Category Archives: Shared Biology

Is a River Alive? On the Rights of Nature, an Adventure Story and a Shifting of the Dominant Paradigm

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Being a horticulturist, a student of ecology, evolution and all of the usual life science topics, my reading list is long with books I find and others recommended to me by friends. This most recent is one of the latter, “Is a River Alive?”, by British writer Robert MacFarlane. I hadn’t read any of his other books and my friend John thought I’d enjoy it…I did. I listened to it and, as it was read by MacFarlane himself, he added a bit of rhythm and emotion in his reading that would not have been there were I reading it in book form. This is particularly significant as you read the more emotionally driven sections, which, in this format, the ‘Canadian’ section, turns out to be a rollicking, adrenaline laced adventure story. 

While focusing on rivers, this is a book about the rights of nature, legal and otherwise. Why, does the growing community of such thinkers and activists, seem to think nature, in all of its forms, from fungi to mountains, rivers to oceans, the grandest to the most minuscule living species, deserve rights comparable to we humans? What makes them so special? MacFarlane and his compatriots, would turn that around, instead asking what makes we humans so special as to deserve that which we deny literally all others? Their only value, in how they serve us….The rights of nature proponents do not argue simply for their own favorite species or place, many of those so advocating, and protesting, come from thousands of years old indigenous traditions, peoples who have always recognized the links between all living things and those places and forces which permit and support them. And this isn’t because they are simple, backwards, savages or naive. Such thinking is not born out of the heads of green patriots, earth firsters and narrowly focused academics. This is a movement based on memory, connection, of those living in relationship with, in which respect for all things comes first, a world in which life is a gift, to be treasured…all lives, all species, all places, it is a remembering that no one individual, species or place is so special that any and all others may be sacrificed for its needs, its demands, its hungers. Continue reading →

The Emperor of all Maladies: Mukherjee’s look into Our Relationship with Cancer

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Siddartha Mukherjee’s first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”, is the third of his I’ve read. My interest earlier, and still, remains in understanding the biology of the organism, so I read his books on genetics and the cell first, trying to improve my understanding of the complex actions and structures of life before attempting to understand a disease that ravages and destroys so many lives. His effort to write this book led to Mukherjee receiving the Pulitzer Prize. It is a gargantuan endeavor, artfully constructed. It contains several stories in an overlapping, although, natural style beginning with man’s earliest recorded conception of the disease(s). It becomes clearer and clearer as you read through it that cancer is more a ‘family’ of diseases, linked by their pattens and effects as they progress within the cell and from there, into the collective structures of our body, than it is a singular disease. But that gets way ahead.

Cancer is not a ‘new’. The ancient Greeks wrote of it and there are scattered records of it much earlier from other civilizations. Galen, wrote of it almost 2,000 years ago, attributing it to an imbalance in ‘black bile’, one of the four humors, which when out of balance, he claimed, lead to various diseases (This was the justification for the practice of ‘bleeding’ a patient that continued on into 18th and early 19th centuries, not that long ago). Such ‘humors’ were thought for centuries to be at the root of many diseases and infections across Europe until scientists, through the use of microscopes, began to understand that the cell was the basic building block of all life, and that there was a microbial world beneath and within the world readily observable to us. Galen’s views continued to hold sway until anatomists, through their careful dissections, realized that ‘black bile’ was a fabrication, an attempted explanation for something unseen at work within the body. Cancer then, along with our understanding of the body and disease, began its slow, lurching, advancement through the practice of science. What actually is cancer? Continue reading →