Today, Marsham is recognized as the founder of a discipline now known as “phenology,” from the Greek φαίνω, meaning to show, appear, or bring to light. It is concerned not with the appearance of things in the visual, aesthetic sense, but in the temporal one: not how things appear, but when they do. Phenology thus depends on paying attention, over time, to the here and now.

Between 1850 and 1950, the Marsham records show a couple of clear trends. One is that, over the course of a century, there is a slow but observable increase in mean temperatures, particularly in the winter months. And this observation is correlated in the behavior of plants and animals: oak leaves, for example, appear a little earlier every year. But as the authors of one paper examining the records note, “How the earlier leafing, flowering, and arrival of animals will affect our perception of spring is difficult to gauge. The slow rate of change and annual variation will probably mean that the changes will go unnoticed by a single human generation.”3 This is not a problem limited to humans, or even to generations.

As of 2015, data centers consumed about three percent of the world’s electricity and accounted for two percent of total global emissions; approximately the same carbon footprint as the airline industry. Much attention has been lavished on the disturbing idea that Bitcoin, if it continues at its present rate of adoption and growth, could alone account for 2°C of global warming in the next thirty years.9 But individual attentional behaviors act in insidious ways too: charging a single tablet or smart phone uses a negligible amount of electricity at home, but using either to watch an hour of video a week consumes more electricity in a year than two new refrigerators.

This essay went in a direction I didn't quite expect.

When it comes to environmental harm, I haven't given much thought to the contributions of a data-based economy to phenological mismatches. It's much easier for me to point fingers at large corporations mining for resources beneath the ground than to think about how my choices to focus attention on certain activities create accumulated and measurable harm over time (both to my brain and to the broader environment... neither of which is good!).