The hedgehog and the fox : on unifying ecology, climate, and water

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

We can divide great thinkers and writers into two camps- hedgehogs and foxes, suggested the philosopher Isaac Berlin. Hedgehogs try to unify everything into one single idea, while foxes are extremely clever and study a great many things. To his surprise, Berlin’s essay on this distinction became very popular.

In Berlin’s eye, Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust were to varying degrees hedgehogs; Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce were foxes.

We can extend this scheme to great scientists.

Hawking, Tao, and Feynman are foxes. Stephen Hawking, had ways of visualizing complex situations in his head, and using this ways to tackle a number of different problems in quantum astrophysics. UCLA’s Terence Tao, is considered by many to be the world’s greatest living mathematician. He tackles problems in many disciplines, and has solved many major problems in math. Richard Feynman, was a brilliant man, who would tackle many problems across physics with his own idiosyncratic set of tools, and come up with answers in ways that seemed like magic to other physicists. He was a fox, who yearned to be a hedgehog.

Einstein, Grothendieck, and Langlands are hedgehogs. Einstein unified electromagnetism and classical physics to form relativity. Grothendieck birthed many new fields in mathematics that then made solving a whole host of problems in other fields almost solve themselves. He had a famous quote where he said that the way to open a nut, is put the nut in liquid, to let it soak, even to walk away from it, until eventually it opened. A fox would have just cracked the nut quickly. The hedgehog, by contrast, has a whole variety of nuts opening all at once. Langlands came up with a wide ranging meta-scheme to unify many areas of mathematics in the 1970s. Most mathematicians at the time had no inkling that many subdisciplines were in any way connected to other subdisciplines. In the 2020s it appears he was right on many accounts, as many of these deep connections have since been proven. (The programme is still ongoing.)

What we need now in the field of atmospheric science, ecology and hydrology are some hedgehogs to help us unify climate, ecology and water, to see how they are integrated, to see how underneath they are all part of one bigger thing.

Lovelock and Margullis’s Gaia theory, and Makarieva and Gorschkov’s Biotic Regulation theory are important steps in the right direction to unification. As an example, part of the Biotic Regulation research programme is to show that forests can also reduce large storms. This comes from the larger vision of the programme that forests and biota are able to control the earth’s water cycles, which would then mean they could lessen huge rains.

Einstein actually did not come up with the equations for special relativity first. That distinction went to Lorenz, and it is why the relativistic equations are called Lorenz equations. But Lorenz did not see the deeper paradigm of what these equations implied. He still thought in terms of classical Newtonian physics. Einstein came up with a way to understand experimental results in a whole new paradigm, where space and time were no longer fully distinct from each other. The new object of study would be a spacetime fabric that underlay everything. Depending on how fast you were traveling, time and space could morph into each other. With this profound reformulation of physics, many other implications for physics then naturally followed.

Atmospheric scientists, ecologists, and hydrologists have in some ways been seeing all these behaviors in the ‘classical physics’ sense. Their research studies results are like the parable of the blind people feeling the elephant, with one person feeling the trunk saying its like a hose, another feeling the ears and saying its like a fan. When science starts seeing the ‘elephant’ holistically, a lot of methods and frameworks in each of the respective discplines will give way to a more unifying methodology across disciplines. Currently we are still looking for the unification, the way to integrate these fields into one underlying spacetime fabric, into one underlying ecohydroclimate fabric, where biodiversity, water, and climate are three faces of the same fundamental process and field.

…

[above book cover from Princeton University Press]

Appendix: excerpt from Berlin’s essay “The hedgehog and the fox”

“There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think, and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance—and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal. Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.

The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second. Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs. Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, and Joyce are foxes.

Of course, like all oversimplified classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic, and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as merely superficial or frivolous. Like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting point for genuine investigation.

Thus, we have no doubt about the violence of the contrast between Pushkin and Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky's celebrated speech about Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and depth of feeling, seldom been considered by any perceptive reader to cast light on the genius of Pushkin, but rather on that of Dostoevsky himself. This is precisely because it perversely represents Pushkin—an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century—as a being similar to Dostoevsky, who is nothing if not a hedgehog. Dostoevsky thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into a dedicated prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was indeed the center of Dostoevsky's own universe, but exceedingly remote from the many varied provinces of Pushkin's protean genius.

Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is spanned by these gigantic figures—at one pole Pushkin, at the other Dostoevsky—and that the characteristics of other Russian writers can, by those who find it useful or enjoyable to ask that kind of question, to some degree be determined in relation to these great opposites. To ask of Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Blok how they stand in relation to Pushkin and to Dostoevsky leads—or, at any rate, has led—to fruitful and illuminating criticism.”