Show Notes
Join renowned energy and sustainability expert, Richard Heinberg, as he describes the flow of power in hunter-gatherer communities of the Pleistocene. As people learned to wield fire, deploy an array of tools, and coordinate actions through increasingly descriptive language, they became more capable of concentrating power. This development produced mind-blowing impacts on brain capacity and other aspects of human evolution. As you go back in time to the dawn of civilization, you’ll become familiar with self-reinforcing feedback loops and how they shaped humanity’s rise to dominance. And finally, you’ll get to hear about (and appreciate) the surprising power of beauty in all its varied forms, but especially in the form of music. For more information, please visit our website.
Melody Travers
Welcome to Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. In this series, we explore the hidden driver behind the crises that are appending societies, and disrupting the life support systems of the planet. That hidden driver is power, our pursuit of it, our overuse of it, and our abuse of it. I’m your host, Melody Travers.
Rob Dietz
And I’m Rob Dietz, your copilot and program director at Post Carbon Institute. Join us as we explore power and why giving it up just might save us.
Melody Travers
Hey, Rob, how are you doing?
Rob Dietz
I think I’m doing okay, today. How about you, Melody?
Melody Travers
I am doing okay. I was a little sick. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about my body and thinking about how human beings developed over time. And as I was laying in bed and crawling to the bathroom, I thought about how standing was an evolution for us. And so I wanted to start talking about some of these physical evolutions that made human beings pretty unique. And I was wondering if you had any examples?
Rob Dietz
Well, first of all, let me just say I am sorry, that sounds miserable, but nothing like being sick to help you feel that when you are healthy, what an awesome thing it is. So hope you’re feeling that now. Yeah, I mean, the things… there’s so many things that developed in in humans that we could talk about, but I got kind of obsessed a few years back with the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, which he wrote in 2009. And one of the things that really amazed me in there is, I often think of people as being really weak. Like when I go out in the woods and go hiking, I feel like, I’m not really at the top of the food chain. If a bear comes around the corner, or a mountain lion, or whatever, it could eat me if it wants to, right? Physically I’m so weak compared to this thing.
Melody Travers
I mean, forget about bears, have you seen squirrels jump among trees, I mean, I can only jump like two and a half feet in the air.
Rob Dietz
Good point, but I don’t fear for my life with the squirrels. But what McDougal talked about in the book is how we humans actually have a physical superpower that beats out all the other animals. And that is our extreme ability to run long distances. And in the book, he talks about persistence hunting, which was a technique where a band of humans would actually run down some kind of an antelope over miles and miles and miles. Basically, the antelope would sprint away, but the people would track it and catch up. It would sprint away, catch it, and this would go on, basically, until the antelope had a heart attack. And the things that allowed us to do this are really interesting, like, having the ability to sweat allows our bodies to be cooled while we’re keeping up this activity. And. you know, not being so furry, as are some of our other mammal friends out there. So, that ability, always kind of, you know, what… once I was reading about it, I was like, “Wow, maybe I should cultivate this some.” And I have not gone into the world of extreme running or anything like that, but I have tried some stuff. I decided that I was going to try to see how fast I could run a 5k race, you know. So that’s not very far. That’s 3.1 miles. and I set a goal of running one in 20 minutes time, which, you know, for me that’s really fast. For a good high school 5k runner, that’s really not that big of a deal. But I trained up for this and I didn’t quite get to my goal. I ran it in about 20 minutes and 30 seconds. But you know, what I did after that was kind of demoralizing. I looked up what are the records among different age groups? And it turns out my best 5k is about as good as an eight year old and an 80 year old.
Melody Travers
Oh no, yeah.
Rob Dietz
I felt pretty good for a while there. Now. I’m pretty humble. Apparently, that’s our superpower, just not mine. But yeah, one of those things that humans can really do. That’s an amazing power that we evolved over the years.
Melody Travers
Your talking about long distance running reminds me of the musical Grease. And there’s the scene where Danny Zuko is trying to impress Sandy. And so he joins a team. And he’s got like a cigarette in his mouth as he’s doing these things. And he’s fighting people. He’s a disaster, basically. And the coach is like, Oh, I’ve got the right sport for you: long distance running, cross country running. And he’s like, Yeah, that could be cool. And…
Rob Dietz
I think my, my problem is, I probably wasn’t smoking enough.
Melody Travers
That was it. Yeah. You weren’t working on your lung capacity. But anyway, speaking of musicals, kind of a weird transition. But another astonishing development during this time was human beings going from like, grunting to each other to full sentences and this crazy range of vocalizations, and to even singing, which has brought so much beauty into the world, I think. And our vocal cords changed as we evolved. So that was another thing that as we started developing, there were kind of like feedback loops within our own larynx that it dropped down. And we have this separated wind pipe from our gizzard, gullet.
Rob Dietz
Well, I gotta say, we’re using it right here, right? I mean, look at us, all evolved and powerful speaking to one another with a variety of vocalizations. And I’ll just say, I really appreciate what you’re able to do, Melody. Your voice works really well in a podcast and you can sing and so yeah. It is a definite power and something that if you sit back for just a bit and think about, you know, all what you’re talking about — this physical apparatus — that’s pretty insane that we are able to do that and make all these these different sounds and understand and sculpt them into stories and patterns.
Melody Travers
And I was thinking about, like, trying to learn another language and how hard that is, that we kind of develop these sounds, but you can, you can actually train to make sounds up until a certain point. And I remember when I was first learning German, I spent six months walking around going “grrrr-urrrr.” It was a really gross gurgling sound, but I was trying to roll my r’s in the back of my throat, which let’s see if I can do it.
Rob Dietz
<Rob rolls his r’s> Come on, you can do it!
Melody Travers
It’s still hard for me. But yeah, I think that’s pretty amazing. And being able to at least do it enough where not only could I communicate to people within my culture, but then I could go to another culture and communicate in a completely different language. So I’m, I don’t know, just in awe and grateful to our ancestors for spending so much time on this. And I it was something that developed over time, and I think it mostly developed, sitting around a campfire, which is one of my favorite things to do.
Rob Dietz
Oh, yeah. Who doesn’t love swapping some stories and maybe some s’mores around the campfire? I have really fond memories, especially with young children and campfires, how much they love hearing those stories. You could be out in a wilderness area that might not be the most hospitable place, and it feels totally warm and welcoming. So yeah, I appreciate that too. Maybe that sped up evolution to be sitting around the campfire. This is why I’m not a biologist. I just make up stuff.
Melody Travers
Well, okay. The audience has probably had enough of us making weird vocal sounds and making stuff up. I’m gonna turn it over to talking to Richard about, you know, facts and things like that. But thanks a lot.
Rob Dietz
Thanks, Melody catch you next time.
Melody Travers
Hi Richard!
Richard Heinberg
Hi Melody.
Melody Travers
Last episode, we talked about the maximum power principle, which states that a species that exploits a given resource most effectively will tend to crowd out competing species And Rob and I were just talking about some of the incredible powers that humans and proto humans developed over the last 13 million years that helped us to maximize our power. And I thought we could have a little campfire discussion about some of those evolutionary qualities that make us distinctly human, like fire. We are still the only species that can cultivate and control fire. And as I was thinking about this, I was reminded of the figure in Greek mythology, Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. And I love the stories of Prometheus because he has come to represent knowledge and technology and civilization overall. And this idea of humans striving, especially for this kind of scientific knowledge. But he’s also a figure that represents the risks of overreaching, or the unintended consequences of this striving, which, again, is very human. So I just wanted to start with that and talk about how fire drove human evolution.
Richard Heinberg
Right? Well, the way I think of it is that fire was a key component of an evolutionary pump, that once it got started, this evolutionary pump caused human development to move in a particular direction, more and more and more. So this is an example of what we’re going to be talking about a lot over the next few episodes, which is what system scientists call self reinforcing feedback. Sometimes they call it positive feedback. And that’s where a process feeds on itself. It’s the famous vicious circle, right? So in this case, fire plays a pivotal role, because fire is increasing the amount of nutrition we get from our food. So it’s causing our brains to get bigger. You know, the brain is a relatively small organ, that accounts for maybe two and a half percent of body weight, but it uses 20% of our metabolic energy. So not only is it important in terms of what it does for us, but it also requires a lot of calories to support it. So having a lot more calories, because we are cooking our food, enabled our brains to get bigger.
Also, once we started using fire, I mean, what do we do with fires these days, if you have a campfire, you sit around and talk, right. So our ancestors, were doing the same thing. So having fire made us a lot more sociable, we had a place to gather around to tell stories, to compare notes, you know, to plan for the next day. Fire gave us heat and light, it was a way of using energy for practical purposes, that was other than food energy. So instead of just the food that we were collecting, now we were collecting firewood. And getting the energy out of that and using that for… Of course, this is going to have enormous implications, as we follow the human story up closer to the present, which we’ll do in a future episode. But this is where it got going. Protection from predators, you know, if you have a burning stick, you can ward off a lion or a tiger. And they’re not likely to approach campfires during the night. And that, of course, is a time when we’re all very vulnerable, typically asleep, and if a predator comes around, they can wreak havoc. And it allowed us to alter landscapes, because you could use fire to burn underbrush. And then that would encourage the growth of the kinds of plants that we could either eat directly, or that would serve as food for deer or other herbivores that we would kill for food. So fire was a big deal. And we don’t know exactly when humans started to manage it. But it was a long time ago, that’s for sure. It might have been anthropologist Richard Wrangham, who has written on this extensively. He figures it might have been several million years ago, a couple of million years ago, when humans started using fire. The evidence goes goes back pretty far.
Melody Travers
Yeah, as you were describing that I was thinking about, you know, human beings were, like most animals, either awake during the light and would sleep at night. And you know, there’s either day animals or nocturnal animals, and with fire, it gave us warmth, but also light and extended the day for human beings. And that’s a time of day, when it’s dark all around, there isn’t as much work to do. It’s a time to just be around each other. And so again, that kind of verbal tradition and storytelling and even religion, and kind of like the Prometheus story I was talking about before… every culture has had stories that emerged, and even now, you know, as a kid camping, we would tell ghost stories around the campfire.
Richard Heinberg
Right? Well, I mean, you mentioned the myth of Prometheus, the aboriginal tribes of southeastern Australia tied fire not to the gods, but to the animals. I mean, you know, hunter gatherer people were much more closely attuned to nature. So it was natural that they would think that way. So there’s an Aboriginal story about how the bandicoot, which is a an Aboriginal mammal, was once the sole owner of fire, and he refused to share it with the other animals or with humans. And it was a hawk, who was able to steal some of the fire and accidentally set some of the the brush on the landscape, the tall grass, on fire, and it was from there, that humans got it. So this is really interesting, because of course, the only animal that we know of that actually does use fire, in any way, is the firehawk of Australia, which picks up burning branches and releases them from above, in areas of dry grass to burn the grass so that it can flesh out game for itself. Okay, so this little story from southeast Australia is, you know, it’s observing nature. It’s making sense of it. It’s answering a question, you know, where did fire come from?
And also, you know, we’re already talking about language, which is one of the other big components of this evolutionary pump that I was talking about earlier. Because, as we’ve been saying, you sit around the campfire — what do you do? You talk and talking was just an enormous contributor to human power over nature and, ultimately, power of some humans over others. You know, language enabled us to plan what to do the next day to coordinate our efforts — you know, bringing down a big animal like, say, a mastodon. One person couldn’t do that by himself. But if you got a bunch of guys together, and you had a plan, and you had weapons, oh, that’s the other thing: tools. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But that’s the third major component of the evolutionary pomp that made human beings so special: fire, language, and tools. But language, you know, we have to talk about that a little bit more. Because it changed us so much. It changed our minds. It changed our brains, it changed who we are, it changed how we operate in the world to such an extent that we think with language, so it’s like everything that we can’t verbalize is unconscious. Right? So it created the division between the conscious and the unconscious, between the left brain and the right brain. If we can’t verbalize something, if we don’t have a word for it, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist. Language is our world, is our experience of the world.
Melody Travers
Yeah, I think that’s such an interesting observation. Because I think when we give something its name or describe it, we’re kind of encapsulating it, we’re communicating it. And the experiences that are able to be named and described are often given more status, it seems. Although love is something that we’ve been trying to describe for millennia, as well, and we’re always trying to come up with new sonnets or songs to describe it, but it’s something that is kind of indescribable. But that’s so interesting that you were talking about how using language had a physical impact on the way that our brains are shaped and connected. And that’s something that was interesting about looking at this time period, which I haven’t really thought about that much. But there was a time when our vocal cords couldn’t make this range of sounds, like, we were really grunting. And then something happened. And we moved to vocalizations that were more specific, and then to sentences and then abstract concepts and rules of grammar. But there was this move over, and as we started discussing things, and as we started doing these things, they had this physical impact on the human beings that we recognize today, in a truly physical, evolutionary way.
Richard Heinberg
Right, right. Yeah, and all of the things that we’re talking about — fire, tools, and language — other animals have access to the elements of these. I mean, we mentioned the firehawk, that’s really the only example in the animal kingdom of anybody else who uses fire. But the firehawk doesn’t build fires. It doesn’t start from scratch and rub sticks together and create fire. It finds something that’s already burning, and then transports it someplace else to start a fire there. But we figured out how to start fires, how to manage fires to keep a fire going for a long time. Same thing with tools, you know. There are animals that use tools. There are certainly lots of animals that communicate. But language is much more complicated than just communication, because as you say, we developed implicit rules of grammar. They didn’t have to be written out, or even articulated, consciously, but we developed ways of stringing thoughts together that could be represented in vocal sounds, and thoughts within thoughts. And human language differs in fundamental ways, from the communication habits of other creatures, and allows us to do a lot more. And then you start bringing these things together.
And that’s where you get the wealth pump, because language… Once we started developing language, it enabled us to use fire and tools in far more imaginative ways than we could have without language. You know, try teaching somebody how to make even a simple tool without language, just by demonstrating using your hands. Well, you can get partway along but if you can describe also what you’re doing and explain it, then you can get to a whole different level of tool making. Same thing with fire and tools. Fire enabled us to make much more elaborate tools. I mean, ultimately, we could make tools out of metal that was smelted and so on. But even much earlier on, we were cooking animal skins to make glue. Glue is an easy thing to take for granted. But by golly, if you’re a hunter gatherer, glue can really come in handy for making more complicated tools.
And so that’s what I mean by self reinforcing feedback and the evolutionary pump, these things work together. And as they’re working together, they reinforce one another, so that we want to do even more of each of these things, we want to get better at language, we want to make more sophisticated tools, we want to use fire for more things. And as we’re doing all of that, it’s changing us. It’s changing our bodies. You mentioned how it changed our vocal apparatus, our vocal cords and the descent of the larynx, and the evolution of the human hand to adapt to even more effective tool making. And on and on and on. We live at the end of this process of human evolution that’s ongoing. I mean, we’re still changing. And it’s really fascinating to see how that’s happening and why. But so, I guess in a way, we’re not at the end of the process. We’re still in the process. Yeah. Nevertheless, when you look at what has led up to now, it’s been quite a journey. And it has made us very special in a lot of ways. We think of ourselves as being special, and at a certain level, it’s really true, because we have all this behind us. But on the other hand, you know we start thinking of ourselves as being so special, and it can trip us up. You know, anytime you start getting a big head about how special you are, look out!
Melody Travers
There was something at the beginning of the chapter where you connect it to climate change, and how climate change was a big driver of some of these evolutionary changes. And obviously, I’m curious about that, because we are in another period of climate change. And so I was wondering if you could just describe how this relationship with human beings and the environment also contributed to this evolutionary pump?
Richard Heinberg
Sure. Yeah, well, of course, you know, the last 3 million years or so have featured an extremely variable climate of ice ages lasting roughly 100,000 years, punctuated by warmer periods lasting, on average, roughly about 10,000 years. And right now we’re living at the end of one of those 10,000 year periods of relative warmth. And of course, the temperature’s going up, not down, because of our greenhouse gas emissions. But William H. Calvin wrote a book, I think, back in the 90s, if I remember right, called The Ascent of Mind, in which he described this last 3 million years of periodic extreme climate change with the ice ages and the warming periods. He described that as a kind of evolutionary pump, that caused human culture to evolve. Because we had to adapt so much to changing conditions, not just changing weather, but changing climate. So you know, suddenly, you’re in a place where, instead of being a Mediterranean climate, you’re in almost arctic conditions. So what do you do? Well, one thing you do is you make clothing. And clothing, of course, is a kind of tool. It’s a tool that enables us to live in many different kinds of climates. So tool making, clothing, language, these were things that we already had started to have going for us maybe even as early as a couple of million years ago. But this requirement for continual adaptation to rapidly and dramatically changing environmental conditions forced us to evolve probably even faster than we were already doing. So you have an evolutionary pump on top of an evolutionary pump.
Melody Travers
So you talk about this kind of biological evolution, which is a pretty slow process over hundreds of 1000s or millions of years. But then there’s this cultural evolution that you were talking about, through language and tools, and even fire, you know. We didn’t stay in the stone age, we combined that and then made bronze, etc. And now, I don’t know about you, but I feel like I have whiplash sometimes, right, because everything is evolving so fast. And technology brings things and changes things so quickly, that if you have a four-year-old computer at this point, it’s a dinosaur, and you have to get a new one.
Richard Heinberg
Yeah, I do have a dinosaur sitting here in front of me. Oh, dear.
Melody Travers
Um, but yeah, I think this kind of kaleidoscoping of time, looking back and seeing evolutionary biological time in this kind of long view, and then coming back to the present, which feels very, very, very rapid. And it seems like we’ve been on this accelerating path. And I don’t know about you, but I feel like that’s one of the drawbacks of modern life. And I was wondering, all of these things seem great. We kind of take them for granted. I was wondering if there were costs associated with some of these developments and how we can identify and maybe deal with those.
Richard Heinberg
Yeah, well, I’m glad you asked that question. Because that’s a question that we’ve too seldom asked. You know, what are the costs associated with the benefits? And as you know, you started out talking about Prometheus, and the myth of Prometheus, you know, warns us about the downside of the very advantages that make us so special. Like tools, you know? Tools give us enormous power over the world. But there’s a saying, to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. So we use our tools, our hardware, which are the physical tools we use, and the software, which is language. And all of the aspects of language, including mathematics, we use these to change the world, to understand the world, but everything that doesn’t fit in that grid, you know, of what we can manipulate with tools, or what we can understand with language, we just kind of forget about it. We don’t pay attention to it. And so that makes us kind of one sided. We lose, in many ways, a sense of connection with… Well, I mean, if you spend time with a nonhuman animal, right, that’s a non-linguistic animal, because we’re the only ones that that really have language in the way we do. I mean, you can teach, like an African grey parrot to use simple sentences. So it is within their realm, but they don’t figure out how to do that themselves. They communicate, but they’re not making sentences. They’re not using language in that sense. But once you start spending time with non-verbal animals, you realize that we’re in a completely different world from them. We have all these advantages, but we lose the ability to just sort of be, in an empathetic sense, in our environment. We’re just so on edge to look for verbal cues and things that we can manipulate, that we can miss a lot. And we become kind of one sided. We become like the person who has one big talent, and you know, orient their entire life around that talent. And then put them in a different situation… Maybe they’re a great mathematician, but take them to a cocktail party, and they’re a complete bore, because they have nothing to talk about other than, you know, advanced mathematics. So we’re kind of like that in the animal kingdom. You know, we’re amazing in some ways, but we’re terrible at the animal cocktail party.
Melody Travers
Yeah, my dog is incredibly empathetic. He always knows when one of us is upset. He has tactics to, you know… Basically, his emotional intelligence, I think, is very, very high. And he also, even if we’re killing a cockroach or a fly, which I have no qualms about, but he gets extremely upset. We call him our pacifist. And he seems so upset with us that we would harm any creature at all, you know? And it’s like he has some sense of every creature being important. And even the squirrels that he chases after, he’s not actually trying to kill them. He’s just trying to keep them off of our property.
Richard Heinberg
Right, right. And some of the downsides of of these great advantages of fire and tools and language have to do with the ways we use them to manipulate one another. Weapons, for example. I mean, we probably developed weapons, maybe at first for hunting, it’s hard to say. I mean, it’s all theoretical. It’s hard to come up with hard evidence. But once we were killing big animals, why not use these weapons on other human beings? And we started doing that a long, long time ago. The evidence, again, goes goes way, way back. And we’ve developed that technology, very enthusiastically, I guess, is the word to say, you know, because it comes to the point where, now in the modern world, so much research is going on in the Defense Department or funded by the Defense Department, that even most of the other tools that we’re so proud of, and we use every day, like computers, telecommunications, jet planes, aerospace stuff — all of that was developed for weapons purposes, and then we kind of get to use the the byproducts. Well, that goes way, way back, you know. We were in an arms race, even in the stone age, where we were figuring out how to make better weapons, because our lives depended on it, somebody else might be attacking us. And if they had superior weapons, then they had the advantage. So it was incumbent on us to keep up. So, yeah, tools are great, and they come with a cost, just like language. There’s another side to this too, though. And that’s that we… We talked in the last episode about beauty and how it’s a tremendous motivator for nature at large, that nature is intentionally beautiful, and we humans do sexual selection too, so we respond to beauty, we make beauty. And this evolutionary pump, also worked in the service of the production of beauty. Using tools to make beauty with musical instruments, art — that’s all part of tool making. Same thing with language, you know. When we developed language, it wasn’t just for utilitarian purposes. I would guess that song writing and poetry and jokes go back as far as language itself. We use these things for play and for the creation of sound and color, fragrance, even making life more enjoyable. So it’s a complicated picture.
Melody Travers
Absolutely. It’s interesting, though, like you said, you’re talking about clothing, too. On the one hand, clothing can be something that we can hide behind. We can discriminate through our clothes, but it can also be a form of personal expression. There’s both sides, to everything, I think, not to beat a dead horse, but with Prometheus as a representation of human striving kind of at its best. And I think we just need to focus a little bit more on the things at they’re best, right? At that kind of cultivation of art and beauty. And even you’re talking about jokes and poetry and music — those are things that that can be for sexual selection, but I think more commonly, it’s used for social cohesion and community building that’s a lot broader than just, you know, partnership. And that language, when we when we think about how we frame things, that is something that as we move forward… We’re talking right now, we’re using language right now, and we’re, we’re trying to figure out a way to reframe the way that we think about power, interact with power, use our power abuse our power. And that manipulation can be negative, or it can be positive, but we have to at least think about how we’re wielding these and step back and ask ourselves, are we cultivating these things so that we have the power to fly, as I talked about in the first episode, or is it to have a fighter jet? And, you know, bomb people across the world? Well, maybe we need to be focusing our resources on the former rather than the latter.
Richard Heinberg
Right, which requires us really to think about power critically, instead of just sort of mindlessly pursuing more of it all the time, then, and that’s really the key to the whole book. That’s the essence of our conversation. You know, we’ve been talking about the the evolutionary pump of fire, tools, and language. And all of these together enabled us not only to have more power over our environment, but they enabled the development of more and more social power, so larger and larger groups of people being able to cooperate in ever more intricate ways to achieve more purposes. And that’s one of the superpowers of us human beings. And it also has it downside. And I think in the next episode, we should, we should really zero in on that. And that downside is inequality, which you don’t see so much in other animals. I mean, other animals maybe have the pecking order that we talk about with our chickens. But social inequality for humans is really developed to an extraordinary degree. And it requires some explanation. So let’s get back together and talk about that.
Melody Travers
I look forward to it. Richard, thank you so much for the conversation, and I’ll see you next time.
Melody Travers
Each day, we make choices about how we use the tools at our disposal. How fire heats our homes, or a firing pin strikes the primer. How language lifts or wounds, how we wield an ever growing number of tools, produced for more exact, but often singular purposes. Our choices become habits. And those habits change the neural pathways in our brains, are stored as muscle memory in our bodies, and carve desire lines through our landscapes. So, the next time you use fire, language, or tools, ask yourself, “Am I being generative or destructive? Are my habits congruent with my values? What small shifts could I make today to form a new habit of alignment?” We will leave you with an expression of generative mastery. Here’s Richard playing the violin.
Melody Travers
For a more in depth account of the genesis, evolution, and adaptations of power, check out Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival at your local library, or get a personal copy to scribble in the margins. But beware, you can’t unsee humanity knocking hard against our limits to growth on this finite planet. Are you ready to confront power?
Melody Travers
This podcast is hosted and produced by me, Melody Travers, and Rob Dietz. Richard Heinberg is our resident expert. The music is by Robert Labaree. Special thanks to Clara Winter. This is a program of Post Carbon Institute. Learn more at post carbon.org.
Teaser photo credit: Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash
