No Stone Unturned

Peter Haff Devotes 25 Years to Studying Nature's Desert Pavement p.4

  In his constant search for makeshift shade against the broiling heat, Haff has been known to lash a beach umbrella to the tailgate of his field vehicle. And he acknowledges even wriggling underneath the vehicle on occasion. But he’s learned that radiant heat from the desert floor also quickly becomes unbearable.

  He says he knows when he’s getting dehydrated because his voice begins to change. And he finds the best heat-beating strategy is to constantly dowse himself with water, clothes and all, provided he has enough water. When that fails he sometimes drives to a higher elevation—research permitting— to wait out the middle of the day.

  While Haff still does desert research, he finds much of his interest is now shifting to the impacts humans and their technology are having upon the Earth. He has even coined a term for it: neogeomorphology.

  “Something is happening right now (due to human activity) that has never happened before,” he says. “It’s global. It affects everybody. And it’s happening very fast. And it’s happening to the surface of the Earth, which is my bailiwick. So that’s why I’m spending less time on moving around sand grains, and on desert pavement.

  “What it is going to be like 1,000 years from now is impossible to say. It hardly makes sense to talk about 100 years from now. Technology is not predictable. So I have been doing a lot of thinking and some writing about technological change. It originally extended from my view as a geologist. But I’m not really approaching it from the point of view of earth science any more.”

  In a lengthy unpublished paper called “Time-Scales, Technology, and Terrorism,” Haff probes the meaning of it all. He thinks one key to understanding is the nature of complex systems—those so intricate that you can only understand a tiny part of how they work, he says.

  His paper asserts that “terrorism has focused attention on the stability and vulnerability of the large complex systems that characterize modern societies, such as jet aircraft and high-rise office buildings, networks such as those for power transmission and water supply, physicosocial structures like cities and the Internet, and social organizations such as businesses and government bureaucracies.”

  Noting that one key property of modern society is speed, his paper focuses on “the role decreasing time scales play in creating instabilities in otherwise well-behaved societal systems.”

  Some of the paper’s conclusions are jarring and bleak. “There is less and less time to decide upon an effective form of regulation before the effects of new technologies are set loose in the world,” says one passage.

  So far his paper remains unpublished. While he tried placing it in several of the “more sociological” journals, he thinks he is “too much of an outsider. I don’t speak the language and they have never heard of me.”

  So he plans to expand it into a book during an upcoming sabbatical.

Monte Basgall is a senior writer with Duke’s Office of News and Communications and specializes in science news.

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