every stage in this food chain, around ~90% of this energy is lost as a waste byproduct of metabolic processes. This is why animal-based foods are generally more energy-dense than plant-based ones - the animals have done the work of concentrating energy for us. To sustain large and complex organisms, an ecosystem needs to efficient at capturing energy (and generating entropy as a byproduct). Trophic pyramid from Open Education Alberta:
Quoting from Entropy, Ecology and Evolution: Toward a Unified Philosophy of Biology:
A dissipative structure is something that builds and maintains order by consuming free energy and therefore creating more disorder in its environment. Dissipative structures arise as a consequence of dispersal and degradation of energy and associated increase in entropy and disorder. The structure is sustained by the flow of energy and as soon as that ceases the structure decays. When the process producing the dissipative structure occurs, the rate of generation of entropy in the universe is increased because energy is being dissipated more rapidly by the dissipative structure than it would in its absence. In the case of organisms, the entropy of the universe is increasing more rapidly as a result of photosynthesis and the biochemical pathways of metabolism and tissue growth than it would if the photons had fallen on inanimate earth. As soon as the source of energy is removed (photons from the sun), the dissipative structures of organisms will die and decompose. They are thermodynamic instabilities driven by the flow of energy and the transduction and degradation of that energy.
Ecosystems are networks of organisms, and this principle applies at ecosystem scale as well. The characteristics of a species or ecosystem emerge through (co)evolution acting as an optimization method with the maximization of free energy dissipation (and the increase of entropy) being the optimization target - the system is constantly looking for configurations that enable energy to flow more freely. Evolving species that grow in inhospitable environments like cracks is one such configuration that maximizes harnessed energy.
Information entropy
Let’s now shift from considering thermodynamic entropy to information entropy. Though it’s hard to quantify the ‘information’ an ecosystem contains, we can think of it as being encoded in several layers:
- Species abundance and diversity: The number of species in an ecosystem, the abundance of their members, and their distributions in time and space encode a significant amount of information about the system. This layer is perhaps the simplest to investigate, as there’s a well-defined mathematical foundation for quatifying it and it can be measured by observing an ecosystem and counting the occurences of different species.
- Genetic: The genetic code of the organisms that comprise the ecosystem. For a singular species, changes in their DNA that make them more specialized represent a stricter ordering of genetic information, locally decreasing information entropy. However, these adaptations usually co-occur in a rich and diverse ecosystem, leading to greater variation (and higher entropy) in the system as a whole.
- Cultural and behavioural knowledge: This layer has to do with behaviour, memory, and culture. For example, a herbivore’s favourite foraging spots, whale songs in different dialects, and the locations of breeding grounds in migratory animals can be considered a form of culture.
- Inter-species relationships: (eg. mycorrhizal networks)
This maximum entropy (MaxEnt) approach applies not only from the perspective of thermodynamics but also information theory and is often applied in empirical ecological studies. By maximizing information entropy - a measure of uncertainty in probability distributions - MaxEnt derives theoretical predictions about the scaling relationships between species abundance, metabolic rates, spatial distributions, and energy allocation without relying on mechanistic assumptions about species interactions.
For a treatment of how fractal spatio-temporal patterns emerge in nature from energetic constraints by accounting for how quickly sessile organisms grow and die mediated by competition for fluctuating resources, check out the paper Growth, death, and resource competition in sessile organisms.
Anthropogenic cracks: visions of a solarpunk future
While cracks in the ground or rocks can be certainly be hostile environments, they’re no match for many of our barren urban landscapes covered with asphalt and concrete. And to me, plants reclaiming anthropogenic (man-made) cracks for nature are the embodiment of the solarpunk ethos.
Check out this radar complex from an abandoned military site on the outskirts of Moscow (incidentally, also the location for the abstract film ШАРО-ФОМИНСК). It’s a ~5 storey building capped with a concrete dome that would armor the radar equipment it housed.
The roof of the building at the height of the surrounding forest’s canopy is sprouting its own mini-forest. Close to the dome we find areas that already support trees like birch, while decaying planks of wood criss-crossing its tarred surface act as nucleation points for moss to lay the foundations of future colonization.
A discussion of the implications of MaxEnt for ecologically regenerative urban design: Ecologically Regenerative Building Systems through Exergy Efficiency: Designing for Structural Order and Ecosystem Services
The human connection
What is nature telling us as humans? What does it mean for a person to embody ground crack energy?
Tangents, conclusions
Crack plant energy is satanic. Quoting from this essay without elaboration:
The reality behind Satan is simply the dark evolutionary force of entropy that permeates all of nature and provides the drive for survival and propagation inherent in all living things. Satan is not a conscious entity to be worshipped, rather a reservoir of power inside each human to be tapped at will.
And now I’ll leave you with a quote from the black metal album linked above:
The soil is the seed’s universe. It is oblivious, as it longs and strains and reaches to sprout from the ground, to what lies beyond what it has always known. But is is born to strive upward, to whatever grief or joy is beyond. As I rise above the world, as I hurtle through the sky, as I expand in every direction, I do not know what is beyond these stars or the vast and aching blackness they pierce. But I must strive, I must rise. I must go beyond. It does not matter whether it is the boundary or myself that is destroyed. I am the transgressor! May my body break these bonds or may these bonds break my body. I am the fate of the earth. All the light will come to live within me, and I must shine with it or it will die within me, and existence will cease. I am the momentum of life hurtling ever forward. I am all my brothers and sisters of every kind – all silent standing trees and mottled owls and speckled fish gliding through the light as it shimmers in the water – they are all within me and I am within them. We are a circle and we must rise!
