Nancy Y. Kiang

Today is a conversation with ​‘biometeorologist’ Nancy Kiang. It was really great to speak with her because I first read an article from hers in Scientific American about 11 years ago now. The article is called The Color of Plants on Other Worlds, and it discusses exactly what the title says. This has been an article I’ve been giving out in my teaching almost since I read it. The reason being a bit different than why Nancy wrote it, but when discussing the environment, climate change and what earth and our spaces might be in the future, it’s important to realize that many of the aesthetic, image based pictures we hold in our minds for what healthy, sustainable and exotic might look and be are quite plastic and malleable. In fact, the color of our plants here on earth now, though unique, are not guaranteed.

Maybe a better way of saying it, as we as architects / as well as the general public strive to guide and build our world going forward in a responsible, somewhat healthy manner as best we can, the results might not lead to stand images in we stored our minds. And if the aesthetics, behaviors and shapes (or Colors as it were) don’t look like what we already know around us now like the green in the tree leaves, but are instead Black, purple, red or infrared vegetation which likely already exists elsewhere in the universe, don’t make the assumption that this would somehow be ​“unnatural” or impossible. Back to why I use this article as an architect, it’s not because I believe those plant colors somehow belong here on earth or foresee their arrival with today’s environmental change, but because I think it helps broaden our perspective about what life might look like when we take into account earth larger cosmic neighborhood. And that maybe as designers we don’t seek to represent or petition for only the images or earth’s past or present. This broader spectrum of light is just a sliver of potentialities for how our environments and earth might evolve to meet criteria for a earth’s health and success. 

Dr. Kiang is a biometeorologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York. She conducts research on the interaction between the biosphere and the atmosphere, focusing on life on land. Dr. Kiang also relates this work to research in astrobiology, particularly with regard to how photosynthetic activity produces signs of life at the global scale (e.g., biogenic gases like oxygen and photosynthetic pigments like chlorophyll) and how these may exhibit adaptations to alternative environments on extrasolar planets, resulting in other ​“biosignatures” that might be detected by space telescopes. Her work includes computer simulation modeling of vegetation dynamics coupled to atmospheric general circulation models (GCMs), occasional fieldwork, and theoretical studies on the thermodynamic efficiency of photon energy use in photosynthesis. 

We get into the weeds, as the saying goes, but I think we cover some topics and I definitely suggest reading her article.