Author Archives: gardenriots

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About gardenriots

I'm a horticulturist with 35 years experience primarily in the maintenance and management of public landscapes and gardens, including, renovation, construction, planting design, doing horticultural reviews of capital projects and creating and implementing maintenance plans that recognize the dynamic nature of these places. I have a strong interest in sustainable/ xeric landscapes and view the landscape as an opportunity to create places of beauty in an all too often utilitarian urban world while at the same time using them as a teaching tool for the public and peers. I recently retired from Portland Parks and Recreation where I was responsible for many of our downtown landscapes for 16 years. I have a degree in ornamental horticulture and a life long interest in science, beginning when I was ten or eleven with astronomy. I became fascinated by physics and the paradoxes and conundrums theory left us with in the '60's. I moved on from this to an avid interest in nature, biology and the living world around me in Central Oregon. I did not find a mentor so instead spent many hours by myself exploring and wondering and became largely self-taught, a pattern that has continued through my adulthood. Some of my postings are a direct result of my curiosity and are a result of my learning style, submersing myself in a topic that interests me, generally related to a plant I have grown and then building a fuller understanding of what is going on. Topics as diverse as general evolution to quantum biology and learning the biogeography of regions from which my plants come are continuously fascinating to me. These interests can become consuming 'rabbit holes' for me taking me places my wife does not understand. The world to me is a beautiful, fascinating place filled with puzzles to be understood and thereby more fully appreciated.

On Rediscovering the World We’ve Been Ignoring: An Introduction to the Life Sciences and Our Need For It

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Science is the study of life and the world around us, an exploration of the reality of the universe conducted from different ‘directions’ with the intent of understanding its endless aspects. Today, however, science in seeking to ‘peel back its layers, in attempting to clarify our place in it and improve the conditions within which we live along with our relationship with it, and each other, many have dismissed the effort and our effort to continue ‘doing’ science has become contentious. Knowing and its pursuit, has become a kind of ‘blasphemy’. Science has become politicized along with so much else. Many completely dismiss it as a wasteful effort, an attempt by elites to purposely complicate our lives with distractive and destructive nonsense, the value of expertise dismissed. For them life seems simple and obvious. Science, many claim, is an effort by ‘elites’ to obfuscate and to remove decision making ever further from the ‘people’…in doing this we are replacing curiosity and understanding with a willful ignorance, generalized fear and a ‘trust’ in those who simply, and loudly, claim to hold the answers, who demean all others and promise to return us to some ‘golden age’ fantasy of the past. They ‘reduce’ language, surrender clarity, replacing it with volume and repetition, shrink both what is acceptable for discussion and the lexicon with which we do so, rendering communications more open to confusion and misinterpretation, to manipulation. Language and speech, limited, regulated. Science can’t afford this. (Nor can any vital society.) Doubt and insecurity will overwhelm us, until we reclaim our right to knowledge. Reason, science and critical thinking, offer us a way out, a way to reclaim our agency, without destroying the world. Continue reading →

“Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death”, a Review and Thoughts on this Life

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I begin this post in my usual way of attempting to incorporate the science presented in Lane’s book into my own understanding of life. That’s what I do through the first portions of this piece. Then I stray….discussing how I understand the process of homeostasis and what I see as the extension of this, relationship as integral to complexity itself, developing from necessary sensitivity, the ‘awareness’, necessary for internal communication,  signaling, responsiveness and, ultimately, the coordination of internal functioning and cognition, sentience and ,ultimately, intelligence. It is a process of accretion, with increasing complexity. The links between related ‘things’ are then not just physical, they are energetically connected. I’ll leave this now for later.

I’ve just finished reading evolutionary biochemist, Nick Lane’s latest book, “Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death”.  It is not light reading. There are diagrams of chemical reactions, often with descriptions that urge the reader to not get overly hung up on them, the terms and steps. They are not simple processes. One transformation following another, necessarily, in precise order, until removed for other processes, other needs, the remainder augmented by what is required to continue on. Uninterrupted. Billions of times per second. He writes about the quantum hopping occurring in reactions instantaneously. Shared electrons. The flow of protons in the continuous ‘flux’ of life. The processes changing ‘directions’, spinning off secondary products, closing and reopening paths as the cell and organism works to maintain homeostasis, interpreting the seeming chaos of activity into the sustenance of life. It is a ‘story’ of constant metabolic change, patterned and ‘free’, the work of homeostasis that takes place within every organism. There is a lot here I write of not in the book, but which I’ve picked up in my other reading. And, again, I’ll remind you that as an intuiter, I combine ideas, works from disparate sciences and follow my own paths. This is another part of my journey to understanding this world.

His other books have been more accessible, for this reader anyway, but to move ahead in one’s understanding of life’s complexity, one has to have an understanding of the concepts and big ideas involved. Life isn’t magic. Its study can be simultaneously intimidating and fascinating as well as a wondrous process when look closely. I’ll be rereading this one to pick up more bits later. Continue reading →

On Our Western Juniper Survey in Redmond’s Dry Canyon

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This is an explanation of the importance of the survey work being done by the Friends of North Dry Canyon Natural Area, FNDCNA, and it’s role in the creation of a broader management plan, and a fire management plan, that addresses both community safety needs, as well as those of the Western Juniper and Sagebrush steppe plant communities in Dry Canyon. This is a 160 acre portion of the Canyon Park that stretches 3.7 miles, north to south, through the City, a remnant of one of the canyons formed by one of the previous courses of the paleo-Deschutes River, (There were at least two, one some distance east of Redmond’s location, joining with the Crooked River at present day Smith Rock State Park. The current Deschutes River flows 4 miles to the west of this location through a canyon carved in its earlier stages by Tumalo Creek.) Continue reading →

On Biology, Ecology, Evolution: Health as a Product of an Engaged Life Aided by Science

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Biology, the ‘life sciences’, botany, evolution, cell biology, ecology, health and disease, plant communities, our relationship as humans with each other, geology and the life around us, are all topics that interest me. My most recent reading choices have focused on embryology and an organism’s capacity to maintain homeostasis, what is meant by ‘health’. Earlier I focused on the big question of ‘What is life?’ I’m an integrator, an intuitor, an assembler of conceptual puzzles. For me understanding is the goal and that usually involves understanding the ‘pieces’ of the puzzle and fitting them together into coherent wholes. That’s what I do when I select books and read. While my fiction choices are relatively wide and varied, when it comes to this question, I am far more focused, purposeful. I am not overly concerned with being correct in terms of conventional thought or even regarding that which is accepted as being scientifically correct. I’m looking for what makes ‘sense’. I ‘test’ what I read.

Science is conservative and rightly so. It works to define a foundation from which we may build on. Many, if not all scientific advances, came at the expense and pain of researchers who reach beyond the established to address the problems that accepted theory has revealed as the process advances. Egos and careers can get crushed. Arguably, every significant advance in science began as a controversial idea. Over time, with repeated experimentation, advances in technologies that enable scientists to address questions not previously possible, new insights and ways to ask the ‘question’, the new gains support, or alternatively, is revealed to be ‘wrong’. In this process other questions arise, that move us toward a more complete ‘truth’, a truth that enlightening and revealing, can never be the ultimate answer. What preceded it was not necessarily ‘wrong’, but more likely incomplete, unable to fully explain the world as our understanding of it itself changes. Science becomes a process of understanding at an ever finer scale. What once served, still does, but in a coarser grained way. Occasionally, it demands a radical rethink of our basic understanding of reality. Continue reading →

The Comfort Crisis, Thoughts on one of those books that just resonated

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I have always been physical. There’s a picture of me and my brother, I must have been four or five, sitting on a pile of boulders, on a hilltop. We had raced, which was common for us, to be the first to the top. I won. I’m grinning and my knee is bloody. It didn’t matter. 

I remember another time playing football in the yard with the older, bigger, kids, being excited after tackling one of them, no pads, no helmet, with my well earned bloody nose. No tears. I wasn’t masochistic, it was a sense of physical accomplishment, of doing something, beyond myself. Such events, not generally ending in blood, but having required physical effort, the outcome unassured, became habitual, even necessary…Sometimes I did get hurt, never catastrophically, although, in retrospect, there was some degree of luck or ‘grace’ in my efforts not having ended with more permanent physical consequences. It was a regular testing of myself. These were important learning experiences, a learning of my limits, the kind of lessons that stay with you. Continue reading →

Everything is Tuberculosis: a Disease as an Object Lesson On How to Better Live Our Lives

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John Green’s, ‘Everything is Tuberculosis’ is a great piece of writing. It is also an excellent, expansive and accessible introduction to the world of tuberculosis. By number, it’s the world’s most deadly disease, but one that is often overlooked by those of us in the wealthier, western countries, where it is largely controlled. This is a history of the human experience and the way that we have gone about treating it, or not. Tuberculosis (TB), is a disease that was an undeniable fact of life around the world for the majority of ‘modern’ human existence, before germ theory and our ability to develop and implement effective treatments. There was literally no place in the world ‘untouched’ by it. It killed indiscriminately. Author Green, mostly known for his young adult fiction, tackling problems of teen angst, love, loss and grief, here goes beyond this, asking the question, that since TB is treatable and curable today, generally even those forms that have developed resistance to several of the drugs used to control it, why is it still killing 1.25 MILLION people around the world every year? The answer isn’t difficult to find, but it reveals an ugly fact of modern life. The disease still kills to the degree that it does today because of prejudice, poverty, underfunded health care systems, a misguided reliance on cost ‘effectiveness’ when deciding who is ‘worth’ treating and a pharmaceutical industry far more interested in protecting and increasing its profits than it is in working to bring about a healthier world. Continue reading →

I Contain Multitudes: An Excellent Starting Point for the Beginner to Understand this Life

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Ed Yong’s, “I Contain Multitudes” takes a different angle into the biology of organisms, looking not so much at the functioning of the individual as it does those countless single celled organisms, protists and tiny ‘critters’ that live within and upon us, bacteria, fungi, nematodes, viruses, dust mites etc. There are bacteria living within larger, multi-celled organisms with viruses living inside these….And these are not unusual relationships. Such relationships dominate all of life. Their exception is the rare event. Together, in their multiplicity, these constitute living communities, living in the very specific ‘biomes’, found on larger, seemingly independent organisms. Numbering in the thousands, millions, billions, even trillions, these tiny residents live in dynamic symbiotic, mutualistic, parasitic and antagonistic relationships with their hosts, often filling more than one role, depending on the host, the conditions and constitution of the biotic community. Whew! Yong’s book introduction, of the reader to this world, should lay to rest the idea that ‘we’ are truly ‘individuals’. The countless microbes that occupy and ‘invade’ us, have previously been considered unnecessary or consistently compromise our health, sources of disease.…The idea that we can ‘sterilize’ our way to better health denies the necessity of these organisms, or at least most of them, in the health of individuals.

No, he presents a variety of cases which illustrate the absolute dependence of an individual on these microbes, bacteria that breakdown our otherwise indigestible foods into forms that we can then absorb and utilize. Others that may live on our skin, defending us from attack, by providing a defense against other microbes that could otherwise infect us. Their are microbes that infect other microbes (see Martinez Arias’ book, “The Good Virus”), tiny ‘organisms’ that infect that disease’s vector, killing it before we become infected or blocking the disease causing microbe from infecting the vector, keeping it free from the organism which can cause disease in us. Continue reading →

The Good Virus, A Review and Thoughts About the Necessity of an Informed Public

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Every book tells a story, even the driest academic tome…or rather, utilizes the form of a story. Humans communicate through story. It’s how we give some communicable ‘form’ to our thoughts which we can share. Without it everything is disconnected reportage of facts, personal impressions, emotions. Raw data. Zeros and ones. incomprehensible. To communicate through story requires that we share enough elements of the story, its language, form and ideas, with our ‘listener’, that they can understand what we are saying/writing. If it is too alien, communication does not happen. The listener/reader, hears the words, but the meaning eludes them. Meaning and experience are not shared. Without these, connection, communication, fails. The more esoteric the topic, the more important it is that both ‘parties’ share a common language, that  each is ‘educated’ to some degree, about the world the other is attempting to communicate. As science and technology become ever more specialized and schools and social institutions become more isolated from their larger communities, communication fails more often than not. Especially when the ‘other’ is viewed in a negative light, as untrustworthy. Communication then requires a leap of faith, because as our understanding of the world becomes deeper and more complex, we cannot all become expert in all things. There is just too much to learn. This is when effort, trust and faith, become essential. We must share a commonality, a trust in the other. As shared knowledge, and ‘ways of knowing’ decline, assumptions then dominate. Intentions then become suspect and the very possibility of community and communication evaporate. What we ‘see’, is what ‘we’ see, not what someone else does. Whether or not that is shared is the crux of the communication problem.  Continue reading →

Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell is Rewriting the Story of Life, Alfonso Martinez Arias, a Review

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The 20th century brought to the fore the supremacy of genetics, the time in which the secret of life was about to be explained by the DNA held within the double helix of our chromosomes. With our mapping of the human genome, at the last century’s close, after only a short time of examination and study, the secrets of life would begin to be revealed and, with them, the keys to defeat disease and, through our manipulations of these genes, our ability to design improvements that would make us resistant, or even immune, to many of our maladies. Available to us as well would be the ability to select desirable qualities in our progeny. It might even make possible the knowledge and technologies to stop, or even reverse, aging. Genes held the key within their previously unknowable ‘blueprint’ guiding the development of each individual, of every species. Industries have sprung up around this. Billions, even trillions of dollars, stand to be made as we approached our coming futures. But, as is so often the case with science, advances in knowledge bring with it entirely new questions, and what once promised to be explicable, becomes shrouded in an unexpected haze of complexity. Continue reading →

Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir

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Feeding Ghosts is a unique creation, a graphic memoir, a memoir that utilizes the format of the graphic novel, one that many associate with Marvel super heroes, but often tackle substantive social issues. In this author, illustrator, Tessa Hulls, tells the story of her family’s experience with trauma and how its echoes are passed on to the children; the trauma of the parent, the damage it has done, and their response to it; their defense against the pain, the ‘story’ they tell themselves of their personal experiences, that truncates their life and their ability to parent and model healthy behavior. These limitations then go to shaping their children’s world as it ‘collides’ with the child’s innate capabilities and vulnerability, like a wave breaking on a shoreline shaping the child’s life and their ability to respond to the opportunities and traumas that arise they will be confronted with. When the parent is so limited, and all of us are, this shapes the beginning point of their children. And the ‘original’ trauma is passed on, in altered form, to the children, from which they form their own stilted baseline for their lives. Continue reading →