Life as a Manifestation of Earth and Human Survival: a Look at “Earth and Life: A Four Billion Year Conversation”

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[I’m using Knoll’s book here as a starting point, so it isn’t strictly a ‘review’.]

As people we tend to simplify things, explain them linearly through either deductive reasoning, taking an accepted rule and applying it to the available ‘evidence’; or follow the process of inductive reasoning, examining the evidence first and using that to make sense of the what we observe. The world itself is very complex and our tendency is often to assume certain things about it and then act on that. In a dangerous world, where genuine threats abound, if we attempted to analyze all possibilities, we might be dead before we decided what to do. Part of our process leads us to isolate problems, things, into different categories…to streamline it, speed it up. Some people simply call this ‘focusing on the problem’, ‘if it walks like a duck…’, but this can result in our ignoring the context…and missing something absolutely essential.

We do similarly with ourselves, when we view ourselves as independent individuals. Doing this doesn’t negate the fact that everything, every being, came from another and so exists in relationship ‘with’. Because we study particular individuals, groups and processes ‘separate from’ others, does not in fact mean that they are independent. The universe is a connected whole. While each of its ‘parts’, each of its processes, may seem to exist to us independently, ‘free’ from others, they aren’t. We are enmeshed in a matrix of relationships. No individual, no function, no process, can be understood entirely on its own. Nothing occurs in the absence of the ‘other’, of other actions and actors. The passage of time can reveal this, if we are looking. Even the controlled lab experiment happens within a context that goes beyond itself. Such isolation is a construct and its result can never define something in its entirety. We need to understand this when we examine life in a singular, narrow way.

Physicists talk about the ‘three body problem’, that as soon as you introduce a third variable, precise prediction becomes impossible. A similar result occurs even in simple two body problems when you extend them out over time, each subsequent interaction, adding ever more uncertainty. Complex systems are inherently impossible to predict precisely. Outcomes become more or less probable. Not certain. In systems involving life, the complexities, the outcomes, occur within limited ranges, between ‘survivable’ margins. These results cannot go to the extreme or death/extinction occurs. As humans we are biased toward a belief in our independence, our ‘freedom’ of thought, of action, and imagine a capacity to predict and control outcomes. We frequently exaggerate our ability to effect the world and interpret results in ways that ignore outside influences, other ‘actors’. Our ‘independence’ appears to give us choices and agency that we don’t actually possess. We are, in reality, intimately enmeshed in the universe and so can not be sole determiners of its outcome. Life is an inclusive process in which we each play a role. The reality is that we can never act truly alone. Our impacts echo across time, distance and type…and are moderated by those of others. Extremes are reeled back in by the system, as long as it remains overall in a healthy state/condition. Our effects are never truly our own. We remain, perpetually, under the influence because we are ‘of’ the same whole. We get into ‘trouble’ when we ignore this. Continue reading →

Treekeepers, a Look into Forestry and the Role of Tree Planting as a Solution to the Climate Crisis

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Reading Lauren Oakes, “Treekeepers: the Race for a Forested Future”, was a bit of a bi-polar experience for me, with periods of amazement and hope, interrupted by depression and hopelessness….To be fair this wasn’t all a result of the book, as there’s no way I could separate out my reading experience from the roller coaster ride of social, political and economic upheaval that characterizes our current ‘Anthro-Trump-pocene’ period…and the ‘reality’ that climate change is taking on a ‘life’ of its own, no longer a simple linear response to our irresponsible Carbon burning, resource consuming, habit. Oakes is a conservation scientist and a science writer. She is also a mother searching for a way out of the impending crisis that awaits us if we continue on failing to act intelligently, respectfully and with enough urgency, that we can avoid the worst outcome of what is definitely bearing down on us. Oakes spent 4 years interviewing ‘experts’, yes that dubious group of would be influencers, whose work is to head off climatic disaster through the use of the conservation, renewal, restoration and expansion of Earth’s reduced and still declining forest base, the natural systems and cycles that have supported life’s development, what role they could play in forestalling what appears to be on our way and even ameliorating the damage already done. What she tells here is the story of an evolving approach to a ‘solution’, one that has been rife with misunderstanding, conflict, misinformation campaigns, innovation and setbacks, a process that is not just redefining the problem and its potential solution, but the processes and ‘mechanics’ of how we might do this. Trees, once presented as a silver bullet, in a simple replacement program, are not and cannot staunch the Carbon ‘bleeding’. They do, however, still remain an important component of a larger program. Continue reading →

A Consideration of Uncertainty and Probability After Reading Taleb and Labatut

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Probability and uncertainty pervade in this world…not the chance and randomness of the gambling and gaming worlds, but the unfettered randomness of life. In gaming there are fixed/limited odds of an occurrence…in life, not so much. In the world of the geneticist, patterns prevail, but certainties of structure, function and character, don’t. For the theoretical quantum physicist, uncertainty dominates all things. They speak in terms of possibilities and probabilities. Literally nothing is fixed or truly solid, not the air you breathe, your very body, nor the ground on which you stand. Fixity, certainty, is illusory, only apparent as a function of scale, of perspective, of knowledge. As humans, with our limited lifespans, we crave it, behave as if it were so and, with regards to our future, seek to predict it or even determine it. But there is so much beyond our control. Beyond our knowledge. Continue reading →

Toward the Formation of The Central Oregon Tree Explorers

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Paleontoiogists say that we first evolved as a species on the African savanna, that mixed landscape of grassland and scattered trees. Some argue that we were first a tree associated species. Be that as it may, most people have an affinity for trees today. We have our favorites. We plant them for food, as a source of material to meet various needs, for shade, for that inexplicable feeling we have when amongst them, in support of the life that came before, those dynamic communities, their complexity and the vitality, that define these places we now occupy, for their beauty. In Central Oregon with our arid to semi-arid climates, those with annual precipitation as high as 15”-20”, xeric referring to our dry summer growing season, our native trees serve as an indicator of the possible. Our local landscapes have curvilinear boundaries, that delineate areas with like moisture regimes. These go a long way in determining the native landscape (But not all of the way!).
14” of precipitation locally is roughly the bottom limit for Ponderosa Pine. You can see this as you observe grouping and the massing of tree species, forming a line from south of Bend, west and north to Sisters, then along Green Ridge and north to the Columbia. There is an in-between landscape, an ecotone, where the Ponderosa intermingle with the Western Juniper, which dominate easterly, until the average drops below what even that reduced amount can support. The ecotone roughly bisects Bend. Continue reading →

James Rebanks’ “Pastoral Song” and its Message to Us For Change

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A friend suggested I read James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey”, more than a year ago….It went on to my list, with 150 other titles. Inclusion doesn’t put it into some methodically followed cue. Some titles, my interest shifting, fall off the list, others jump to the front, other times, simple availability at the library, brings one my way. I always have two or three in process. I’m dogged and rarely give up on a book once begun so I’m reluctant to read a book based only on someone’s recommendation. With this one finishing wasn’t in question.

This book is a great companion to, “Wilding:
The Return of Nature to A British Farm
by Isabella Tree, which I read in February. Both discuss the problem of survival for small farmers in an economic world that favors efficiency, minimizing costs, externalizing that not understood or valued, in order to maximize profits. In both cases the authors come to reject the path laid out for them and choose another that prioritizes the health and welfare of the farmer, the land, in its broadest sense including the overlooked and essential lives of the countless wild things that comprise it. Continue reading →

On the Creation of an Urban Tree Canopy Management Plan for Redmond, Oregon

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Trees can be a defining element of a community as a ‘success’ story, a failure or somewhere in-between. A community’s trees are of it, not some separate amenity provided by the City. Ideally, just as the canopy is part of a community, its care should be a part of the shared responsibility of the community, with the City providing the services the community cannot, in addition to their role of coordinating the care so that the tree canopy can provide the highest level of service while meeting aesthetic needs. The City is ideally situated to perform this role. Neither ‘group’, the community or the City can do this on their own. Training, education, outreach, project implementation (planting, tree care) are a joint responsibility. Leaving this as a City responsibility alone cannot result in the best product. Communication and partnerships should define the relationship and effort.

Picking numerical targets for increasing overall tree canopy misses the mark. We don’t just need numbers, we need site and species appropriate trees in order to grow out a healthy urban canopy that is neither water intensive, given our climate and declining aquifer, nor one that increases overall wildfire risk; one that helps us, a portion of the more powerful human residents, bridge the gap between the contrived landscape in which we spend most of our lives, and the wild, evolving landscape outside our communities, that operates in ways that balance all the competing and supportive needs, of all of the species that comprise it. Our ‘developed’ communities, heavily prioritize a narrow fraction of the lives within them.

Tree selections should be supportive of local wildlife and pollinators in addition to providing the environmental services associated with urban tree canopies…not just those of the decision makers within the human community. Planting the wrong trees to get initial numbers up, as some kind of marker of success, will be relatively short lived at best. Trees are a long term, living and growing investment, that shape the future. However we slice it, they will demand water in larger amounts as they grow over time. So our choices should be thoughtful and considered. At issue is whether the normal growing conditions can adequately support the growth of chosen trees. We know that almost any other tree, beyond our Western Juniper, will require supplemental water. How much though we need to weigh. When tree and climate are a mismatch the result is evidenced locally by the increasing numbers of shade trees around town where owners have turned off the water leading to stressed and dying trees. Success is absolutely dependent upon well chosen trees, their ongoing care and the participation of an informed public.

 

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Political Chaos, Wildfire and Drought: We have a choice, but not a lot of time

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I don’t usually repost what I’ve put on my FB page, but the world just keeps getting crazier politically, so much so that our new reality is being lost in the chaos. Now is not the time to give up. As bleak as things may seem to be becoming…it will be far worse if we don’t do what we can to implement a course correction.

If you want to keep your head in the sand, if you believe in the stagnant and bleak Trumpian promises of a return to a ‘golden’ past, if you truly believe that the MAGA movement contains all of the answers we require…don’t read any further. It will only upset you.

Picture from a Spokane, WA area newspaper of one devastated residential neighborhood.

As I write this the world is literally burning. Round it up and there are 2 million acres in Oregon alone either already burned or in the process of doing so this summer, with several months still to go in our ‘fire season’. There are multiple fires each over 100,000 acres. In Washington state Spokane continues to burn. In Bordeaux region of France hundreds of thousands of residents were evacuated while others were because of a fire threatening Madrid, Spain. Most of Europe is undergoing it’s fourth major heat wave with thousands having died as a result. As the drought in the American West and western Europe deepens the flow of rivers and the level of reservoirs across the Western US drop to or near record lows, all while demand for water keeps increasing. There is so much excessive heat and fire around the globe right now that it would overwhelm the news cycle to report it…so we only hear about those most local. Some are publicly claiming it to be a result of a singular ‘super-El Nino’, while most climatologists see this as the new normal, with much worse extremes to come, on an over heated planet. Continue reading →

On Johnjoe McFadden’s, “Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe

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As a science nerd I found this a fascinating read. Enlightening. I’ve read a lot of science over the last few years and most of these books focus on what the author knows best, on their particular field, their expertise. There are those scientists, more all of the time and science writers today, who are taking a more wholistic view of their subject, joining together all of the ‘bits’ that they are understanding in ever greater detail, and looking at what is emergent, what is a product of the whole, that isn’t revealed in our focused, atomistic, reductionist, traditional approach favored, in fact almost demanded, by those doing science. The author of this book, McFadden, isn’t one of those reductionists.

While his expertise is in molecular genetics, McFadden does not shy away from those other ‘experts’ attempting to put the pieces together to better understand the whole. He himself has done that in an earlier book that he coauthored with, physicist, Jim Al-Kalili, “Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology” and in another earlier book, “Quantum Evolution”, which is still on my to read list. In this book he looks more widely at the practice of science, how it influences our understanding of the world/universe/life, how resistant science and society have been to change and how our study of the universe and all that it contains, leads us, at least potentially, to a better, more coherent practice. He builds this around the ideas first formulated by the Franciscan Friar, William of Occam, some of whose ideas later became the standard today commonly known as ‘Occam’s Razor’. Continue reading →

Everything is Related, Of and Part of the Whole: Beyond Inheritance, Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health and the Economics of Life

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One of my most current reads and the book that prompted this posting.When Darwin wrote “Origin of the Species” in 1859, he clarified and developed ideas that had been kicking around by those studying natural history and the origin of life, even the possibility of it’s evolution. Lamarck, von Humboldt, Darwin’s own grandfather, Haeckel and others had been speculating, arguing about certain pathways to ‘now’, but without having done that much serious research into life’s intricate relationships. There’s were less bold challenges or conceived theories. Christian orthodoxy shaped the thinking of the time, and opposing it, well that wasn’t done. Creation was pronounced a one time event, that all life forms that existed, had from the beginning by the grace and workings of God. But Darwin, himself a devout Christian, and Alfred Russel Wallace, did do the research, did examine the relationships in depth, adding their insights, the idea of ‘natural selection’, a process that ‘sorts’ through the accumulations of adaptations across a community and populations, ‘selecting’ those that give them a competitive advantage. These, over time would produce progeny at higher rates and would come to dominate a population and species. Since then one question led to another, as is the way of science. Where do these adaptations, these mutations, come from? How frequent are they? Aren’t our chromosomes ‘protected’ from this random degradation and mutation? Are mutations truly random? What drives them? Evolution ‘shows’ that over Earth’s 4.5 billion years, life has evolved towards greater complexity, organisms innovating new structures, variations and with it an increase in the sheer bulk of life, as more species create and fill more niches. Life on life. This can’t then be an entirely random event. Wouldn’t a truly random process result in no net ‘gain’? Wouldn’t it be a 50:50 proposition? One step forward, one step back? What is going on in this mutating?

Roxanne Khamsi, in “Beyond Inheritance”, takes the reader on a guided tour of our rapidly evolving understanding of the mutation of our cells and what it means. Mutation is an essential fact of life, one central to natural selection and the ongoing health of every living individual, and, perhaps our demise. Mutation, however, is commonly understood to be a negative, a degradation of the ideal held in our chromosomes. What’s going on here? Is it necessary or is it bad?
Mutation, it turns out, is pervasive. Every species, every tissue every cell and cell type is subject to it. We’re not talking about what occurs in ‘germ cells’, our egg and sperm,  those all important passers on of our genetic code. There are 30-40 trillion cells, in a mature human body, depending on our size, colonized by a like number of bacterial cells. These cells too, as they are going through a continuous process of metabolizing, internal and external maintenance, repairing and replacing themselves, are much more prone to mutation in this endless process of living. Some human brain cells are thought to survive over the course of our entire lives, but all of the rest, are being replaced at widely varying rates. Those epithelial cells of our intestinal lining are replaced every 3-4 days; we replace around 170,000,000,000, 170 billion red blood cells in our bodies, EVERYDAY. Every single cell replaced in our body, requires that the cell replicate its DNA, the two sets of chromosomes each containing 3.1 billion base pairs, the rungs in the helically shaped ladder of DNA’s structure. 3.1 billion base pairs, each consisting of a specific four ‘letter’ group of Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Guanine (G), and Cytosine (C), a 4 digit quarternary code….Perfect replication of each cell, billions and trillions of times over our lives…‘mistakes’, mutations happen. Organisms, cells, are not machines. We have this idea that machines can perfectly produce products endlessly, but that is wrong. Our continuous ‘cloning’ of our cells is far more precise a process. As the bumper sticker once so popular used to say, Shit happens…and the numbers within a complex, multi-celled animal such as ourselves, are astronomical. Mutations happen. We get stressed, sick, exposed to toxic substances, free radicals, physical trauma, various types of radiation, we age, become sedentary, our systems slow, we slow…as the necessary processes of life go on, within bodies and cells. Most must replicate themselves perfectly over our lives. Nevertheless, given the numbers, mutations accumulate. Some of these enable our continued ‘good’ health, some are benign, while others become ‘negative’ change agents, altering the operation and conditions within us, in what can be very harmful ways. Continue reading →

Dry Canyon Drought May 26: What’s Happening and What’s Our Role

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Taken May 17. Spare, limited growth, looking more like July than May. Dominated by the Gray, Ericameria nauseous and Green Rabbitbrushes, Chrysothamnos viscidiflorus..

We all know its been a drier and warmer than average Spring. In town people are often exclaiming about how wonderful its been, but in the Canyon the combination of dryness and unseasonable warmth are showing, if you know how and where to look. Dry Canyon has already taken on that ‘sere’ look, the soil and plants drying prematurely, annuals, the survivors that they are, seemingly knowingly rushing through their life cycles flowering at an earlier and shorter stage. The difference this year is subtle or maybe even unnoticed by many visitors. Whether you see it or not depends upon how many of the plants you know, where they should be and their ‘phenology’…what? Their growth schedule. Every plant species operates on its own internal ‘calendar’ when their seeds germinate, when those perennial growers ‘wake up’ and initiate spring growth, how they progress through the season, when they form their flower buds (and yes, grasses do flower, they just do so with flowers we don’t recognize, without petals, having other structures0, when their ‘fruits’ and seeds ripen. Continue reading →