On seeing & remembering
As my ancestors would say in Tigrigna:
ዓሻ ዝተኸሎስ ለባም ነይነቕሎ (A tree planted by a fool is not uprooted by a wise person).
There is a temptation, when surveying the current state of the world, to locate a single moment of origin. A single decision, a single election, a single man, whose removal would in principle allow a return to what came before. This temptation is understandable. It is also, the old saying tells us, a mistake.
“Subduing the Deluge in Soil Science: What If Each Researcher Published Only One Paper Per Year?” H.H. Janzen and P Baveye, European Journal of Soil Science 77(2), 2026
The authors argue that limiting researchers to one peer-reviewed paper per year would amplify scientific merit, bolster peer review, and benefit researchers’ mental health and creativity. The proposal is compelling — until one examines the publication record of the authors in the years immediately preceding this call for restraint. The cobbler, it seems, has many shoes.
There is a Tigrigna joke my people tell.
A child comes home from school and asks his father: is it true that we came from apes? The father thinks for a moment and says, I don’t really care where we came from. I am more concerned about where we are headed.
I have spent years watching war films. Not for entertainment, exactly, though they are entertaining. I watch them the way some people read history, to understand how catastrophe arrives, and more specifically, to understand the people who saw it coming versus the people who didn’t notice until it was too late. Downton Abbey, where a family discusses the approaching war over dinner as though it is a weather system that will pass. Winds of War, where Herman Wouk traces the slow accumulation of the inevitable through the eyes of one American family moving through Europe in the late 1930s. The New Look, about Dior and Chanel navigating occupation and liberation and the strange moral compromises that survival requires.
One day when my son was around four, he curiously asked me about an event happening during the upcoming weekend. Neither of us remembers what it was about. Perhaps because I was preoccupied by something, I told him we will find out when we get there. His response stopped me in my tracks and has been the subject of numerous conversations between us ever since:
Dada! You don’t go to the future. The future comes to you.
The USSR, despite having world-class geneticists and seed banks, chose to silence and discredit them in favor of the convenient narrative of a poorly educated charlatan, Trofim Lysenko. He pushed Lamarckism, the long-discredited idea that organisms pass on traits acquired during their lifetime. He rejected chromosomes, genes, and the foundations of modern genetics as “bourgeois” constructs. One particularly devastating initiative was his “cluster planting” method, based on his belief that plants of the same species would never compete with each other, a rejection of Darwinian competition that he considered a capitalist concept. Farmers were ordered to plant seeds in dense clusters. The plants competed, of course, and yields plummeted. Over 3,000 biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed. Among them was Nikolai Vavilov, the world’s foremost agricultural scientist, who was arrested for defending genetics and starved to death in a Soviet prison in 1943. A man who dedicated his life to preventing famine, killed by famine, because he wouldn’t abandon evidence.
In Stalin’s USSR, ideology at least pretended to be a theory. There is no Lysenko of climate. There is no alternative theory. There is just erasure. And yet, eighty years later, with more evidence and far higher stakes:
As the Soviet biology eventually recovered, climate science will too. But, climate doesn’t wait. Carbon emitted today commits the planet to warming for centuries. The grounds we lose today will never be regained.
Finally! teamrat.me is mine and this site is live! It goes against my very private personality to expose my thoughts with my name. But when I turned fifty, I promised to break that cycle. For decades I have written my thoughts on different topics in anonymous blogs. Starting this now, when the web is so fast and our interactions are filtered through algorithms, seems counterintuitive. It is like I am venturing out into the dark space in search of aliens. This level of opening myself feels just right.
This story occurred circa mid-September 1991, four months after Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia. My college education at Addis Ababa University was interrupted in my second semester of freshman year and I was back in Eritrea with an uncertain future.
It had been two weeks since my friend Tesfom and I arrived at Maria Tselam (ማርያ ጸላም) as middle school teachers at Asmat Boarding School as part of a national service that had yet to be declared officially. We met in high school a couple of years earlier. I knew Tesfom very well as he was a top student and organizer of all things fun in high school and our freshman year at Addis Ababa University the year before. I doubt he knew much about me other than my existence. I mostly kept to myself and did not participate in the soccer games that bound together most of our class.
Today is the 50th birthday1 of my name. It was the exact midpoint of my life in my mother’s womb.
A few weeks earlier, my parents traveled to Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) for vacation and business. My mom (mama) returned home to Asmara (then part of Ethiopia) two weeks earlier than planned to attend the funeral of a close relative. But my dad (baba), who worked as an independent accountant, stayed behind for two more weeks to file the financial statements of one of his long-time clients. The day before his travel, he sent a telegram to another of his clients in Asmara. He does not remember the exact wording now, but it was terse and said something to the effect, “I am done with the business. I will arrive tomorrow”.
