Image above: Insanity itself from Ecomodernists - "A manifesto to use humanity's extraordinary powers in service of creating a good Anthropocene."From (http://www.ecomodernism.org/).
I’ve been writing in my book draft lately about the role of livestock in a small farm future, which has led me by a somewhat circuitous but probably fairly obvious route to reading Harvard biologist and conservationist E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth (W.W. Norton, 2016), in which he argues that we should leave half our planet’s surface as “inviolable reserves” for nature.
I found it an interesting and informative, if also somewhat vague and rambling, little book (still, if I succeed in publishing a book that’s no more rambling than Wilson’s when I’m 87 I’ll be happy).
One of Wilson’s key points is that we’re not yet even close to knowing all the species with which we share the biosphere, let alone knowing how they fit into wider sets of ecological relationships.
Therefore, from numerous perspectives but not least human self-preservation, he argues that it’s not a good idea to wantonly let species go extinct.
Yet this, sadly, is what’s currently happening by the hand of humanity, with an extinction rate now around a thousand times higher than before the spread of humans around the world.
This amounts to a sixth mass planetary extinction, which will rival over a few human generations what the last one, the Chicxulub asteroid impact that ultimately did for the dinosaurs, achieved on one bad day – but in geological terms, the time difference is slight.
Wilson deploys his biological expertise to great effect throughout the book in a running battle with Anthropocene theorists, “novel ecosystem” enthusiasts and outriders of the ‘ecomodernist’ Breakthrough Institute like Emma Marris and Erle Ellis who’ve likewise detained me on this website over the years.
The basic message of the Anthropocenites to threatened species and to the people who wish to defend them runs something like ‘this is a human planet now – so deal with it, or get out the way’.
In practical terms, they raise the valid point that in an ever-changing and stochastic biota there’s never a baseline point of ‘balance’ to which conservationism can aim its restorative efforts.
To which Wilson makes the nice rejoinder that this is a problem that should be formulated as a scientific challenge, not an excuse for throwing up our hands and singing que será será.
But then, in the penultimate chapter, he lets it all run through his fingers. Take this passage:
“The [human ecological footprint] will not stay the same. The footprint will evolve, not to claim more and more space, as you might at first suppose, but less. The reason lies in the evolution of the free market system, and the way it is increasingly shaped by high technology….
Just as natural selection drives organic evolution by competition among genes to produce more copies of themselves per unit cost in the next generation, raising benefit-to-cost of production drives the evolution of the economy. Almost all of the competition in a free market…raises the average quality of life.
Teleconferencing, online purchases and trade, e-book personal libraries, access on the Internet to all literature and scientific data, online diagnosis and medical practice, food production per hectare sharply raised by indoor vertical gardens with LED lighting, genetically engineered crops and microorganisms…” (p.191)
Enough already, Edward…we get your point. After nineteen chapters of amiable good sense, Wilson suddenly goes full ecomodernist, as if some devilish Breakthrough Institute hacker finally figured out how to make him stop his anti-Anthropocene agitating by messing with his neurons like a cordyceps fungus attacking one of his beloved ants.
I won’t dwell here on how wrongheaded all this is – regular readers and commenters on this blog are well appraised of the counter-arguments. I don’t even dispute that there are some aspects of emerging high technology that might help us mitigate some of our present predicaments.
But, my dear professor, the ‘evolution’ of the ‘free market system’ is not among them – rather, it’s the ‘free market system’ (or, more precisely, corporate capitalism – which isn’t really the same thing at all, but is the beast that Wilson is implicitly invoking) that has biodiversity in its deathly grip.
Wilson is pretty vague about what a ‘half-earth’ devoted to inviolable nature would actually look like, though he tells us that it needn’t involve dividing off the planet into large pieces the size of continents or nation-states, and earlier on in the book he demurs from the idea that ‘wilderness’ necessarily implies a lack of human residents.
He favors a lower human population, but says nothing about urban vis-à-vis rural residence or the nature of the agriculture necessary to support a half-earth world (other than his half-baked half-earth of vertical farming and LED lights).
His simple point really is that the number of species going extinct usually varies by something like the fourth root of the area available to them, so if we make half the planet available to wild species we should retain about 85% of them.
Of course, things are more complicated than that in reality, but maybe it’s not such a bad place to start – especially if we proceed by trying to ensure that existing wildernesses and centers of biodiversity are protected first.
A quick look at the FAO’s global land use statistics reveals that in fact only about 37% of the planet’s land area is devoted to agriculture, with about 4% devoted to cities, roads and other artificial surfaces.
So by those lights Wilson’s half-earth ambitions are already achieved – though it’s doubtless fair to say that we humans have appropriated the nicest territory for our agriculture (about a third of nature’s 60% share is glaciated or barren land).
Still, perhaps when Wilson says we should leave half the earth as “inviolable reserves” he means really inviolable – so no chemical pollution of any kind, and perhaps no climate change either, creeping in from the human side of the planet.
If that’s so, then the ‘half-earth’ idea is a little misleading because it draws attention to land take, when it should really be drawing attention to human practices like GHG emissions and nitrate pollution (another reason to question the ‘land sparing’ critique of organic farming).
Maybe instead of a half-earth we need a quarter-earth – which would be easily achieved by cutting back on rangeland and arable crops grown as livestock fodder (nearly 70% of global agricultural land is permanent meadow or pasture – yet another inconvenient truth for the land sparers, who illogically obsess over the 1% of organically-farmed land).
But I think what we really need is a no GHG emissions and a no pollution earth. How to achieve that?
Well, I’m open to ideas but here’s my half-earth halfpenny’s worth: stop fishing in the open ocean, stop extracting fossil fuels, stop making synthetic fertilizer (except as a stopgap measure via special government derogation).
Decide on the total human land-take, which gives a global per capita acreage. Then divide it up equally between the people of the world for carbon-free homesteading.
Those who prefer not to avail themselves of this generous offer and continue working in the city would be entitled to do so with the proviso that they forfeit, say, 50% of their earnings on top of tax, split between practical conservation, farmer support, agro-ecological research funds and mitigation of the environmental "bads" caused by the commercial-industrial farming that their old-falutin city-slicking ways would probably bring forth.
I’ll admit that it needs working up a bit more – a few details to fill in, some implementation issues to address. Perhaps you can help me in that task.
My starter for ten is that this system won’t emerge by the ‘evolution’ of a free market system increasingly shaped by high technology. Wilson might have realized this, if only he’d consulted an economist biologist…
Image above: These 600-700 pound steers are being fed in a feedlot in Jetmore, Kansas, for “backgrounding” to gain weight to around 1,000 pounds. They’ll be sent to another feedlot for “finishing” before slaughter. From (https://aspenranchrealestate.com/Colorado_Cattle_Ranching).
Humans and our livestock now make up 97% of all animals on land. Wild animals (mammals and birds) have been reduced to a mere remnant: just 3%. This is based on mass. Humans and our domesticated animals outweigh all terrestrial wild mammals and birds 32-to-1.
To clarify, if we add up the weights of all the people, cows, sheep, pigs, horses, dogs, chickens, turkeys, etc., that total is 32 times greater than the weight of all the wild terrestrial mammals and birds: all the elephants, mice, kangaroos, lions, raccoons, bats, bears, deer, wolves, moose, chickadees, herons, eagles, etc.
A specific example is illuminating: the biomass of chickens is more than double the total mass of all other birds combined.
Image above: At this KFC "broiler shed" there is only artificial light, no fresh air, and huge fans circulate the stale ammonia filled air. Chicken meat is perfect for our fast food culture. A producer can ‘grow’ a chicken within a few weeks with super large breasts, and minimize overhead through economies of scale. From (https://pos394.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/do-you-know-how-your-chicken-was-raised/).
Before the advent of agriculture and human civilizations, however, the opposite was the case: wild animals and birds dominated, and their numbers and mass were several times greater than their numbers and mass today.
Before the advent of agriculture, about 11,000 years ago, humans made up just a tiny fraction of animal biomass, and domesticated livestock did not exist. The current situation—the domination of the Earth by humans and our food animals—is a relatively recent development.
The preceding observations are based on a May 2018 report by Yinon Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Bar-On and his coauthors use a variety of sources to construct a “census of the biomass of Earth”; they estimate the mass of all the plants, animals, insects, bacteria, and other living things on our planet.
The graph below is based on data from that report (supplemented with estimates based on work by Vaclav Smil). The graph shows the mass of humans, our domesticated livestock, and “wild animals”: terrestrial mammals and birds. The units are millions of tonnes of carbon.[1] Three time periods are listed.
Image above: Graph of history of land based mammals and bird biomass over last 11,000 years. From www.darrinqualman.com.
The first, 50,000 years ago, is the time before the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction. The Megafauna Extinction was a period when Homo sapiens radiated outward into Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas and contributed to the extinction of about half the planet’s large animal species (over 44 kgs). (Climate change also played a role in that extinction.)
In the middle of the graph we see the period around 11,000 years ago—before humans began practicing agriculture. At the right-hand side we see the situation today. Note how the first two periods are dominated by wild animals. The mass of humans in those periods is so small that the blue bar representing human biomass is not even visible in the graph.[2]
This graph highlights three points:
Wild animal numbers and biomass have been catastrophically reduced, especially over the past 11,000 years
Human numbers and livestock numbers have skyrocketed, to unnatural, abnormal levels
The downward trendline for wild animals visible in this graph is gravely concerning; this graph suggests accelerating extinctions.
Indeed, we are today well into the fastest extinction event in the past 65 million years. According to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment “the rate of known extinctions of species in the past century is roughly 50–500 times greater than the extinction rate calculated from the fossil record….”
The extinction rate that humans are now causing has not been seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65 million years ago—the asteroid-impact-triggered extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Unless we reduce the scale and impacts of human societies and economies, and unless we more equitably share the Earth with wild species, we will enter fully a major global extinction event—only the sixth in 500 million years. To the other species of the Earth, and to the fossil record, human impacts increasingly resemble an asteroid impact.
In addition to the rapid decline in the mass and number of wild animals it is also worth contemplating the converse: the huge increase in human and livestock biomass. Above, I called this increase “unnatural,” and I did so advisedly.
The mass of humans and our food animals is now 7 times larger than the mass of animals on Earth 11,000 or 50,000 years ago—7 times larger than what is normal or natural.
For millions of years the Earth sustained a certain range of animal biomass; in recent millennia humans have multiplied that mass roughly sevenfold.
How? Fossil fuels. Via fertilizers, petro-chemical pesticides, and other inputs we are pushing hundreds of millions of tonnes of fossil fuels into our food system, and thereby pushing out billions of tonnes of additional food and livestock feed.
We are turning fossil fuel Calories from the ground into food Calories on our plates and in livestock feed-troughs. For example, huge amounts of fossil-fuel energy go into growing the corn and soybeans that are the feedstocks for the tens-of-billions of livestock animals that populate the planet.
Dr. Anthony Barnosky has studied human-induced extinctions and the growing dominance of humans and their livestock. In a 2008 journal article he writes that “as soon as we began to augment the global energy budget, megafauna biomass skyrocketed, such that we are orders of magnitude above the normal baseline today.”
According to Barnosky “the normal biomass baseline was exceeded only after the Industrial Revolution” and this indicates that “the current abnormally high level of megafauna biomass is sustained solely by fossil fuels.”
Only a limited number of animals can be fed from leaves and grass energized by current sunshine. But by tapping a vast reservoir of fossil sunshine we’ve multiplied the number of animals that can be fed. We and our livestock are petroleum products.
There is no simple list of solutions to mega-problems like accelerating extinctions, fossil-fuel over-dependence, and human and livestock overpopulation. But certain common sense solutions seem to present themselves.
I’ll suggest just one: we need to eat less meat and fewer dairy products and we need to reduce the mass and number of livestock on Earth. Who can look at the graph above and come to any other conclusion?
We need not eliminate meat or dairy products (grazing animals are integral parts of many ecosystems) but we certainly need to cut the number of livestock animals by half or more.
Most importantly, we must not try to proliferate the Big Mac model of meat consumption to 8 or 9 or 10 billion people. The graph above suggests a stark choice: cut the number of livestock animals, or preside over the demise of most of the Earth’s wild species.
Using carbon content allows us to compare the mass of plants, animals, bacteria, viruses, etc. Very roughly, humans and other animals are about half to two-thirds water. The remaining “dry mass” is about 50% carbon. Thus, to convert from tonnes of carbon to dry mass, a good approximation is to multiply by two.
There is significant uncertainty regarding animal biomass in the present, and much more so in the past. Thus, the biomass values for wild animals in the graph must be considered as representing a range of possible values. That said, the overall picture revealed in the graph is not subject to any uncertainty. The overall conclusions are robust: the mass of humans and our livestock today is several times larger than wild animal biomass today or in the past; and wild animal biomass today is a fraction of its pre-agricultural value.
Graph sources:
– Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 17, 2018.
– Anthony Barnosky, “Megafauna Biomass Tradeoff as a Driver of Quaternary and Future Extinctions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (August 2008).
– Vaclav Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
Recall your favorite memory: the big game you won; the moment you first saw your child's face; the day you realized you had fallen in love. It's not a single memory, though, is it? Reconstructing it, you remember the smells, the colors, the funny thing some other person said, and the way it all made you feel.
Your brain's ability to collect, connect, and create mosaics from these milliseconds-long impressions is the basis of every memory. By extension, it is the basis of you. This isn't just metaphysical poetics. Every sensory experience triggers changes in the molecules of your neurons, reshaping the way they connect to one another.
That means your brain is literally made of memories, and memories constantly remake your brain. This framework for memory dates back decades. And a sprawling new review published today in Neuron adds an even finer point: Memory exists because your brain’s molecules, cells, and synapses can tell time.
Defining memory is about as difficult as defining time. In general terms, memory is a change to a system that alters the way that system works in the future.
"A typical memory is really just a reactivation of connections between different parts of your brain that were active at some previous time," says neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin, coauthor of this paper. And all animals—along with many single-celled organisms—possess some sort of ability to learn from the past.
Like the sea slug. From an evolutionary perspective, you'd have a hard time drawing a straight line from a sea slug to a human. Yet they both have neurons, and sea slugs form something similar to memories.
If you pinch a sea slug on its gills, it will retract them faster the next time your cruel little fingers come close. Researchers found synapse connections that strengthen when the sea slug learns to suck in its gills, and molecules that cause this change. Remarkably, human neurons have similar molecules.
So what's that got to do with your favorite memory? "What is unique about neurons is they can connect to thousands of other neurons, each very specifically," says Kukushkin.
And what makes those connections a network is the fact that those specific connections, those synapses, can be adjusted with stronger or weaker signals. So every experience—every pinch to the gills—has the potential to reroute the relative strengths of all those neuronal connections.
But it would be a mistake to believe that those molecules, or even the synapses they control, are memories.
"When you dig into molecules, and the states of ion channels, enzymes, transcription programs, cells, synapses, and whole networks of neurons, you come to realize that there is no one place in the brain where memories are stored," says Kukushkin. This is because of a property called plasticity, the feature of neurons that memorize. The memory is the system itself.
And there's evidence of memory-making throughout the tree of life, even in creatures with no nervous system—scientists have trained bacteria to anticipate a flash of a light. Kukushkin explains that primitive memories, like the sea slug's response, are advantageous on an evolutionary scale. "It allows an organism to integrate something from its past into its future and respond to new challenges," he says.
Human memories—even the most precious—begin at a very granular scale. Your mother's face began as a barrage of photons on your retina, which sent a signal to your visual cortex. You hear her voice, and your auditory cortex transforms the sound waves into electrical signals. Hormones layer the experience with with context—this person makes you feel good.
These and a virtually infinite number of other inputs cascade across your brain. Kukushkin says your neurons, their attendant molecules, and resultant synapses encode all these related perturbations in terms of the relative time they occurred. More, they package the whole experience within a so-called time window.
Obviously, no memory exists all by itself. Brains break down experience into multiple timescales experienced simultaneously, like sound is broken down into different frequencies perceived simultaneously. This is a nested system, with individual memories existing within multiple time windows of varying lengths.
And time windows include every part of the memory, including molecular exchanges of information that are invisible at the scale you actually perceive the event you are remembering.
Yes, this is very hard for neuroscientists to understand too. Which means it's going to be a long time before they understand the nuts and bolts of memory formation.
"In an ideal world, we would be able to trace the behavior of each individual neuron in time," says Kukushkin. At the moment, however, projects like the Human Connectome represent the cutting edge, and they are still working on a complete picture of the brain at a standstill. Like memory itself, putting that project into motion is all a matter of time.
Repeat after me: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.
That’s CRISPR, a new GE technology that uses an enzyme, Cas9, to cut, edit or remove genes from targeted region of a plant’s DNA. Because it doesn’t involve transgenics, i.e. inserting genes from foreign species into an animal or plant, foods produced in this manner just received a free pass from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to be sold into the marketplace.
In an April 2016 letter to Penn State researcher Yinong Yang, USDA informed the associate professor of plant pathology that his new patent-pending, non-browning mushroom, created via CRISPR technology, would not require USDA approval.
“The notification apparently clears the way for the potential commercial development of the mushroom, which is the first CRISPR-Cas9 gene-edited crop deemed to require no regulatory review by USDA,” reported Chuck Gill in Penn State News.
Why does this anti-browning mushroom not require USDA regulation? ”Our genome-edited mushroom has small deletions in a specific gene but contains no foreign DNA integration in its genome," said Yang. "Therefore, we believed that there was no scientifically valid basis to conclude that the CRISPR-edited mushroom is a regulated article based on the definition described in the regulations."
The USDA ruling could open the door for many genetically engineered crops developed using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, said Penn State. In fact, just days after USDA's notification regarding Yang's anti-browning mushroom, the agency announced that a CRISPR-Cas9-edited corn variety developed by DuPont Pioneer also will not be subject to the same USDA regulations as traditional GMOs.
In response to Pioneer's "Regulated Article Letter of Inquiry," about the new GE corn product, the USDA said it does not consider the CRISPR corn "as regulated by USDA Biotechnology Regulatory Services," reported Business Insider.
Not so fast, cautions Michael Hansen, senior scientist for Consumers Union. Just because USDA says CRISPR needs no regulation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which uses the international CODEX definition of “modern biotechnology,” would “clearly include” the new Penn State CRISPR mushroom, says Hansen.
“The biotechnology industry will be trying to argue to USDA that these newer techniques are more "precise and accurate" than older GE techniques and should require even less, or no scrutiny,” he says. “Thus, the issue of what definition to use for GE is a crucial one,” Hansen points out.
“The government does realize that there is a disconnect between USDA and EPA and FDA about what the definition of genetic engineering is, and that is part of the reason why it is in the process of reviewing the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology,” Hansen says. “Thus, the last sentence in USDA’s letter to Dr. Yang at Penn State would say, ‘Please be advised that your white button mushroom variety described in your letter may still be subject to other regulatory authorities such as FDA or EPA.’”
Yang does plan to submit data about the CRISPR mushroom to the FDA as a precaution before introducing the crop to the market, he says. While FDA clearance is not technically required, Yang told Science News, “We’re not just going to start marketing these mushrooms without FDA approval.”
Gary Ruskin, co-director of the advocacy group U.S. Right to Know, told Fusion on April 25 that the organization’s concerns about genetically engineered food crops extend to Penn State’s new CRISPR mushroom.
“What are the unknowns about CRISPR generally, and in particular, in its application in this mushroom?” he asked. “Regulators should determine whether there are off-target effects. Consumers have the right to know what’s in our food.”
In Europe, however, where anti-GMO advocates have strongly opposed CRISPR, Urs Niggli, director of the Swiss Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) was recently quoted in the German newspaper Taz that CRISPR may be different from traditional GMO technologies and could alleviate some concerns groups like FiBL have with older gene-editing techniques.
His comments have since been subject to much interpretation and criticism among both pro- and anti-GMO circles.
While biotech proponents claim that CRISPR has much to offer, Nature reported in June 2015 that scientists are worried that the field's fast pace leaves little time for addressing ethical and safety concerns. The issue was thrust into the spotlight in April 2015, when news media reported that scientists had used CRISPR technology to engineer human embryos.
The embryos they used were unable to result in a live birth. Nature reported that the news generated heated debate over whether and how CRISPR should be used to make heritable changes to the human genome.
Some scientists want to see more studies that probe whether the technique generates stray and potentially risky genome edits; others worry that edited organisms could disrupt entire ecosystems, Nature reported.
Robin Wall Kimmerer has a PhD in botany and is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a Native American people originally from the Great Lakes, with a reservation today in Oklahoma. She describes herself as a “traveler between scientific and indigenous ways of knowing,” but there is little about her writing, public speaking, or teaching that suggests movement back and forth. Rather she seems to be standing still, looking simultaneously through two lenses, expressing two worldviews. Trees, for her, are photosynthesizing beings as well as teachers. A forest is an ecosystem and a home at once.
Born in 1953, Kimmerer was raised in upstate New York. The federal government had forced her grandfather, as a boy, to leave his home on the Potawatomi reservation in Oklahoma and attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. The school’s purpose was to assimilate Native American children, even against their will, and its founder’s motto was “Kill the Indian, and save the man.”
Over time her family rekindled tribal connections, which she says had been “frayed by history, but never broken.”
She did her graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she focused on how plants reclaim abandoned zinc and lead mines, healing the damage of a destructive industry.
For a decade Kimmerer taught college biology in Kentucky, establishing herself as a leading expert on mosses. In 1993 she returned to upstate New York — which she calls “Maple Nation” — where she’s currently a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York, Syracuse.
Eight years ago she founded the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to promote sustainability through programs that draw on both indigenous knowledge and science. The Center also works to increase opportunities for Native American students in the environmental sciences.
“Science is often perceived to be at odds with indigenous values,” she writes. “The result is that Native Americans are barely present in the scientific community, where their unique cultural perspectives on environmental stewardship are greatly needed.”
Kimmerer’s first book, Gathering Moss, won the John Burroughs Medal in 2005, and her second, Braiding Sweetgrass, received the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award in 2014.
Last year she addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations for the commemoration of International Mother Earth Day, and the year before that, she was a keynote speaker at the National Bioneers Conference.
I talked to Kimmerer on a bright summer morning at her farmhouse in Fabius, New York, where she raised her two daughters, both of whom are now grown. Before beginning the interview, we ate a brunch of quiche and green salad with strawberries at a picnic table in her yard.
Kimmerer was warm and welcoming, with long, graying hair and dangling porcupine-quill earrings. She spoke with assurance, rarely pausing, her voice and her thoughts always clear.
After two hours we got up to stretch our legs and walked down a mowed trail, past a vegetable garden, and around a small pond. I mentioned a slug I’d recently seen that used a thread of slime to rappel off a ledge, as a rock climber might, and Kimmerer responded by pointing out the place where, a few days prior, she had encountered a wriggling green nematode: “It was a four-inch-long thread of a creature, a species I’d never seen before, living right here in the yard.”
The two of us continued trading small wonders in a kind of ping-pong match. “Isn’t it all fantastic?” she finally said, the comment less a question than an exclamation.
Tonino: You’ve always loved plants, but your relationship to them has transformed over time.
Kimmerer: I would describe my journey as a circle, moving out into academia but coming back to the way that I knew plants as a child. I grew up in a rural area much like where we’re sitting today, and I was interacting every day with plants in the garden, the woods, or the wetlands. I couldn’t go outside without being surprised and amazed by some small green life.
I suppose it was their great diversity of form that first drew my interest: that on a small patch of ground there could be so many different ways to exist. Each plant seemed to have its own sense of self, yet they fit together as a community. And each had a home, a place where I knew I could find it. This inspired my curiosity.
From as far back as I can remember, I had this notion of plants as companions and teachers, neighbors and friends. Then, when I went to college, a shift occurred for me.
As an aspiring botany major, I was pressured to adopt the scientific worldview; to conceive of these living beings as mere objects; to ask not, “Who are you?” but, “How does it work?” This was a real challenge for me. But I was madly in love with plants, so I worked hard to accommodate myself to this new approach.
Later in my career, after I’d gotten my PhD and started teaching, I was invited to sit among indigenous knowledge holders who understood plants as beings with their own songs and sensibilities.
In their presence, and in the presence of the plants themselves, I woke from the sleep I’d fallen into. I was reminded of what I’d always known in my core: that my primary relationship with plants was one of apprenticeship. I’m learning from plants, as opposed to only learning about them.
I was especially moved by an elderly Diné woman who told the biographies of each plant in her valley: its gifts, its responsibilities, its history, and its relationships — both friendships and animosities.
As a scientist I had learned only about plants’ physical attributes. Her stories reminded me of how I had encountered plants as a young person. That’s why I say I’m coming full circle after all these years — because I’m able to stop speaking of plants as objects.
Let me add that my appreciation of plants has been greatly enriched by knowing the beauty of chlorophyll and photosynthesis and hormones and cellular biology. Ideally the two ways of knowing can reinforce one another.
Tonino: Writer Vine Deloria Jr. has called indigenous knowledge the “intellectual twin to science.” Is that what you’re talking about?
Kimmerer: Yes. Both Western science and traditional ecological knowledge are methods of reading the land. That’s where they come together. But they’re reading the land in different ways. Scientists use the intellect and the senses, usually enhanced by technology. They set spirit and emotion off to the side and bar them from participating.
Often science dismisses indigenous knowledge as folklore — not objective or empirical, and thus not valid. But indigenous knowledge, too, is based on observation, on experiment. The difference is that it includes spiritual relationships and spiritual explanations. Traditional knowledge brings together the seen and the unseen, whereas Western science says that if we can’t measure something, it doesn’t exist.
Tonino: What are some other differences between the traditional indigenous approach and the Western scientific tradition?
Kimmerer: When we use the scientific method in an experiment, we look at one variable at a time. In order to really understand how something works, science says, we must exclude all else. We’re not going to talk about relationships. We’re going to limit ourselves to cause and effect. This notion that you can rigorously exclude all factors save one, and in so doing find the cause, is not part of traditional knowledge.
In the traditional way of learning, instead of conducting a tightly controlled experiment, you interact with the being in question — with that plant, with that stream. And you watch what happens to everything around it, too. The idea is to pay attention to the living world as if it were a spider’s web: when you touch one part, the whole web responds. Experimental, hypothesis-driven science looks just at that one point you touched.
Another important difference is that science tends to want to make universal statements, whereas to the indigenous way of thinking, what’s happening between two organisms is always particular and localized, unique in space and time.
Take the example of a bee landing on a flower for a sip of nectar. To the indigenous observer, it’s not some idealized Bee meeting some idealized Flower. There isn’t an attempt to generalize to pollinator ecology, or to say that it’s all being driven by certain physical principles. Those principles may be real, but they aren’t any more real than this bee on this flower at this time on this day with this weather.
Tonino: But how do you get beyond that isolated moment in space and time to develop a broader understanding? It can’t be that you have to start over with every bee and flower. Don’t the observations pile up?
Kimmerer: You’re asking: Is there an equivalent in traditional knowledge to what science calls a theory? Absolutely. But it’s a different kind of theory, one that centers on the idea of responsibilities. All bees, for example, have a responsibility to pollinate. The indigenous observer is asking the bee, How are you living out your responsibility? And what about you, flower?
The individual observer brings findings back to the community to share. He might talk about what happened when he was setting his trapline that day, and someone else might say, “Oh, a few falls ago I saw that same thing, and the consequence was this or that.”
And then maybe somebody else chimes in that she saw the same thing, too, but the consequence was a little different. The information isn’t published in a professional journal, but it’s shared with the community and vetted by that community’s collective intelligence. I think of it as the equivalent of peer review.
Tonino: You say that indigenous observers interact with the world they’re studying. They participate. Why is that so important?
Kimmerer: Western science explicitly separates observer and observed. It’s rule number one: keep yourself out of the experiment.
But to the indigenous way of thinking, the observer is always in relationship with the observed, and thus it’s important that she know herself: As I watch that bee and flower, as I study how water moves, as I observe the growth of the grass in this meadow, I understand that the kind of being I am colors how I see and feel and know. Furthermore, my presence might even be influencing how the world is working around me.
It’s important to recognize the relationship that exists between the observer and the observed. In Western science we believe our technologies and how we frame our hypotheses will eliminate our bias. A traditional perspective instead celebrates the relationship. A young person is going to see things differently than an old person.
A daughter and a mother and a grandmother will see in different ways. All of these perspectives should be brought to bear. Rather than isolate them, we can incorporate them into the learning process.
Tonino: Do you think there’s an analogy between Native American oral traditions and long-term scientific research projects?
Kimmerer: Let me back up and say that paying attention to natural data has evolutionary value for a culture. If you don’t pay attention to the circumstances under which the salmon return to the rivers to spawn, you will fail at fishing.
So there has always been great impetus to make meaning from data.
That data might not be quantitative, though. It’s not as if a thousand years ago on the Pacific coast people were measuring and weighing fish.
But they were cleaning hundreds of fish, so their hands knew the size and weight and relative health of these beings. And their hands remembered “data” from the previous year and the year before.
I can imagine a conversation that went something like: “You know what else was happening that year when the fish were so fat? There was a great hatch of mosquitoes,” or, “We had a really long winter,” or, “Water temperatures were up.” We search for connections. It’s what we do as a species.
The ecological history of a place is passed down through foodways, through stories around the campfire, through ceremonies performed on certain dates in honor of the cycles — such and such natural event tends to occur around such and such a date. And this knowledge has adaptive significance.
If you don’t pay attention, you’re going to go hungry, or you won’t be able to find the medicine you need. It’s imperative that you collect and safeguard knowledge over the years. Western science — or, at least, ecology — has a growing appreciation for this basic truth: if we don’t have a handle on our fisheries and forests, we’re in huge trouble.
Tonino: Long-term studies, whether conducted by Western scientists or indigenous peoples, strike me as an effort to prevent amnesia.
Kimmerer: Yes, forgetfulness. I think of my friends just a few miles over the hill here at Onondaga Nation. They’re trying to restore their sacred lake, which has been horribly polluted by industrial dumping and sewage. They want to bring it back to the state described in the prayer of gratitude that opens and closes all their group meetings. They call it the Thanksgiving Address, and it’s an ancient description of how the world once was and can be again. They’re not using the EPA’s standards of allowable parts per million of some toxic chemical. They’re saying that lakes are places where eagles can come and feed and breed.
Lakes are places where people can gather their medicines. Lakes are places where all kinds of creatures can drink and be refreshed.
Ceremony is often said to be how we remember to remember. The great orations, such as the Thanksgiving Address, reach back through time and say, “These are the relationships that have existed and should exist. With that in mind, let’s go forward and restore our environment.”
Tonino: That’s a lovely thought: ceremonies are how we remember to remember.
Kimmerer: Ceremony also reminds us of our responsibilities to creation. When you have ceremonies of gratitude, you understand how much the world gives to you, and you remember your dependency. Through the ceremony itself — the food, the regalia, the time spent in preparation — you are giving back. You’re putting energy back into both the material and the spiritual world. The two are inseparable. Ceremonies are as much about reciprocity as they are about gratitude.
Tonino: You’ve said that an indigenous elder might see the scientific method, which asks a direct question, as disrespectful. Why?
Kimmerer: Because the organism being questioned has its own intentions, its own agency in the world. It is rude of us to prod this sovereign being and ask: How come you’re doing that? How come you’re living that way? How come you’re that color? How come you’re that tall? How come you die in the winter? To someone who views each organism as a potential teacher, this type of pushy questioning is just plain rude.
It has also been explained to me that scientists’ interest in how things work leads us out of our place and into the Creator’s realm. We don’t need to know how something works. We need to know that it works to keep natural systems intact. We should remember that our curiosity exists in the human realm. It’s sometimes said that we humans are the “youngest brothers of creation.” We haven’t been around very long, and we should be humble and pay attention.
My personal view, as a Native American scientist, is that, while I honor this traditional perspective and acknowledge that science sometimes overreaches, I also understand that knowledge of underlying mechanisms can provide us with the tools for positive intervention in ecological systems.
Knowing how something works can also be a source of wonder. At the same time, I appreciate the traditional perspective, which cautions against hubris and arrogance and the sense that we are “controlling” nature, as if it were a machine.
Tonino: If asking a direct question of the natural world is disrespectful, what’s the alternative?
Kimmerer: We can find creative ways of pursuing inquiry that are courteous and delicate and don’t demand information but instead search for it. I like to think of my own research as an interview process, a conversation.
Let’s say we want to know how a particular species of moss responds to drought. Some people would take samples into the lab and drought-stress them, but that’s pretty crude, in my opinion. If I want to know how water is important to moss, I’m going to go to wet places and be with the moss, and I’m going to go to dry places and be with the moss, and I’m going to discover whatever I can. I will say to the moss, “I’m not going to snatch you from your home and grind you up to learn your secrets.
Instead I will sit at your feet and wait for you to tell me what I need to know.” And I’ll do so joyfully, appreciating the experience regardless of what data might come from it. A way of learning that’s not destructive, that minimizes interference — that’s my goal.
Patience and commitment are the key to learning from a being or a place. Unfortunately the institutions of science don’t commonly make room for the slow, steady approach.
I want to be careful here to separate the institutions of science from scientific inquiry itself. They shouldn’t be conflated. The institutions of science dictate that your grant lasts only three years and must produce a report. This propels a reductive, mechanistic approach. And the sad truth is that scientists have no choice but to follow the money. If you can’t secure the funding to do your research the way you want, you devise a project that you can get funded.
Tonino: What are the chief virtues of scientific inquiry?
Kimmerer: The first that comes to mind is repeated measurement as a way of seeing. I can think of instances in which the observations of native peoples could lead them astray. We can’t separate the observer from the observed, but we can avoid imposing our human perspective on the facts. Measurement can help with this.
Science also offers us many lenses for viewing the world. Technology can help us get outside of our human perceptions. When we look at a flower, we don’t see it the way a bee sees it. Advanced technologies can help us to see the flower from the bee’s perspective and get beyond the limitations of our five senses.
Tonino: That reminds me of an essay by Gary Snyder in which he makes the point that our bipedal, binocular, 150-pound, mostly hairless way of experiencing the world can get us only so far, and we need to try to go beyond it, if only imaginatively.
Kimmerer: This is especially true with plants. As a society we are plant-blind. It’s just green wallpaper to most of us. We don’t distinguish one species from the next, let alone appreciate that there’s a reason the leaf of this plant differs from the leaf of that plant; that a tree’s leaves change shape as it grows from a seedling to maturity; that bark can be thick or thin, smooth or rough. We hardly notice plants’ sophistication. We believe they don’t exhibit intentional behavior, but really they just behave very slowly.
Although plants don’t have a nervous system like ours, there is good evidence that they can recognize other species around them and adjust their chemistry, growth patterns, and so on accordingly. Plants are interacting with one another all the time.
Tonino: Do they communicate? Collaborate? Wage war?
Kimmerer: Plants certainly do communicate, primarily through the exchange of chemical signals. They inform one another of insect and pathogen attacks, for example, which allows them to mount defenses.
And there is evidence of collaboration as well as antagonism between plants. To my mind, plants meet any definition of intelligence. They have the ability to perceive, sense, respond to, and communicate about the environment. They create and maintain relationships with other beings. And they adjust their behavior in ways that benefit survival and reproduction.
Tonino: Why do most people resist the idea of plant intelligence?
Kimmerer: We tend to view the world through an anthropocentric lens. Plants are radically different from us, and we tend to see “others” as inferior. Since most plants don’t exhibit rapid motion, we assume they do not exhibit behaviors. Because they do not have the same sensory organs and nervous systems that animals do, we assume that they have no sensation.
Yet they sense the world in ways that are completely beyond us, such as perceiving very long and short wavelengths of light. We don’t understand plant intelligence very well, so we tend to dismiss it as nonexistent or primitive. But we also used to think that the world was flat.
If we would embrace the possibility of plant intelligence and investigate it without any anthropocentric bias, we might be surprised by what we learn.
Then there’s the philosophical barrier to acknowledging plant intelligence: it would mean including plants within our circle of ethical responsibility. If we assume that plants are just objects, we are free to treat them however we please — they are of no moral consequence.
If, however, we acknowledge the intelligence of plants, it would have significant implications for how we use them.
Tonino: Has your scientific work led you to feel greater empathy for the species you’re studying?
Kimmerer: Absolutely. I’d go so far as to say that if you can’t get to the point of feeling empathy, it’s not worth doing the work. I want to know what it’s like to be an oak or a birch or an ash.
Tonino: There’s a poem by Mary Oliver that begins: “Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches / of other lives … ?”
Kimmerer: Yes, I’ve tried. It’s an ability that can be learned — or relearned, as the case may be. Our ancestors understood this as quite normal and natural, whereas in our modern era we have forgotten what this kind of wordless communication is like.
Tonino: You’ve said that both science and traditional knowledge can be pathways to kinship. Does it matter which path we take, as long as we arrive at kinship eventually?
Kimmerer: No, I don’t think it matters how you get there. The scientist peering through binoculars and the native hunter studying tracks in the mud both experience kinship with the living world.
Tonino: So what is kinship?
Kimmerer: It has to do with the realization that we are all beings on the same earth, and that we all need the same things to flourish. Water, for example. When I pay attention to how birds interact with water, or how mosses interact with water, or how lichens interact with water, I feel a kinship with them. I know what a cold drink of water feels like, but what would it be like to drink water over my entire body, as a lichen does?
Kinship also comes from our reciprocal relationship with other species. Sitting here, you can get a whiff of ripe wild strawberries off the hillside. They are fulfilling their responsibility to us, and we will fulfill our responsibility to them. Those berries provide us with food and medicine, and in reciprocity, we perhaps unwittingly disperse their seeds and tend their habitat so they can continue to thrive. It’s like a family: we help each other out.
Tonino: Is that what you mean when you write that all flourishing is mutual?
Kimmerer: Yes. What’s good for life is good for all life, whether it’s green or two-legged or any other kind. Obviously there are trade-offs: the individual fish doesn’t flourish when it’s being eaten by the fisherman. But human flourishing and fish flourishing must be mutually reinforcing, or we wouldn’t both still be here, right?
Videoe above: Robin Kimmerer speaks of Mishkos Kenomagwen, The Teachings of Grass for Bioneers. From (https://youtu.be/cumEQcRMY3c).
Image above: Dictyophora mushroom that can produce sexual arousal in human women. From original articla.
A study from the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms reports that Dictyophora, a mushroom that grows on lava flows, induces spontaneous orgasms in about 1/3 of the woman who sniff it. From Wikipedia:
According to a 2001 publication in the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, the smell of the fresh fungus can trigger spontaneous orgasms in human females. In the trial involving 16 women, 6 had orgasms while smelling the fruit body, and the other ten, who received smaller doses, experienced physiological changes such as increased heart rate.
All of the 20 men tested considered the smell disgusting. According to the authors, the results suggest that the hormone-like compounds present in the volatile portion of the gleba may have some similarity to human neurotransmitters released in females during sexual activity. The study used the species found in Hawaii, not the edible variety cultivated in China.
SOURCE: Ray Songtree (rayupdates@hushmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Two years ago birds were found with patches of white feathers related to their radiation exposure.
Image above: Slide from presentation of Ken Buesseler on impact of radiation entering the ocean in Japan and on the US west coast.
Ray Songtree emailed me a link to a video of Dr. Tim Mousseau's presentation on the biological impacts of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown disasters. It was an excellent report as part of a three part video presentation produced by the Ecological Options Network (EON).
We are these videos in reverse order, beginning with Beth Brangan's of EON "Neither Panic nor Denial", followed by Tim Mousseau's "Bio-Impacts of Chernobyl & Fukushima", and finishing with Ken Buesseler's "Fukushima from Two Sides of the Pacific".
Video above: Presentation by Beth Brangan of "Neither Panic nor Denial".
"EON's Mary Beth Brangan sums up an evening of presentations on Fukushima contamination by independent research scientists Ken Buesseler, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Tim Mousseau, Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina.
Brangan explains why the independent scientific evidence so far strongly supports applying the Precautionary Principle in crafting the appropriate public policy response to radioactive fallout from the on-going Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.
She calls for international solidarity with the plight of dispossessed & exploited Fukushima refugees, and the explosive, youth-led current Japanese grassroots campaign against the militarism and nuclear brinkmanship of the US-supported Abe regime.
She encourages people to support independent research scientists' projects and to join the growing movement to shut down California's own 'Fukushima-in-Waiting,' PG&E's aging Diablo Canyon, located over 13 intersecting earthquake faults, in a tsunami zone not far south of San Francisco - the state's 'last nuke standing.'
Organizer: Bing Gong
Co-Sponsors: Fukushima Response Campaign, Pt. Reyes Books, EON
Video above: Presentation by Tim Mousseau of "Bio-Impacts of Chernobyl & Fukushima".
Evolutionary biologist Dr. Tim Mousseau shares findings from his unique research on the biological effects of radiation exposure to wildlife from the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl & Fukushima.
This is part 2 of a 3-part series of presentations on Fukushima contamination by independent research scientists Ken Buesseler, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Tim Mousseau, Department of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina.
Video above: Presentation by Ken Buesseler of "Fukushima from Two Sides of the Pacific".
[EON Editors' note: This relatively unconcerned stance of Buesseler's appeared to change a bit the week after this talk when he spoke in Canada after the Japanese typhoon caused massive flooding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKL...... ]
Marine biologist Dr. Ken Buesseler, is Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity.
Introduced by Mary Beth Brangan, Co-Director of EON, Dr. Buesseler reviews his findings so far in his on-going citizen-funded project monitoring the continuing radioactive contaminiation from japan's Fukushima triple nuclear meltdown.
Within months of the Fukushima disaster, Ken Buesseler assembled an international research cruise to sample the waters surrounding the nuclear plant.
To date, important fisheries remain closed due to cesium levels above Japanese limits for seafood. Ocean currents are bringing the radioactive particles released from Fukushima to the West Coast.
Buesseler now monitors over 50 sites along the West Coast, from Alaska to Mexico, with citizen-scientist funding and participation.
In june of 2014 off the coast of northern California and April 2015, in Ucluelet BC, radioactive cesium from Fukushima was detected in ocean water samples. .
Image above: Photo of author Patrick Holden on the soil by Steph French from original article.
I am a long-standing farmer and representative of the organic movement, but it is only recently that I have come to see just how much microbiology permeates every aspect of our lives.
Although theoretically and mechanistically I knew this a long time ago, and was aware of the importance of soil biology and mycorrhizal fungi, it was only in 2012 that it really began to dawn on me how understanding the intimate, biological and symbiotic processes involved in my own digestion sheds light on the equivalent processes taking place in the soils of my farm.
In 2012 I heard a conference speech by Patricia Quinlisk, Head of Public Health in Iowa, about the remarkable recovery rate – up to 80% – of patients with digestive infections after they had received fecal microbiota transplants. Where antibiotics had been detrimental to their health, introducing healthy bacteria from stools had restored their colonic microflora.
It was through understanding that the human body is a biome – by definition, a large, naturally occurring community of flora occupying a major habitat – that I realised the full meaning of soil life and how interconnected it is to all other ecosystems.
The dark mysterious world of soil biology is rarely brought to the daylight of people’s understanding, even in the organic movement, due to the assumption that this is reserved for the in-depth investigations of soil scientists.
The attention to soil during this International Year of Soils and the Berlin Global Soil Week 2015 will hopefully bring some of the fascinating discoveries of soil science to wider public awareness. However, if we understand this science only in terms of the earth beneath our feet, we miss out on seeing the awe-inspiring interconnectivity of soil with the rest of life.
Parallel digestive systemsThe key concept that has changed my thinking on farming is to understand that the soil surrounding a plant’s root zone is effectively its digestive system, or ‘stomach’. Building on this parallel, my body breaks down the food I eat in an internal and, mainly, but not exclusively, anaerobic process that involves symbiotic communities of bacteria, which occupy the stomach, small intestine and large intestine.
Nutrients are absorbed through the huge surface area of villi lining the gut, a process that is mirrored in the soil, although with plants the absorption is outside-in rather than inside-out. It is in this sense that the soil and its bacterial and fungal community can be seen as analogous to an external stomach of a plant, since these organisms, including a network of mycorrhizal fungi, play a central role in breaking down organic matter into absorbable nutrients, which are available to plants through their large surface area of root systems.
Although these processes in the body and in the soil function differently, there is a fundamental link – the digestive system. This system refines and transforms the material from one organism, which occupies a low place in the food chain, to nourish another, further up the ladder.
Through digestion, organic materials are broken down and transformed into new life forms: the soil biome nourishes the plant through complex digestive processes in the topsoil and rhizosphere, and the plant matter in turn becomes animal flesh as it is transformed through another biome, in this case an internalized gut. The health of all these interconnected organisms is, therefore, centrally dependent on the health of their digestive processes.
The secret world of microbesAt the microbiological level, there is something utterly compelling about the digestive process. This microscopic world opens up a new dimension of understanding in relation to the health connections between the life of the soil and the organisms that live inside our bodies.
In the human gastrointestinal tract, approximately 1.5kg–2kg of non-human life forms, mostly beneficial bacteria and also other microorganisms, help with the process of digestion, enabling the subsequent absorption of short-chain fatty acids, while living off the energy produced by the fermentation of undigested carbohydrates.
As well as digestion, microbes perform various other vitally important roles in regulating the immune system and preventing colonisation by pathogens. The study of microorganisms, through research such as the Human Microbiome Project, has opened up new doors for understanding health. Similarly, the Earth Microbiome Project is systematically characterizing the microbial diversity across the planet.
Even mainstream soil scientists are now beginning to present us with a new and clear message that microorganisms are crucial for soil health – even though we are only just coming to realise how important they are also for our own health.
The layer of healthy topsoil, thriving with microorganisms, which covers much of the land’s surface, is in effect a vast digestive system – the collective stomach of all plants, breaking down soil nutrients into bio-available forms that plants can absorb.
The rhizosphere, or root ball, is the gut of the plant and the zone where plant roots and soil organisms interact in a whole variety of biotic, symbiotic and pathogenic relationships to enable these organisms to do their work.
Without the presence of microorganisms, the mechanics of the digestive system can still function to a certain degree. Purging our intestines of microorganisms through antibiotic use will not stop us from digesting food, just as bypassing the soil ecosystem through using chemical fertilizers or hydroponics will still stimulate plant growth. However, the long-term vitality and health of plants, animals and people is centrally dependent on the presence and diversity of microorganisms, in the soil and gut respectively.
Soil microbial communities are considered the most biodiverse in the world and it is estimated that a single teaspoon of garden soil may contain thousands of species, a billion individuals and one hundred metres of fungal networks.
However, only 1% of microbes that live in the rhizosphere have so far been identified by scientists due to difficulties in getting them to grow in the laboratory. “We know more about the stars in the sky than about the soil under our feet,” says US microbiologist Elaine Ingham.
Despite the lack of scientific knowledge of the specificities of soil microorganisms, the impacts of destroying soil biodiversity by failing to maintain sufficient organic matter, the overuse of chemicals and heavy tillage are obviously detrimental for soil health and fertility.
Microbiomes as the key to good healthThe biodiversity of the organisms in our guts is also crucial for maintaining health. In the human microbiome, this is determined by the specific condition of each section of gastrointestinal tract. However, the compositions of microbial communities are different among people, because the ecological conditions of individual intestines are distinct depending on age, body condition, diet, lifestyle, geography and cultural traditions.
Gut microbiomes are unique to each person – a kind of microbial fingerprint. Modern diets with high sugar content and processed foods, along with increased antibiotic use, have been shown to be detrimental to gut microbiota, which, conversely, can be improved through diets that feed the microorganisms that keep our guts healthy.
The realisation that when I eat I am not actually directly feeding myself but a diverse community of microorganisms upon which I depend for my health, has drastically changed my perception of how my interventions as a farmer can have a similar effect on the soils over which I have temporary stewardship.
Every action, from crop rotation and feeding soil bacteria and fungi with composts or manures, to aeration and careful timing of grazing and cultivation, has the capacity to enhance or diminish soil life.
This new understanding has been mirrored in the scientific community. Until very recently, the mainstream understanding of food and agriculture has been through the lenses of reductionist chemistry and engineering, while biology has been largely sidelined or ignored.
The popularized ‘microbe revolution’ and increased scientific research in microbiology has put the spotlight on linking an understanding of the human biome with the microbial life in soil. However, as with all scientific advances, there are different ways of interpreting and using this knowledge for both the good and ill health of the planet.
If we consider the ‘nature as teacher route’ when feeding the soil with compost, we literally feed it with living food that contains a whole range of bacteria and fungi. This starkly contrasts to the biotechnology route in which synthetically bred microbial solutions are being hailed as the manufactured probiotics of the plant world, which aim to increase chemical fertiliser uptake.
Similarly, if we eat patented synthetically manufactured probiotics, we bypass the diversity and potency of eating living foods such as fermented foods. For example, it has been shown that one 16-ounce serving of sauerkraut is equal to eight bottles of high potency probiotics!
We need to be really open to all scientific and technological advances, yet remain extremely vigilant of the purposes they serve. There is huge potential for harnessing new knowledge in ways that can help us address the ecological crisis, yet there is also the danger of exploitation by vested interests, which view nature’s capital as a resource to be exploited.
My personal soil challenge is to continue to explore how an understanding of soil, in all its extraordinary dimensions, can inform my future farming practices and deepen my relationship with soil in a way that increases its health.
Every farming practice has an impact and every day, as a farmer, I have the possibility of deepening my knowledge, perhaps simply by walking on the earth and learning through my feet.
Through doing so I am increasing my intuitive understanding of the consequences of my actions on the soil.
WHAT: National Tropical Botanical Garden and Kauai Community College present a special showing of A King in China: The Life of Joseph Francis Rock
WHEN:
Tuesday, April 23, 5:30-7:00pm
WHERE:
Kauai Community College Cafeteria
3-1901 Kaumualii Highway, Līhue
A Botanist from Hawai'i Makes a Mark on China.
National Tropical Botanical Garden and Kauai Community College will offer a glimpse into the life of the man known as 'the father of Hawaiian botany', who went on to become internationally recognized for his explorations in China. The free film showing of A King in China: The Life of Joseph Francis Rock will be introduced by NTBG Director and CEO Chipper Wichman on Tuesday, April 23, at 5:30 p.m. in the cafeteria at the KCC Campus Center.
The 2013 showing coincides with the 100th anniversary of what many in and outside of Hawaii consider a foundational publication on Hawaiian plant life, Rock’s 1913 The Indigenous Trees of the Hawaiian Islands, republished by NTBG in 1974. During his introduction, Wichman will share another important connection between Rock and the NTBG, the national nonprofit botanical institution headquartered on Kaua'i.
Rock, a largely self-taught plant collector, has a number of Hawaiian species named for him, including the Kauai endemic sedge Cyperus rockii. In the 1920s Rock traveled to Asia for the U.S. Department of Agriculture where he collected plants used in treating Hansen's disease. He may be most known for the expeditions he led for the National Geographic Society and others in Chinese and Tibetan border regions, exhaustively documenting the culture and language of the Naxi, an ethnic minority in Yunan province. Later he continued his work in Southeast Asia before eventually returning to China and then back to Hawaii in the 1950s. The 52-minute film covers Rock’s time in regions of Southwest China and Tibet, which remain remote today even as much of the culture has all but vanished.
Wichman says "the story of Rock’s explorations in China is so fantastic it is hard to comprehend in the context of our modern society. Everyone in Hawai'i should know that this internationally celebrated explorer got his start right here in the Islands, where he taught himself not only botany but also photography, which endeared him to the National Geographic Society."
This special event is the second installment in the "Around the World of Plants" lecture series, which is one of many collaborations between Kaua'i Community College and the National Tropical Botanical Garden. Both KCC and NTBG share a common goal of quality education to truly change lives. KCC, which is part of the University of Hawai'i system, operates a large campus in Līhu'e. For information on the institutions, visit their respective websites at kauai.hawaii.edu and www.ntbg.org
SOURCE: SOURCE: Katie Gelfling (k.gelfling@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Plumes of dust carry thousands of microbial species across the Pacific to West Coast on jet streams.
A surprising number of microorganisms – more than 100 times more kinds than reported just four months ago – are leaping the biggest gap on the planet. Hitching rides in the upper troposphere, they’re making their way from Asia across the Pacific Ocean and landing in North America.
For the first time researchers have been able to gather enough biomass in the form of DNA to apply molecular methods to samples from two large dust plumes originating in Asia in the spring of 2011. The scientists detected more than 2,100 unique species compared to only 18 found in the very same plumes using traditional methods of culturing, results they published in July.
“The long-range transport and surprising level of species richness in the upper atmosphere overturns traditional paradigms in aerobiology,” says David J. Smith, who recently earned his doctorate at the University of Washington in biology and astrobiology. He’s lead author of a paper in the current issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
“It’s a small world. Global wind circulation can move Earth’s smallest types of life to just about anywhere,” Smith said.
It’s been estimated that about 7.1 million tons (64 teragrams) of aerosols – dust, pollutants and other atmospheric particles, including microorganisms – cross the Pacific each year. The aerosols are carried by wind storms into the upper reaches of the troposphere. The troposphere, the layer of air closest to earth up to about 11 miles (18 kilometers), is where almost all our weather occurs.
Co-author Daniel Jaffe, professor at UW Bothell, has previously documented especially large plumes of aerosols in the troposphere making the trans-Pacific trip in seven to 10 days. The recent findings are based on two such plumes, one in April and the other in May of 2011, detected at Mount Bachelor in the Cascade Mountains of central Oregon.
Most of the microorganisms – about half were bacterial and the other half fungal – originated from soils and were either dead on arrival or harmless to humans. A few fungal species have been associated previously with crop wilt but scientists had no way of determining if any crops were affected during either plume event.
Most of the species in the plumes can be found in low, background levels on the West Coast. The plumes, however, brought elevated levels of such organisms leading the scientists to say that it may be useful to think about microorganisms as air pollution: microorganisms that are unnoticed in background levels might be more relevant in concentrated doses.
“I was very surprised at the concentrations. One might expect the concentrations of cells to decrease with altitude based on fallout and dilution,” Smith said. “But during these plume events, the atmosphere was pooling these cells just as it does with other kinds of air pollution.”
Interestingly, Smith says, two of the three most common families of bacteria in the plumes are known for their ability to form spores in ways that they can hibernate safely during harsh conditions, making them especially well adapted to high altitude transport.
“I think we’re getting close to calling the atmosphere an ecosystem,” Smith said. “Until recently, most people would refer to it as a conveyor belt, or a transient place where life moves through. But the discovery of so many cells potentially able to adapt to traveling long distances at high altitudes challenges the old classification.”
Cells also can interact with their high-altitude environment, for example, becoming the nucleus for rain drops and snow flakes and influencing the amount of precipitation that falls. Other scientists estimate that 30 percent of global precipitation stems from microbes.
On the other hand, scientists have yet to see evidence of metabolism or growth of microorganisms while aloft and there’s a limited amount of time that any organism might reside there.
Sampling the upper troposphere for microorganisms in the past has been a spotty effort using aircraft and balloons, Smith said
“Because it is so difficult to get samples, I argue it’s probably the last biological environment on the planet to be explored,” he said.
Mount Bachelor, like many other mountains in the Cascades, has a peak tall enough to pierce the upper troposphere. Unlike other mountains in the Cascades, however, the top of Mount Bachelor is a far more accessible place for an observatory because a ski area exists there. There’s power and bringing equipment and personnel to the observatory is not a major undertaking, you just take the ski lift.
Funding for the work came from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, the UW’s NASA Space Grant Consortium and the UW Department of Biology.
Other co-authors are Peter Ward and Hilkka Timonen with the UW and UW Bothell respectively, Dale Griffin with the U.S. Geological Survey, Michele Birmele and Michael Roberts with NASA and Kevin Perry with the University of Utah. .
[Author's note: This poem was written on 2/15/12 for the occasion of my son's and daughter-in-law's baby shower in anticipation of their baby's birth. Their daughter, Magnolia De La Casa Kondrat-Wilson, was born early this morning in New Paltz, New York.]
Image above: From photo of my son John Wilson with his daughter Magnolia taken by her mother, Katy Kondrat.
When Magnolia De La Casa landed on Earth
Those before her had coiled, shuddered and sighed.
She had no name then, and she wasn't really a "she" -
But she was free.
A spark, a wriggle and then
what would be her was embedded.
And she stuck, and in doing so became them,
and became herself.
More complicated every moment, to the tune of her own heart, and that of the womb.
The Womb World
is now everything and everywhere.
Pulse – blood, juices, enzymes, hormones -
Motions – vibrations, bounces, squeezing -
Sounds – gurgling, laughing, crying, farts -
Sights – a web of veins in the glow, a shadow of a hand in the sun -
It seems like forever.
Magnolia – an ancient tough genus, older than the bees, hums her tune.
The Womb World
is a warm comforter on a long winter night.
But outside seems funny and exciting.
They rub the womb's outside.
I kick back and elbow them.
I can hear them talking to me now.
There is more than one of them out there.
Inside is a slowly collapsing universe imploding on itself -
My aerial acrobatics are reduced to squirms and twists.
Hey! Something's up. There's some rush.
Waves are rolling through the casa.
Leading somewhere?
My face is pressed to the floor.
It's too tight in here.
These convulsions are new!
I don't want to wake up,
but the dream – It's getting scary.
There is only one way out.
The NOISE, the LIGHT, the AIR -
BREATH!
Oh my God!
I'm on my own – but in their arms.
Image above: Container lost off California coast in 2004 subject of study. From original article.
In 2004, on a trip from San Francisco to the Port of Los Angeles, the shipping vessel Med Taipei hit a patch of bad weather. Like all shipping vessels, Med Taipei was loaded down with 40-foot-long metal containers—the moving boxes that bring us stuff from all over the world and deliver our exports to other countries. In the storm, 24 of these containers fell off the Med Taipei and into the ocean.
That's not a particularly rare event. Thousands of shipping containers are lost every year, in much the same way, says Andrew DeVogelaere, Ph.D., research coordinator for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. What makes this story remarkable is that one of the lost shipping containers was eventually found. Just months after the box fell off the Med Taipei, researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute stumbled across it while placing sensors for a survey of the ocean floor within the Marine Sanctuary.
This year, the Sanctuary and MBARI were able to apply that good luck in a practical way, performing what is likely the first detailed study of a lost shipping container, and the effects it has on the ocean environment. I told you about this study back in March, when it was announced. Now that researchers have collected data and are starting to analyze it, I wanted to check in and find out more. In an interview last week, Andrew DeVogelaere told me about why it's difficult to study lost shipping containers, what creatures the researchers have found living on this container, and why what we don't know could hurt us.
Maggie Koerth-Baker: Your press materials say that this is the first time the environmental effects of lost shipping containers have been studied. But containers like this one have been in use for decades. Is this really the first time? What took so long?
Andrew DeVogelaere: That surprised me to. But I've not found any scientific publications on people studying containers. So I do think we're the first to do that. They're falling off all the time, 10,000 per year is best estimate. And the container we found is in really good condition. If we didn't know it had been down there for 7 years, we'd have guessed 4 months. But the containers aren't being found or studied because so few organizations can operate at that depth. The place we're looking at is 4,000 feet deep.
Outside of oil companies operating rigs, MBARI is really one of the very few groups that's out there daily. Maybe the only one. It's still a poorly understood area. In these deep sea ecosystems we don't even know the species names for a lot of the creatures, and the way they interact with one another and the environment is still a mystery.
MKB: Tell me about the location where the shipping container was found. What's it like? Some of the photos I saw before made it look kind of desolate.
AD: The seafloor there [at the container site] is quite beautiful. It's not just flat sand. there's topography and sea pens sticking up and crabs. Every few inches there's something. There's beautiful, lacy sea cucumbers, and a certain kind of pink crab that's associated with this species of sea cucumber. We're going to write a little scientific note on that relationship pattern, because people hadn't really noticed it before. We did just because we were down there [looking at the container].
People assume that we know more about the ocean than we do. There have been discussions about lost containers, especially in the European Union. They're a hazard because they'll float for a while and could sink wooden fishing boats. In the whole discussion, though, nobody talks about impacts to the deep sea. That's what we have to offer. When one of these falls off a boat it's not just a loss of merchandise, or a risk of loss of life. We're also impacting the deep sea community we don't even understand yet. And there's a societal cost to that, though how much we don't really know yet.
MKB: How difficult is it to do this kind of research? What has to happen just so you can observe the interaction between a shipping container and this environment that it's landed in?
AD: The first thing is the mechanical problem of getting something to that depth to look at it. Fortunately, we have MBARI. They have a big undersea robot the size of a car, tethered on 4,000 feet of cable. It's got mechanical arms. You also have to have a special ship that can maneuver to stay above the robot and manage the cable so it doesn't get tangled up. And it's only been in the last 10 years that we can go to that depth and find a specific place we've been before.
That's not a trivial engineering thing to know exactly where the ship is, and from there to know where the ROV is and communicate with that from the ship. as technology advances we're going to have a lot more opportunities to study these containers. Beyond the cabled robots there are now autonomous vehicles being developed. If you can send these AUVs out in search patterns, we'll be able to find more containers.
So technology is a problem. But the number two difficulty is that we think there could be several levels of impact. Obviously [the container] crushes everything it lands on, but there's the question of how it affects the local ecology. It looks like certain species are attracted to this container. For instance, there's a relatively large snail that seemed to be attracted to the container where it would lay these amazing egg sacks, 5 or 6 inches high.
But it looked like the container was also attracting crabs and octopus that fed on the snails as they're coming and going. So, when we look, we don't see many snails but they're somehow congregating around this container and changing predation patterns. You find a lot of empty shells in the area.
Two king crabs, Family Lithodidae, near a shipping container lost in Monterey Bay. The empty shells are from the gastropod Neptunea amianta. (c) 2011 MBARI/NOAA MKB: Before you started this study, what kinds of effects were you worried about? How did you expect shipping containers to interact with the environment they found themselves in?
AD: It's interesting, in that when this container fell into the sanctuary there were negotiations with the shipping company about mitigating damage. They were arguing there was no impact because there was nothing living down there. Luckily, we had research going on at that depth and could say that stuff lives there and this is what it looks like.
MKB: When we were first talking about your study on BoingBoing, both the readers and I thought about artificial reefs—how there are places where they've intentionally dumped things, like old subway cars, off the coast, and those form new habitats. It sounds somewhat like the shipping container is doing something similar, with the snails you mentioned. So I'm wondering, should we be worried about this? Are lost shipping containers a good thing?
AD: In some ways, saying that something is positive is a bit of a judgement call. If you like one kind of species it's positive to you. If you're a diver looking for big fish, then artificial reefs are good for you. But they're not good if you're a fisherman looking for squid [whose habitats are displaced by the reefs]. In this case, we saw these scallops that were living all over the container. MBARI has something like 8,000 hours of video at that depth and we've maybe only seen these scallops a few times before. So, maybe these containers are a positive for the deep sea scallops. It's possible. At this stage in the research, I wouldn't even want to say that anything is a huge negative or positive. But we now know something is going on and we should start studying it and stop ignoring it.
The toughest question is the issue of these containers forming stepping stones from one harbor to another across the deep sea. If you're familiar with invasive species, what prevents them from invading is often geographic breaks. Sandy surfaces can't be crossed by creatures that need a hard substrate. But these containers, falling off along shipping routes, could form stepping stones that allow creatures to move. That's just a hypothesis right now. We'd need to look at multiple containers to figure that out. But it's a hypothesis that makes sense.
MKB: Do shipping containers affect more of the environment than just wildlife?
AD: We don't have the results yet on this. But we took these sediment samples at different distances from the container. When you put something like that on the bottom of the ocean it affects the deep sea current and the size of sediment grains around it. We have to look at the grains we collected and see but, generally, faster currents mean larger grain size. There could be localized changes in sediments and that can impact the organisms, like which can live there.
Also, it's a bit of a stretch with this particular container, but the sediment thing also has an impact on pollution. Pesticide in the river, for instance, it sticks to the sediment, not the water. And it sticks more to smaller particles. Like I say, that's not as big of an issue here, but it could affect other shipping containers in other situations.
MKB: Let's talk about pollution a little bit more. Do the contents of the container matter? What's in your container?
AD: It's full of radial tires. I have said before that I didn't think tires were that toxic and one of my colleagues got upset. I was thinking more like it's not bleach or pesticide. Relatively speaking. The other containers that were lost [at the same time as this one] and that we never found contained cardboard, hair ribbons, hospital beds, sofas. Again, on a relative scale, those wouldn't be as bad. We do have some sediment where we'll be doing chemical analyses, to see if anything is leaching out.
One thing were were interested in is whether things were spilling out because of locks rusting after 7 years underwater. We thought we'd find something like that. In this case it didn't. It does happen though. There are famous stories of containers of Doritos that come ashore on the beach on the East Coast. Or a million bananas on the shores of the Netherlands. There's also a case where Nike shoes that were in a container spilled into the North Pacific and it became this big oceanographic study. Scientists figured out where currents were in that part of the ocean by following the shoes and where they ended up.
MKB: So you've collected all this data about this one shipping container, and you're in the process of analyzing that data to see what you can learn. But, once you've got your results, how much of that can you really extrapolate to other containers throughout the ocean? Does this really tell you much about the bigger picture?
AD: You're right on. Really, we took a relatively very quick look at one container. We can say some things about that one container and develop hypotheses about others. But I think we have a long way to go. As much as anything we have some ideas of potential impacts, and we think some effort should be made to start looking at other containers. Once you learn one thing you're going to have five other questions.
Meanwhile, while we know very little about the consequences, shipping containers are being lost all the time. When we first started this, I learned some amazing things about the things we use and where they come from. For instance, here in California we're interested in eating local fish. But squid caught in Monterey are taken to a packing company, shipped to China for processing, and then shipped back to Monterey to be sold as Monterey squid. We all benefit from the things that move around in containers and I don't think we realize that it's even happening.
MKB: So what happens next, both for you and on this larger issue?
AD: Right now we have a lot of video. We have notes and observations we made while we were at sea. We also have the sediment samples. We're going to look at chemistry, micro-invertebrates inside the sediment, and grain size. We can see general patterns in the video, but we're going to try to get down to a more refined taxa to figure out whether the species are invasive. And we want to quantify more carefully the density of organisms around the container. And my hope is that in two to three years we'll go back and visit again and try to detect other changes. Our hope is to publish this in some journals. That always takes a lot longer, though. Within half a year we'll have the data analyzed. It will take another year to get published after that.
On the other side, I'll be meeting with someone to look at international venues for discussing shipping container practices. We've been approached by a group from New Zealand to see how we can insert the information we do have into those ongoing discussions. There are suggestions that maybe there should be standard loading practices. Right now they don't even have to be weighed. You might be overloaded, lopsided, or heavy containers on top. And there aren't standards for how you tie them down, either. It would take longer and cost more, but it's something that's worth considering I think.
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