Interplace

Hello Interactors,

Most people’s awareness of the economy starts with three letters: GDP. It seems every news report about the health of any nation starts with their GDP. And there is only one direction it can go for anyone to be satisfied and that is up. Even though we all know that as those numbers go up the health of our environment goes down. How did we get here?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BEN AND ARIES

In 1817, German poet, playwright, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, 

“Every school of thought is like a man who has talked to himself for a hundred years and is delighted with his own mind, however stupid it may be.” 

Goethe himself fell victim to this, but it’s unlikely he considered his ideas stupid. No member of any school of dogma does. He considered himself a cut above the rest; a genius in fact. At least as defined by his more famous German peer, philosopher Immanuel Kant.  

Goethe was a naturalist and believed his genius was his ability to translate his knowledge of the natural world into manmade civic matters – like economics. He was equally adept at using words like “budget, balance, economy, law and order” in describing the workings of the German government as he was describing his gardens. Or mines. Goethe was put in charge of managing area parks, mines, and forests which gave him ample opportunities to marry elements of botany and geology with economics. 

He was following in the footsteps of the French economic school of thought from the mid-1700s, The Physiocrats. They too believed in the order of natural law. They thought “the only choice humans had was either to structure their polity, economy and society in conformity with the ordre naturel or to go against it.” Talk about being dogmatic. 

There were some big names in this school of thought; including Benjamin Franklin. He sided with the Physiocrats arguing the only real productive contributions to a nation’s economy was naturally – through land ownership and farming. It’s a school of thought that propelled Thomas Jefferson, also a land loving naturalist, to push for land grabs across the country for the purpose of farming and land taxation. It’s also what separated the industrial mercantilists of the America’s North and the agrarian agriculturalists of the South which eventually led to a civil war.  

Colonialization, at its heart, was about land acquisition for agriculture, industry, transportation, international trade, and real estate. It was also about ethnic, racial, and gendered economies, and eventually the development of urban form. It set out to dominate the interaction of people and place. It was also the emergence of the field of economic geography.  

But long before the Enlightenment and colonization, in 4th century BC, the State of Qin in western China developed timber maps that included locations and distance measures to the sites. These are some of the oldest economic maps in the world. And then along came the Greek philosopher Strabo. He published a book called Geographica just before his death in 24 AD. It was found and reprinted in Latin in 1469 and describes the interactions of people and places from around the various parts of the world Strabo visited, including their economies. 

This reprinted work proved more influential to the burgeoning Enlightenment thinkers of 15th century, than Strabo’s first century contemporaries. Either way, economic geography took hold in Europe throughout the Enlightenment and into the 19th century as Goethe was writing erotic plays, listening to Beethoven live, and dabbling in economics between trips to the garden. 

NEW-MATH MEETS HU-MAN

Strabo’s work would have been picked up by another German, Alfred Weber – the brother to one of the founders of modern-day sociology, Max Weber, who believed capitalism came to exist through the protestant work ethic. Max ended up winning the ‘who will be most famous’ yearbook prize, but Alfred likely would have been more popular at the time.  

He made a name for himself as an economist developing some of the first theories on industrial location in 1929. He wanted to know why and how industries, cities, and farms determine where to locate. So, he developed analytical and interpretive methods to do so.  

Citing agglomerations, a collection of contiguous cities, industries, and labor pools, Weber was likely influenced by one of the most prominent British economists of the time, Alfred Marshall. He authored the 1890 book, Principles in Economics, and was the founder of yet another economic school of thought – The Cambridge school of neoclassical economics. We’ll learn more about Alfred later.  

Weber and Marshall were also influential outside of Europe. Weber’s work made its way to North America by way of a young mathematician named Walter Isard in the 1940s. Isard was a Quaker and thus a conscientious objector during World War II. His civil service was then satisfied as an attendant in a mental hospital.  

He had recently earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago where he was inspired by Weber. He spent his time at the hospital translating Weber’s work from German into English. He went on to teach regional science at MIT, started the first doctoral program in regional science at the University of Pennsylvania, and rounded out his career at Cornell in 1979. He died in 2010 as one of the most influential quantitative geographers in the field.   

But while Isard was still a young boy, another strand in economic geography had already been started in America; but from a humanist standpoint. Geographer and geologist, Wallace Atwood, also a University of Chicago graduate, had published a book in 1920 called Teaching the New Geography. It was targeted at elementary school teachers and encouraged a more progressive method of teaching geography to young people that avoided rote memorization of place names.  

Page one states that Atwood believes,  

“the study of geography in the elementary-school stage should do more than…provide geographical facts – it should give them a real understanding of…a definite power of interpreting their effect on human life.”  

He goes on to state,  

“Fortunately, we have now learned to teach the facts of place, political, physical, economic, and commercial geography in association with the more vital, more interesting, and more thought-provoking topics of human geography. In other words, we have come at last to focus the study on people, not things.” 

Atwood became the founding editor of the journal of Economic Geography out of Clark University in 1925 and eventually became the school’s president. The journal continues today to “redefine and reinvigorate the intersection between economics and geography” and is the discipline’s leading academic journal. 

HEAD AND TAILS

These two schools of thought and approach, technical and naturalist, were both indicators and influencers of the larger field of economics and politics. But they were also two sides of the same coin. On one side, there was a top-down, mathematical interpretation and explanation for what was occurring spatially as goods and people moved through space and time. This approach to economics emerged out of the work of Weber, Isard, and others in Europe and North America who are fondly referred to as the ‘space cadets’. There work complemented another emerging field in economics called econometrics – the application of statistics to economic relationships.  

On the other side of the coin were the earthy-crunchy, naturalists. The roots of the French Physiocrats grew into Germany creating sprouts of ideas tended to by people like Goethe. Seeds then spread to America and were planted by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Their land rights and agricultural economic beliefs blossomed into a gridded patchwork of townships, farms, cities, roads, and waterways that stretched across a continent.   

Colonial settlers toiled and tilled yielding fruits of labor in the form of property taxes and crop revenue. The funds of which built a military that protected industrialists seeking access to sacred Indigenous land to lay tracks for trains and mountains for mines.  

Cities grew across the oceans connecting the northern hemisphere with diverse populations of people cross-fertilizing ideas, yielding new seeds of inventions and innovation, that continued to spread around the world through interconnected vines of nutrient rich endeavors. All of which were extracting natural resources and exploiting human labor at rates never seen in the history of the world.  

By the 1900s the industrial age had lined the pockets of the economic elite, coal fired steam stoked success, but also paired pollutants to particles that penetrated the lungs of those less lucky. Trees were toppled, canyons collapsed, and sand stripped of their sediment. It was enough to prompt the Republican naturalist President Teddy Roosevelt to regulate railroads and conserve natural resources; an attempt to give Americans and the environment a “square deal”.   

His actions encouraged people like Wallace Atwood to pause and grow concerned. Atwood hoped to inspire a generation by asking children of the 1920s to be thoughtful about the power people have over interactions between physical geography, politics, place, and the effect they have on human life. Imagine where we’d be today if Atwood’s books and words actually took hold. I don’t know about you, but my primary geography education was still pretty much about memorizing Anglo-American names of cities and states around the world.  

This coin of economics offers mathematical quantitative spatial and econometric measures that include indicators of success for world-wide economies, on one side, and the other a naturalist-inspired human-environmental articulation of the potential positive and deleterious effects on physical geography and life. The measures of one side of the coin are even inspired by words of the other, like ‘health’ and ‘growth’.  

But the two sides suffer from a perverse cycle of codependency that lingers to this day. For example, we live in a society that measures, rewards, and celebrates how increased sales of automobiles contributes to the ‘growth’ of an economy knowing full well their presence is destroying the ‘health’ of the environment and its inhabitants.  

As gas prices plummet, economies grow – and so does the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Higher wages mean more consumerism and economies grow; and so does the size of toxic landfills and islands of plastic in the ocean. More cars on the road yield more accidents and more injuries and deaths. But they also yield economic growth in the insurance, auto, and healthcare industries as insurance, repair, and medical bills pile high. Economic indicators that rise, also measure our demise. We need no better proof that humans do not act logically nor rationally. 

THE AIMS AND PAINS OF KEYNES

But that would have been a tough argument to make in the late 19th and early 20th century. Most mainstream economists today would still argue. Arguments that stem from the principles of the preeminent 20th century British economist, John Maynard Keynes.  

Remember Alfred Marshall, the father of the Cambridge school of neoclassical economics? Keynes was a family friend and protégé of Marshall’s and expanded on his ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. One of which was the notion that people’s subjectivity in decision making plays a small role.  

In his 1921 Treatise on Probability Keynes wrote that when we are faced with a decision, we weigh the facts based on the knowledge we have. The decision that follows is “fixed objectively, and is independent of our opinion.” A probable choice “is not probable” just because we think it is. Some mythical natural law has determined it. 

I don’t know about you, but despite the knowledge I possess about the negative effects of sugar, it’s probable that I’ll have dessert because in the opinion of my sugar craving brain, I deserve it. And while I know the ocean is full of plastic, it is probable that I will continue to buy plastic products because, in my opinion, I think I want that product. But who am I to judge an Eton grad and one of the most influential people in the history of economics? He must be right. Right? In my opinion, not really. 

Keynes’ biggest contribution to economics, and the world we live in today, came in his 1936 book, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Here he outlined how an economy could be a nationwide entity bounded by certain governmental policies. These policies act as levers, to use a industrial metaphor, that control prices, interest rates, and even consumer demand – consumers who are governed by natural laws of objective logic uniformly identical to any other human. 

By positioning humans as yet another cog in a machine, economists could more easily substitute human behavior into their mathematical models. While some, like Cambridge Philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, disagreed with Keynes, and developed alternative mathematics to demonstrate it, Keynes beliefs survived. In large part because should each individual act on their own accord, subjectively, it would be seemingly impossible to mathematically model the outcome. And where’s the fun in that? 

Economists across Europe and North America agreed. By the end of World War II, Keynesian economics dominated economic scholarship and practice. It’s the model we have today and can be characterized in these four economic processes: 

* Economies are external to our lives. One of the most efficient ways to trick people into believing this fallacy is to put the word ‘the’ in front of Economy. The mechanical metaphors also help to position economic processes as something external to our lives; just like machines. 

* Economies operate under their own internal logical and objective rules. Entire cultures and societies may come and go, but economies are unaffected. Political parties come and go, but economies remain omnipresent. Diverse societies and religions may rise and fall throughout space and time, but economies remain constant and monotheistic. 

* Economies operate on a national scale. The mathematical techniques and apparatus surrounding the analysis and reporting of economies represent the success or failure of an entire nation. It was as early as the 1940s that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) became the primary indicator of a nation’s economic health. These measures allowed for inter-national comparisons and worldwide economic systems like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. 

* Economies must be operated and managed through governmental intervention. This is the key to perpetual economic growth. Governments not only can make it possible but it is their duty to do so. Politicians latched on to this idea quickly, which is why Republicans and corporations stacked collegiate economic departments with Keynesian thinkers and funded their research.  

It’s been 100 years since Keynes published his economic treatise. That’s ten decades of Keynesian economists convincing each other their school of thought is right by pointing to perpetually climbing GDP numbers while ignoring the climbing curve of carbon dioxide concentration. The words of Goethe still ring true: 

“Every school of thought is like a man who has talked to himself for a hundred years and is delighted with his own mind, however stupid it may be.” 

It’s not hard to look around to see the students of this school of economics have failed. Our social foundations have been rocked. Our food, water, health, energy, education, social networks, income, work, housing, gender equality, peace and justice, social equity, and political voice are all suffering. And all that surrounds us too: climate change, ozone depletion, air pollution, biodiversity loss, freshwater withdrawals, chemical and soil pollution, and ocean acidification are pushed to their limits. 

But here’s what gives me hope. If it took just 80 years to dig this hole we’re in, I’m confident we can find our way out in less time than that. I’ve painted a narrow and bleak picture of mainstream economics, but know there are many economists around the world with alternative theories and practices. I’ll be exploring some in future posts. 

But the Keynesian school is what I want to replace.  So here are some things to embrace.  My school says: economies are embedded in the interactions of people and place.    Economies emerge as people converge in a perpetual swirling of reactions.  Social foundations and friendly relations are what make the economic milieu.  But without clean air and water too, any economy is doomed.  So embrace the patterns as complexities emerge among people and place interactions. 

References:

Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction, 3rd Edition. Neil M. Coe, Philip F. Kelly, Henry W. C. Yeung.

Goethe's Economy of Nature and the Nature of His Economy. Myles W. Jackson. University of Cambridge. 1992.

The History of Economic Thought. Gonçalo L. Fonseca. Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Hello Interactors,

This week kicks off the fall series on economic geography. My introduction to economics started with a room full of giggling girls. Its founding began by exploring a common moral sympathy, but it has become anything but. This evolution has been relatively fast; occurring throughout the lives of a rural postman pioneer and his pioneering punch card punching son.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

STUFF IT

As I walked in the door, the girls awkwardly spun around and grinned with a tinge of embarrassment. And then back to their friends as giggles percolated across the room. I tried to play it cool as the teacher welcomed me and led me to a special desk against the wall. She sat down next to me, maybe a little too eager, and helped me to get started.

It was 1984 and Claus Oldenburg had recently finished a civic sculpture, Crusoe Umbrella, for what was then called Nollan plaza in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. My friend’s dad, Charles “Chick” Herbert, designed the concrete plaza featuring a shallow pool across from his angular stark white Civic Center. The sculpture is an homage to the umbrella Robinson Crusoe built from sticks and plants. Oldenburg thought the plaza looked like an oasis amidst the high-rise buildings in a state that felt like an island in the middle of a continent that most people only see while flying over on their way to New York or Los Angeles.

The neon red animating Travelers Insurance logo atop one of the buildings also served as an inspiration – an umbrella. The curved handle of the base also reminded Oldenburg of a backhoe sometimes seen on the ubiquitous tractors grooming the fields of Iowa. And the long skinny shaft that connected the umbrella to the handle reminded him of the road through downtown Des Moines where he saw High School kids cruise on Saturday nights as they ‘scooped the loop’. I was one of them.

Come Monday it was back to school. For the senior art project we got to choose our own medium for our entries into the spring art show. I had Claus on the brain. In addition to large public sculptures, Claus was also known for his oversized stuffed everyday objects. The Des Moines Art Center collection had one; a massive three-way plug made out of blue vinyl that lazily drooped from the ceiling partially stuffed with filler. I decided I was going to do a giant soft sculpture of my own for the spring show. I choose to make a wall mounted hand-cranked pencil sharpener – a staple of every classroom in those days and a farewell homage to my final year in the Norwalk School District.

Des Moines was home to more than just insurance companies. It’s still a major center for insurance and financial services. And publishing. If you’ve ever flipped through a magazine in America, it was most likely printed by the Meredith Corporation. Growing up it was also home to the farm equipment manufacturer, Massey Ferguson. Through the 1970s their factory made mostly lawn tractors and snowmobiles, but it was also a center for the company’s legal, financial, and marketing departments. My Dad worked there for twenty five years.

You can’t really make a soft sculpture in most art rooms. Their set up for drawing, painting, printing, and ceramics. So during art period, I’d grab my cheap beige muslin fabric from my art locker and walk down the hall by shop class where guys would point at me and laugh as they tinkered with an old clunker locals would donate to the school. I’d proceed through the black double doors, hang a left down a long empty hallway, pause at the door, peek through the relight, and slowly open the door. I’d walk through a class full of giggling girls, sit down to the sewing machine against the wall, and start sewing. The only dude in my four years to ever to set foot in a high school home economics class.

THE ORIENT EXPRESS

The word economics in English-speaking worlds was born out of home economics. There are still hangers-on, like ‘economy sized’ goods at big-box stores or ‘economy-sized’ rental cars. Economizing in this context means to be miserly or frugal. That was certainly what I grew up learning. Both of my parents came from humble beginnings.

My Mom’s mother is the daughter of German immigrants and her father the son of Irish immigrants. Both farming families had to scrape to get by. My Grandmother survived the Spanish Flu; even after caring for parents who both had it.

My Dad was born into the depression in his mother’s bed in 1933. He was the second youngest of twelve. His dad served in both World Wars and was the town postman; he started out delivering mail by horse.

They both lived in a small town in southern Iowa called, Orient. They were born into an era and area dominated by a small scale farming economy. There wasn’t a lot of need to think beyond the economics of the household. Having a large family meant that many more hands for labor. The area was settled by farmers with homesteaded land offered by the government. Orient was mostly there to support the local farmers.

This small Iowa town was founded in 1882 during the great swell of America’s industrial age. It’s marquee feature and primary reason for existence was a grain elevator in the center of town. It was part of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. Also known simply as the Burlington. This company started as the Aurora Branch Railroad and was created by the Illinois state government in 1848. It grew to dominate tracks through western Illinois, southern Iowa, northern Missouri, across Nebraska, and extended its reach far north and west into Montana.

Eight years later, in 1900, the American federal government had traded, stolen, or bought enough land and offered incentives to corporations like Burlington to run trains coast to coast. Their tracks divided herds of buffalo, countless Indigenous communities, and were built on the backs of mostly by low-wage Chinese immigrant laborers.

In 1882, the year Orient was founded, the U.S. government thanked these people by instituting the Chinese Exclusion Act which banned further Chinese immigration and blocked naturalization. It is what started the so-called Yellow Peril – an anti-Asian sentiment that has resurfaced in recent years in the form of racist hate crime.

MORAL UTILITY

By the late 1800s the Western world had been putting theories of division of labor to practice for over one hundred years. It’s what fueled the Industrial Revolution. It all began the same year the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and the publishing of A Wealth of Nations. This highly influential book was written by a Scottish professor of moral philosophy, Adam Smith.

He was an awkward and absent minded man who is said to have "had a large nose, bulging eyes, a protruding lower lip, a nervous twitch, and a speech impediment." Smith himself agreed he was no looker saying, "I am a beau in nothing but my books."

Despite his speech impediment and awkwardness, he found success lecturing. He began writing and lecturing on economic topics in 1748, but from a moralistic standpoint. He expanded on what he deemed obvious and simple principles of natural liberty. An idea that had been around since the Greeks; and likely the Zoroastrians before that; one of the longest running religions in the world out of Persia that espouses three core principles I think we can all get behind: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.

Natural liberty, or natural law, was a feature in many Enlightenment thinkers of Smith’s era and is ensconced in the U.S. Declaration of Independence – "all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". His lectures also concerned the increasing opulence in England during this period. It led him to write his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 that explored “moral sympathy” or what today we might call empathy – the capacity of an individual to express sympathy for other members of society.

It was after this that he turned toward more explicitly toward economics and the inclusion, exclusion, and overlap of natural law with manmade legal laws that were beginning to be written by Western societies and nations. He theorized it was the legal power of the state to control labor that brought about wealth, dominance, and control and not the accumulation of silver and gold. It led to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. A book who’s name has shortened over time to the Wealth of Nations.  

That book became his most famous and leads many to call Adam Smith the father of the field of Economics. In it he reveals how the division of labor in scaled up industrial enterprises leads to growth and wealth accumulation. By having teams of specialized skilled workers conducting interdependent tasks, industries could scale production more efficiently and profitably – in large part through slave or low-wage labor.

This mechanized view of labor divisions echoed scientific theories and discoveries in biology and physics that would have been swirling around Smith during the Age of Enlightenment. The influence is evident today by looking at the language of economists and business professionals. Money flows through economies; especially when there are waves of prosperity. Economics is a mechanism that uses the gravitational pull of consumers and sellers. Unless, of course, there is friction from far away resources or customers. Markets seek equilibrium. So long as we avoid inflation.

Economics can even be described in farming and biological terms. A market can be fertile. Every day on the radio, tv, and social media you hear about the health and growth of the economy. Goods can be in circulation, products can be reproduced; come Black Friday in November consumers will be triggered by herd instincts. In the end, economies are a function of natural selection. Only the fittest companies and strongest governments will survive.

By the late 1800s scientists were on a roll. They had discovered an underlying uniting principle of physics that also unified the discipline: all matter in the universe is connected by a unifying force – energy. The burgeoning field of economics, eager to model itself off science and math, sought their own unifying principle and settled on an economizing word – utility.

ECON ONE-BY-ONE

Prior to the industrial age, the production of goods required the labor of an individual farmer, merchant, blacksmith, baker, carpenter, or cobbler which was harder, slower, and more expensive to scale when demand became greater than supply. To maximize profits, firms had to maximize the utility of their workers. And they did that by creating specialized divisions of labor.

But that quaint image of a farmer and merchant, could be recognized in Orient even when I visited my Grandparents as a kid in the 70s and 80s. It had a single tiny grocery store, a hardware store, and assorted repair shops. Nearly everyone in town had a garden and the city was surrounded by fields and farms of corn, beans, hogs, and heifers. And running straight down the heart of town was a railroad.

Nestled next to it was a grain elevator five stories high that would get filled with area corn and soybeans waiting for the next train to come to haul it away; a cog in a nationwide industrialized economic machine in the middle of small-town Iowa on an island of a state within a vast continental land mass that stretches from sea to shining sea.

The wealth of this nation, in keeping with Smith’s theory, grew from the federal and state laws that, in cooperation and sometimes collusion with private firms, controlled the price of land and labor to build the nation’s largest industries; including the railroads that ran through Orient, the steel used to make the trains, tracks, and railcars that were fueled by what seemed like endless supplies of coal, oil, and gas. Industries also controlled the seed the farmers bought, the fertilizers and pesticides they spread, and the equipment they used to till, plow, plant, and harvest – like Massey Ferguson.

My Dad was a Computer Audit Analyst at Massey Ferguson. He exceled in math, majored in it, taught for awhile, got married to my Mom, and then landed a job in 1969 writing COBOL programs for a small financial software firm in Des Moines. He soon moved to Massey Ferguson where he wrote more COBOL on punch cards. He’d bring them home for me to play with and draw on as a small boy. I can still see them stacked under the piano bench in my room on Jackson street that looked out to the elementary school across the street.

My Mom and Dad and their Mom and Dad bridged generations of economies. My Grandpa Weed was born in 1889. The Ford Motor company was still a twinkle in Henry Ford’s eye. My Mom and Dad were born in the thirties into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal Era; when Democrats were the party of protecting people over banks and not the party of protecting banks over people. FDR must be rolling in his grave. He famously quipped, "I took economics courses in college for four years, and everything I was taught was wrong."

By the time I was born, my family had entered the ranks of the middle class FDR had imagined. My parents experienced old-fashioned agrarian economies that even Adam Smith would have recognized. They rose with the White educated middle class and settled into the comfortable suburban sprawl of the post World War boom to raise a family. They witnessed the growth of American industries that cranked out planes, trains, automobiles, and rockets. And, yes, Massey Ferguson tractors, snowmobiles, and riding lawnmowers too.

But my Dad also bridged the industrial economy and the knowledge economy by becoming one of the first software professionals in 1969 as part of a newly burgeoning high-tech industry. Within my lifetime, the lives of my parents, and of theirs the formal discipline of Economics was born overseas, grew larger in America, and has metastasized into a global economic instrument void of any of the moral foundations its founding father, Adam Smith, envisioned. Where’s the empathy? Where is the capacity of an individual to express sympathy for other members of society?

Our world economy has come to resemble the soft sculptures of Claus Oldenburg. A parody of mass production and mass culture that has ballooned to comedic scale and is sagging mournfully from the gravitational pull of its own weight.

Maybe what we need is to step away from our classes, march into the void, open a new door, endure the ridicule and laughter, and sit down to sew us a new moral economy that can be stuffed with good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.

Hello Interactors,

This is the last post on the subject of physical geography. Starting next week and through the fall I’ll be digging into economic geography and how the interaction of people and place relates to inequality, instability, and sustainability of local and global economies.

This final post of the season ushers in a windy wet fall by focusing on the forces of wind and water; and our sometimes intimate relationships with nature.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

PUZZLING PILES IN THE PARK

I paddled my kayak two miles across a calm Lake Washington this week to a park where I water baby native plants. I realized I move through fluid water at about the same pace as I walk on solid ground. Kayaking is a lot like swimming that way. But dryer. You’re in the water extending one arm forward, grabbing water with the paddle, pulling it behind you while pushing your other arm forward so it can do the same. I lean sideways slightly on each extension rotating the boat, extending its length, rocking back and forth with each stroke. Just like swimming. But dryer.

I’m not much of a misty spiritual type, but there is a oneness with water that I experience when swimming or kayaking that is hard to explain. I feel it when I sail too. So does the boat. Sailboats hum with vibration when the force of wind on the sail is balanced by the forces acting on the keel underwater. These invisible forces propel the boat forward, but can also slow it down.

Polynesians were some of the best, if not the best, sailors and navigators in the world. To sense the subtle cues of shifts in the current on the vast Pacific waters, the men would put the tiller between their legs and let the most sensitive nerves in their body sense the changes. Their scrotum. Now that’s being one with your boat – and the water.

Most people have lost touch with this kind of intimacy with nature. The closer we get to embracing urban life, the more distant nature recedes. I’m reminded of this every time I beach my kayak at the waterfront park I’m helping to restore. I pull the boat ashore, strap on my work gloves, slip on my branded Green Kirkland hat, and set out to water baby native plants under a canopy of firs and old growth cotton woods. But invariably, in my periphery, I’m distracted by a bleach-white pile of toilet paper clumped just beyond the trail.

People pooping in public parks is as much pernicious as it is puzzling. One day I became curious how widespread in the park this was. Perhaps this stand of trees is just a particularly pleasant place to poop. So I walked the park. Crossing over a footbridge, I spotted two juice boxes tossed to the side of the creek. I walked down the bank and under the bridge to see more wads of white waste.

I collected the juice boxes and tissue and heard a mom on the bridge say to her kids, “Oh look, that nice man is picking up litter!” I had a moment of pride bolt through me, but it was displaced by rage that almost made me want to holler back, “Yeah, so why don’t you and your kids get your butts down here and help!” I didn’t, of course. But I wanted to yell at somebody.

As I walked further up the creek, I could see the bank leading up to the restrooms was spotted with white. The closer I got to the building, the more clumps of toilet paper I found. What compels people to walk into a restroom stall, pull more toilet paper from the roll than a single human needs to wipe their fanny, stride outside and into the woods, and poop. Or pee. I found more evidence of pee-pee than poo-poo. Which tells me it’s those with the internal hardware doing most of the doo-dooing in the dirt.

I suppose you could cry, COVID! And it’s true. I could see where some would be concerned with being in a public restroom for too long. And let’s face it, it’s nicer in the woods than in a public facility. I’d rather be looking at a tree than a stall door with graffiti etched into it; breathing air that surrounds with a nasty stench to it. But park staffers tell me it was happening long before Covid and it’s been getting worse. While doggy doo-doo is their number one park problem, a close second is public plops from people.

The BBC wrote a piece about these dastardly deeds of the terrible turds. They interviewed a forensic psychologist who gets called onto scenes of crimes where someone has dropped some dung. The first thing he asks the police officer is this, “Is it soft or hard?” They think this psychologist is in need of psychiatry. It’s the number one indicator of intent. If it’s soft, the person was anxious, stressed, and realized they either drop trough or poo their pants. So they landed a pile in the middle of the living room and then made off with the TV. If it’s hard, then this person is most likely angry and bitter about the world and this is their way of expressing it.

He says the reasons for these episodes range from anxiety, alcohol, illness, rage, or, as one anger management expert put it, people want to make a statement: “Life is s**t, so stand in it.”

Either way, these psychologists warn us that shaming is the last thing we should do to remedy this rectal ruse. In any form, it’s a sign of anti-social behavior that most likely stems from some kind of trauma in these people’s lives. I’ve stopped picking it up and instead snap a photo with a description of the location. The city is trying to track occurrences so they can be more targeted in their solutions. I’ve also come to muster compassion for the sources of these pearly piles of paper that pop out amidst the brown brush.

WIND AND WATER

This park experience has offered me a whole new angle on the interaction of people and place. Defecating in public I think we’d all agree is a social taboo. Taboo is Polynesian word. It’s formed from the word ta – to mark and pu – an adverb of intensity. It can be spelled tabu or tapu. The Polynesians used this word in many contexts, but one was conservation of natural resources. They would mark reefs, groves, plants, and animals as taboo when they became overfished or overly picked, plucked, or hunted.

Numerous anthropologists noted this elsewhere in the world among Indigenous societies; typically with religious overtones to sacred edicts. The Kayapo people of Brazil have religious sanctions as a way of managing groves of trees. Maya’s Huastic people protected sacred groves as did Moroccans and the Chinese.

China’s ancient practice of feng shui 风水 is alive today. Search for feng shui on Amazon books and you’ll be greeted with over 40,000 books to choose from. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and cultural ecologist, Gene Anderson, spent years researching behavior of poor laborers in Hong Kong. His first encounter with feng shui was in 1965. A hospital was being built on a nearby hill where he was staying. As he interacted with area farmers and laborers, they would remark on how bad it was to build there. The elders would tell him, “This is very bad; the construction has cut the dragon’s pulse.” He studiously noted the comment, but found it an odd thing to say.

Soon after, a typhoon struck. Two feet of rain in two days brought water that turned to mud as it came gushing down the mountain. The newly built hospital foundation was wiped out and homes were buried in mud at the foot of the hill. The next time he saw his farmer friends, they said, “See? This is what happens when you cut the dragon’s pulse.” Geologists would say it was “slope failure” due to “over steepening.”

After ruminating on the catastrophe, Anderson wrote,

“A light went on in my head. The Chinese, pragmatic to the core, had described the phenomenon in terms strange to me; but the phenomenon they described was perfectly real. I reflected that the geologists’ terms “oversteepening” and “slope failure” were not much more empirically verifiable than the dragon. Any Chinese peasant would find them even stranger than I had found that eminent serpent, since I had already learned from reading that ancient Chinese saw dragons in the scaly, ridged contours of mountain ranges.”

Anderson never thought of facts the same way again. Feng shui guides people to not put houses on a slope or rise. A year later, Anderson observed the effects of another natural disaster – the great floods of 1966. He noticed the only houses to survive, were those that obeyed the principles of feng shui.

While he had ample empirical evidence that feng shui works, he could never quite square with the mystical connotations. He had trouble relating to “dragons in the hills”, “tigers in the ridges”, “veins of subtle circulating force”, and “wavelike flows of good and bad luck.” But with time, he’s discovered and appreciated the interdependence of hard-nosed pragmatic empiricism and the more spiritual cosmology of ancient Chinese tradition.

The literal meaning of feng shui combines “wind” and “water”. It is the ancient Chinese science of how people interact with place in a way that minimizes damage from natural forces. It guides the planning of houses, buildings, villages as well as ways of getting around: roads, bridges, waterways, and highways. Natural forces in traditional Chinese culture is called ch’i (qi 气) – a force vital to life but can’t be seen. It’s literal meaning is “air” or “breath”; both invisible vital forces that should not be impeded. Feng shui exposes principles that avoid blocking or disrupting that invisible vital force – or ch’i.

Wind, in my mind, is the perfect spiritual and empirical example. You can’t see wind, but it’s best not to impede it. And when I’m sailing, wind can bring bad luck – no wind, too much wind, or wind in an unhelpful direction. And it can also bring good luck – a consistent gentle wind blowing in a helpful direction. Harnessing and channeling the invisible force of wind balances forces between the sail and the keel causing fluid turbulence that makes a boat hum and a sailor smile. (Though the turbulence can also create drag, so is best appreciated only momentarily if you’re in a hurry!)

Water holds both empirical and mystical and metaphorical truths as well. One look at a drainage map of any massive river system reveals a fractal-like network of tributaries, creeks, and streams that feed into progressively larger rivers. Like the capillaries and veins that gradually grow in diameter as they approach the two largest veins in our bodies – the superior and inferior vena cavae. These connect to the heart that pulses at precisely the right rhythm to send blood all the way to the extremities where the smallest capillaries in mammals deliver oxygen and nutrients to surrounding cells.

River systems in tidal zones and floodplains work much like our circulatory systems. The natural cycle of seasonal drought and floods or ebb and flow of tides distribute water, nutrients, and organisms through what is known as a flood pulse. And like wind, these forces cannot be seen, are best not impeded, and can be described by many as bringing good or bad luck. A drought stricken flood plain flush with forgotten water is good luck for plants and animals reliant on the pulse. A tidal rush from a tsunami is nothing but bad luck.

S**T HAPPENS

It’s not hard to imagine an undulating mountain ridge with piercing rocks silhouetted against the sky appearing like the scales on the back of a curvaceous dragon. It’s also not hard to imagine the streams running through the steep crevices and valleys and into the flood plains; pulsing like the veins of a mountain dragon. Describing naturally occurring forces this way is both pragmatic and poetic. Empirical and mystical. Especially in the absence of any other explanation.

But the first Western scholars to encounter these people lacked such imagination and grace. J. J. M. de Groot was one such person. He was a Dutch missionary and religion instructor at Leiden University in Germany. Here’s how he described what he heard and observed when he spent time in China in the 1800s,

“Feng shui is a mere chaos of childish absurdities and refined mysticism, cemented together, by sophistic reasonings, into a system, which is in reality a ridiculous caricature of science.”

These words resonated with other Western explorers, scholars, and writers so they copied them. They considered feng shui a form of superstition or religion; a belief that propagated through generations of text books throughout the Western world. But in recent decades that has changed. Most scholars now regard feng shui as scientific. In 1996, Gene Anderson described it like this: “a system of empirical observations and pragmatic knowledge, bound together by an overarching theory that is supposed to be naturalistic.”

If you’ve ever been backpacking, you’ve likely pooped in the woods. My climbing friend told me you don’t really have a climbing partner until you’ve pooped next them while dangling from a rope on the face of a cliff high above the mountain floor into what they call a poop-tube. And I’ve spectated at enough cross-country and endurance events to know emergency pooping happens in the woods, on the trail, or even on the bike. S**t happens.

But as more people flood urban areas around the world and cities struggle to maintain open, natural spaces, we can’t be leaving grunts on the ground. Besides, it’s not like this is the only form of environmental degradation humans are inflicting on the world. We are unquestionably impeding vital natural forces. Wind, water, and other natural forces are getting chocked. A widespread blockage of the world’s ch’i.

The Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest imagined salmon as humans wearing fish skins. When I put on my wetsuit and swim in Lake Washington, I am a human wearing a fish skin. These people have their own spiritual and cultural beliefs that are also bound together by pragmatism and naturalistic theory. The salmon – and the seas, lakes, and rivers they occupy – bind with the native people and their sense of place. They believe they are here to take care of the salmon, because the salmon take care of them.

Lake Washington used to be home to countless salmon. They would have been running under my kayak on their way to Juanita Bay this time of year. There would be so many of them that they’d clog the entry to Forbes Creek; a floor of wiggling salmon so thick you could have walked on top of them. The last time a salmon was spotted trying to spawn here at Forbes Creek was 2001.

The lake level dropped in 1910 when they cut a path to Seattle’s Lake Union so ships constructed in Kirkland could make their way to sea. Upstream the creek’s water is polluted from lawn fertilizer runoff, pesticides, and tire dust and oil from the flow of traffic on the freeway under which the water flows. Tire particulates have shown to be particularly harmful to baby salmon. And while that electric car may look green, the added weight of the battery and increased torque from engine results in even more tire wear and particulate matter. We all breath it and the salmon do too. Cars and trucks are defecating in our streams.

Lake Washington is as deep as it is wide. It was carved by a giant receding glacier. Creation stories passed down through generations of the Puget Sound’s coastal tribes tell of chaotic natural forces of the post ice-age. Glaciers retreating, rivers flowing in both directions, volcanoes, earthquakes, and freezing temperatures. It took thousands of years for things to settle down to where salmon could populate the region and fir trees could climb to the sky. But the spiritual and pragmatic words to describe the anxiety and fear felt by this dynamic changing environment have endured through millennia.

The native Puget Sound word dookw is a root word that means “to change” or “transform.” Out of it grew words that describe worry, dissatisfaction, and anger; all words that could describe feelings most of us feel as we ponder the ferocity of wind, the slowing riparian pulse of cyclical drought and rain, or the rising sea water as the northern ice melts. It’s the pervasive anger and worry those psychologists said could can lead to hard stools.

Indigenous people have lived through a lot of s**t, but they don’t leave it there for us to stand in. Dookw is also the root word for “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” A positive sign that if we all find a connection to the sometimes violent vital forces of nature, we will live to see another day while charting courses to the future.

Hello Interactors,

I’ve started to making my own milk again. It’s not really milk. It’s creamy colored water made from pulverized remains of nuts or grains that I sweeten with a little maple syrup. Invariably I get lazy and real dairy creeps back in. But every time I look at that carton, I know what’s inside didn’t come from that cute cow or that stylized farm on the label. And however it got here, I know it came at a cost greater than what I paid.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MILK MAN

Rick has a phone to his ear with one hand while he clicks his mouse in the other. He’s searching websites for a hay baler part while calling neighboring farmers to borrow theirs until his part arrives. He clicks a browser tab that is already open to the weather forecast. Rain is coming. Tension mounts as friends and relatives kick into gear. The hay has to be cut before that rain comes.  

Have you ever had milk straight from the cow? It truly tastes like milk you’ve never had. It was so good, I was warned to not drink too much or too fast. Gluttonous dairy consumption can lead to an upset tummy. But I was assured that if I ever wanted more, there was always a fresh container waiting in the refrigerator.

Chances are if you grew up with milk, your refrigerator has milk in it. It’s probably not straight from the cow, and it may just look like milk (oat milk is all the rage – especially once Oprah and Jay-Z got in on the action), but the West likes their milk and milk products. But consumer demand is worldwide. The more Taco Bells and Pizza Hut’s pop up on streets around the globe demanding cheese, the more milk supply is needed. Starbucks sells more milk than they do coffee. People like their milk and coffee.

I was in Mexico City once eating breakfast at a local eatery with a friend. The waitress sauntered around with a carafe of coffee in one hand and a pitcher of milk in the other. She’d walk up, make eye contact, and start pouring coffee until you said stop. She’d fill the rest with milk. I miss Mexican coffee.

It was hard for me to imagine a dairy farm in a mostly arid Mexico. Growing up in Iowa, I have images of vast grassy fields dotted with milk cows; a winding grove of water thirsty trees clinging to a creek or river bordering the farm. A&E Dairy was the only brand of milk I ever knew. They’ve been bringing milk to Iowans since 1930. We had an actual milkman as a small child. A gray sheet metal box with a blue A&E logo on the front sat nestled in the corner of our doorstep. He’d raise the hinged lid and gently place a glass container of milk inside.

By fourth grade, in 1976, that all had changed. We took a field trip to the A&E bottling plant in Des Moines, Iowa. I remember watching an industrial sized see-through bin full of white plastic pellets the size of ball bearings funneling into a heated form. After a couple seconds, a plastic one-gallon milk container emerged. The glass jar delivered by the milk man had been replaced by crates of one-gallon milk jugs. They’d load them into a semi-truck and off they went; onto a freeway that was as old as me.

A&E, like all American dairy producers, were just beginning to scale up their farms. President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz sent this message to American farmers, “get big or get out.” It was the beginning of the end for small and medium sized farms across the country as milk production steadily climbed from around 54 million tons in 1976 to nearly 100 million tons in 2018. It doesn’t show signs of stopping.  

MILK: THE MAN

Rick, his wife Terri, and a team of extended family members were able to get the hay in the barn before the rain started to fall. But there was no time to rest. A semi-truck had backed its long shiny silver milk tanker up to the barn and was waiting patiently, though a little stressed, for some help. It was time to mix their milk with that of other producers in the Delaware River Valley just north of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Both milk and water flow from this watershed south to an increasingly thirsty New York metropolitan area where urbanites peek up from their steaming molten chocolate cake at trendy restaurants to ask their waiter, “Got Milk?”

With milk production continuing to ramp up over my lifetime, these New Yorkers must not be the only ones craving milk. The entire country must be hankering for more. Not true. Despite American momma cows producing more and more milk every day, the average American milk consumption per capita in 2018 is equal what it was when I was born in 1965 – 256 kilograms per person per year. That’s around 65 gallons a year or just over five gallons per month. That includes cheese, but not butter.

If a growing American population doesn’t account for the growth of dairy production in America, that tells you American dairy farmers interested in endless growth and profits are relying on exports. But Milk is very expensive to ship given its weight. One gallon weighs 8.6 pounds. Because it’s 87 percent water, 9 percent skim solids, and 4 percent milk fat it needs to be broken down into dry ingredients. Dry milk and dry whey make it easier and cheaper to ship. Once it reaches its destination, it’s reconstituted into milk or cheese by adding water.

This has led to an explosion in commercial exports. The United States has become the world leader in nonfat dry-milk and dry whey exports. Their biggest markets are Mexico, China, Philippines, and Indonesia. To meet consumer demand and a growing food processing industry in China, a 2020 Department of Agriculture report expects exports to continue to grow.

To meet this demand, the dairy industry continues to expand. And like Nixon’s Earl Butz “get big or get out” advice, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said in 2019, “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out.”  He said that in a speech at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin – a state known for cheese – where they lost 800 dairy farms that same year to consolidation.

Licensed dairy farms across the country numbered just over 70,000 in 2013 and is now a little over 31,000. A 55% decline in seven years. Meanwhile, the amount of milk they can get from a single cow has increased. Cow milk production has increased 11.5% since 2011 and the USDA is expecting increases to continue.

To get your head around how production increases while the number of dairy farms decreases, consider one of a half a dozen companies providing most of the milk to the world – Riverview. Based in Minnesota, their website seems corporate but kind. Maybe even a little innocent. It says,

“[They] utilize both rotary and parallel parlors. Each site is a little different from the others, but the activity is the same: milking cows. Each cow produces about eight gallons of milk per day which is sent to processing plants to make cheese.”

But they don’t talk about the farmer they approached proposing a 24,000-cow dairy near his farm in Minnesota. They were hoping to buy his corn to feed all these cattle. He couldn’t imagine a 24,000-cow operation and turned them down. In addition to worrying about the odor, damage to roads, and pollution, he was most concerned about the amount of water that would take.  

One researcher estimates Riverview uses nearly one quarter of all the water used for hog and dairy farms in Minnesota. And they’re not through. State records show permits for two farms of over 10,000 cows. Minnesota isn’t the only state they’re interested in. They’ve extended into one of the most unlikely places to raise and milk cows (given my bucolic ideal of farm country) – the deserts of Arizona.

COCHISE CHEESE PLEASE

Rick and Terri started their farm from scratch. They raise three kids, endured and recovered from a house fire, and have managed to raise some amazing kids, award winning cows, and by my standards, some very tasty milk. But it’s getting harder and harder to make ends meet. Their youngest son is interested in continuing the farm, but prospects of survival are grim.

New York was the fourth biggest producer of milk in 2020 behind California, Wisconsin, and Idaho, but they were also fourth behind Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania in the number of dairy farms lost. New York state lost 240 small dairy farms last year. The pandemic didn’t help. And mega-farms have seized the opportunity to prey on financially vulnerable farmers – like Terri and Rick. But also farmers in Arizona where wells are running dry.

Riverview was most likely attracted to Arizona because of its lax water laws. If you’re a farmer in rural Arizona, there is no limit to the water you can use. But scoot your boots too close to roost near Phoenix or Tucson, and you’ll be wrestled, metered, and hog tied. So they picked a location made popular by California pistachio farmers who got there before they did – Sunizona, Arizona.

This town sits in the Willcox basin in Cochise County. It’s a dried lake bed, Lake Cochise, named after an ancient Indian culture that existed 9,000 – 2,000 years ago. In keeping with America’s enigmatic ways, it’s both a National Natural Landmark and a designated bombing range for the U.S. military. But it’s also home to acres of crop circles in a desert that is prone to dust cyclones. Sounds like a perfect place for a dairy farm.

Below this dusty playa is a vast underground water source. Sometimes. Its replenishment cycle has turned sporadic since large-scale agriculture came here in the 1940s. Before big-ag hit it had enough water to satisfy demand for residents of nearby Tucson for 970 years. And in more recent decades, the effects of climate change have resulted in the nearby mountains getting pounded with rain some years and other years nothing. Farmers are forced to dig deeper and deeper wells to capture a steady supply of water. In 2015 area farmers used four times more water than was being recharged. It’s created a race to the bottom. But digging wells isn’t cheap and the more money you have the deeper you can dig.

Imagine a friend offers to buy a drink to share. They sit down with a tall glass of your favorite icy concoction and then slide you a straw across the table as they dip theirs into the depths of the drink. You plunge yours in and take a long cool draw. Halfway through the drink you realize you’re only siphoning ice melt from the pile of cubes that have become exposed. Meanwhile your friend is happily slurping away from a straw longer than the glass. That’s when you realize your friend gave you a straw shorter than theirs. Some friend.

The farmers in the Willcox basin have built short-straw wells over the years to grow everything from nuts, to cotton, to alfalfa. But many can’t afford to dig deeper. So Riverview swoops in and buys them out. Many are happy to take the money and run, some are hoping Riverview’s money will spill over into the community, and others feel isolated, stressed, and bewildered.

Riverview is taking over the place. A money-rich mega-dairy from Minnesota who showed up with a straw twice as long as their neighbors. More short-straw farmers see wells run dry as desert dust turns green with grain to feed the thousands of Riverview cattle.

To get as much milk out of their cows as possible, operations like Riverview load 90 cows into a carousal that slowly spins in constant motion. Cows enter, get milked as it turns, and then get dropped off. An area that used to get treated to a deep dark night sky lit only by the milky way is now blinded by the light pollution of a 24-7 dairy operation. A water sucking corporate machine who will surely deplete this ancient basin of its water and then move on to the next aquifer. If there are any left.

WAVES OF WATER

You can see why my wife’s cousin, Terri, and her husband, Rick, can’t compete. They’re playing a different game. Having spent some time with them on the farm, I can tell you they have a love and respect for their cows and their land. And they’re proud of the thought somebody down the road, even in another state, is drinking milk they produced. In the presence of factory farming, in an era of ‘go big or go home’, Terri and Rick’s method of dairy farming is receding. That quaint, romantic, idealized grassy farm with a single cow that dairy’s print on their containers is vanishing faster than our water supply. And it will likely not return.

I remember a slogan from an ad campaign paid for by the American Dairy Association that read, “Milk does the body good.” It indeed does. It’s tied with eggs as one of the highest quality, efficient, and micro-nutrient rich foods you can consume. There’s evidence that the earliest domestication of cattle was by nomadic hunter-gatherers who discovered how handy it was to have a food source walk alongside you. Talk about efficient.

Energy we get from cow biproducts is minimal compared to what it takes to generate it.

Feeding livestock requires tons of grain which requires tons of water. In the United States, roughly half of the water for agriculture comes from irrigation and the rest from local ground sources like the aquifer in the Willcox basin. But not all feed can be grown locally, so it’s grown elsewhere and trucked or shipped in. When I was born in 1965, 2.5 million acres of U.S. land was irrigated for corn and soybeans. In 2017 that had grown to 12 million.

California, the country’s biggest milk producer, draws far more water than any other state. But most of that water is drying up. As the West dries up, irrigation moves east.

Nebraska leads the country in the amount of land used for irrigation. California is number two.

But Nebraska is drawing from the Ogallala reservoir. This High Plains aquifer is one of the largest in the world. But it too is getting depleted. Conservation efforts have helped. Programs have been underway for years and together with new genetically modified corn that requires less water, depletion rates have lessened.

Increased in demand is coming from many sources: housing developments, corn and soybean crops, natural gas fracking, and hydraulic drills for oil pipelines to name a few. This, coupled with variation in replenishment rates from climate change, means natural habitat is at risk. A 2017 study used satellite imagery to examine the effects on wildfowl. Measuring multiple years of water inundation during replenishment cycles, they came to this conclusion:

“These results indicated that realized inundation was well below the capacity of the landscape as indicated by maps of potential playas. Thus, even when holding water, the observations here indicated the area of available open-water habitats, for waterfowl, for example, was below the potential capacity described by wetland maps.”

MILKING THE ALTERNATIVES

Back in 2001, Rick and Terri drove their kids across the country in an RV. They passed by 3000 miles of farm country; over the Ogallala and across the arid West to our home in Kirkland, Washington. I was drinking soy milk at the time and had them all try their first swig of the so-called milk. Let’s just say not a single glass was emptied and the kids all looked at me sideways for awhile.

Plant-based milks are growing in popularity, but it’s mostly an elite urban phenomenon right now. And you can bet most of those oat milk drinkers still like their cheese. Most of the milk from Riverview’s tens of thousands of cows goes toward cheese production.

The truth is, we don’t have enough land and water to meet a growing worldwide demand for dairy products. Especially amidst exponential population growth. We’re facing a choice between sliced cheese on a dish or trees and the fish; ice cream in a bowl or a stream that meets the shoal. The Colorado River once rushed into the shoals of the salty Pacific Ocean, but now it runs dry inland in Mexico.  

I can’t say I’m doing very well myself. I’ve reduced my dairy consumption and sometimes make my own Oregon sourced hazelnut ‘milk’, but I’m not fortifying it with the nutrients I get from dairy. And I’ve tried plant-based cheese. It’s not there yet.

Perhaps I shouldn’t beat myself up. Maybe U.S. farmers should stop chasing profits found in lucrative foreign markets and conserve the natural resources this country depends on. Maybe grow more food for people and less food for livestock. More milk and cheese for me please, let them find their own dairy over seas. I now that sounds dogmatic, but maybe it’s just pragmatic. Besides, rainfall is getting sporadic and population growth is dramatic. Meanwhile, the amount of freshwater in the world remains static.

Or maybe I stop hanging on to my Western dairy diet and seek appetizing alternatives. I may be better for it. Remember Rick and Terri’s advice? Gluttonous consumption of dairy can lead to an upset tummy. Greedy consumption of natural resources can lead to an upset global ecosystem. It’s time for a change. Terri and Rick are having to adjust to a new reality that challenges their past, maybe it’s time we all do. Especially companies like Riverview.

Hello Interactors,

What a wild water filled week. From too much water coming too fast to not enough coming too slow, the United States is bearing witness to the schizophrenic behavior of an angry imbalanced ecosystem. Our mother earth isn’t the only one with schizophrenia. The United States, and other eco-wrecking countries, can’t decide if Indigenous people — the historical stewards of this planet — should be silenced and contained or begrudgingly ordained as the knowledge keepers and leaders of how best please our angry mother earth.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

IN COMING

It was eight o’clock on a sunny morning when Kelly Minty Morris received a notification on her phone that read “extreme alert”. A missile was headed straight for her. This must be some mistake, she thought to herself. This was something that she didn’t think of having to deal with in her country. She and her husband were in Hawaii where he was about to compete in a 100 mile trail running endurance race called the HURT100. Missiles can bring a whole new level of hurt; but, as she looked around, to her surprise, nobody was scrambling or panicking. Not even herself. They all believed it must be some kind of blunder.

There is no mistaking that this summer has had its fair share of climate scares. The Northeast have had nothing but rain all summer. Just this week New York’s Central Park was dowsed with six inches of rain in as many hours. A once in a 500 year event.

The Northeast continues to be battered by wind and rain killing over a dozen people in its path. It’s the fallout of hurricane Ida, the fifth most severe hurricane on record, that slammed Louisiana’s coast earlier in the week but was barely phased by its landfall. Now a new hurricane is brewing as climatologists predict a 60% chance that more extreme hurricanes will follow this year.

Meanwhile, water in the west is wanting. California’s fires have claimed two million acres. Ten percent of the sequoia population was taken by a single fire; trees that have been on this planet for thousands of years – gone. It’s so dry in southern Oregon’s Klamath valley that wells are drying up. Homeowners are having to drive for their water. The county has ordered cisterns from as far away as Oklahoma, but are running up against shortages of rain barrels due to choked supply chains and increased demand.

Kelly Minty Morris sat for a half an hour, there in Hawaii, fretting. But she was more concerned with the lackadaisical response to an incoming ballistic missile than the actual damage it may inflict. “It really did feel surreal,” she said. “I wasn’t panicking, I wasn’t anxious, I wasn’t upset, my brain kept telling me, ‘This can’t be real, this can’t be real.’” And then it happened. Another text buzzed her phone. The alert was a mistake. A state employee had pushed the wrong button. I suspect that’s a former state employee.

Kelly left that incident reflecting on the collective apathy she witnessed. She began to wonder what it would take to get people to actually act in the face of an emergency. Upon her return home to Oregon, she vowed as a Klamath County Commissioner to put steps in place that encourage people in her area to respond appropriately to an emergency. She said, “You don’t want to be waiting for an actual emergency to then figure out what you should have done.”

KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN

The Klamath valley has seen its fair share of emergencies, but every generation seems surprised. And sometimes apathetic. The first occupants of this area were the Klamath Tribes: the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin-Paiute people. They were sometimes referred to as mukluks or numu – the people. People, while differentiated by name, are still animals. And like our multi-legged, finned, scaled, and winged companions, we are an integral part of the environment. This was, and remains, a pan-Indigenous concept that deserves reminding. The Klamath Tribes embraced this belief in a shared communal slogan, “naanok ?ans naat sat’waYa naat ciiwapk diceew’a “We help each other; We will live good”

These people did live well. For thousands of years area bands and tribes — bound by loyalty and family — fished, hunted, farmed, and ranched the land in a perpetual act of reciprocity that respected and honored the land and its occupants. From the marshy banks of Oregon’s Klamath Lake and up the Sprague Valley, south along the rivers feeding California’s Lower Klamath Lake, across the lava beds and all the way down to Shasta Mountain, the Klamath tribes prided themselves on their industriousness.

But by the 1800s, the word industrious took on a different tenor. The industrialist fueled American imperialism swaggered on to the scene with their own slogan: No thanks, we’ll help ourselves; so that we will live good.

In 1826 The Hudson Bay Company trappers invaded Klamath territories and conflicts ensued. By 1838, the company had made maps of the region making it easier for John C. Frémont to lead an expedition into the area in 1843 as part of the country’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

If you’ve even been to California, you probably have seen Fremont’s name. In addition to the city of Fremont in northern California, there are dozens of streets and places that bear his name. He was a civil war general; one of four appointed by Abraham Lincoln. He was also the first nominee to run for presidential office by the Republican party. But he was decommissioned by the military in 1856 for his ‘unorthodox ways’.

Ten years prior, on April 6, 1846, Fremont massacred between 120-200 Indigenous people on the Sacramento River. A month later, May 12, 1846, led by his trusty scout Kit Carson, they raided a Klamath village killing over fourteen people. Kit Carson had been killing and scalping Indigenous people from Colorado to California for nearly twenty years by this point. His first was when he was nineteen years old in 1828.

After two decades of wars waged against the Klamath Tribes by the United States, they agreed to a treaty in 1864. In exchange for the 22 million acres these people had cared for over thousands of years and for hundreds of generations, the United States granted them the right to continue to hunt, fish, and gather within a designated 1.2 million acre reservation. Less than one tenth of their land. The treaty also included rights to the water.

Article 6 of the treaty read:

“To each head of a family shall be assigned and granted a tract of not less than forty nor more than one hundred and twenty acres, according to the number of persons in such family; and to each single man above the age of twenty-one years a tract not exceeding forty acres.”

The treaty was ratified in 1870. With a signature at the bottom of a string of legalese I can barely understand, these people lost nearly 99 percent of their land and ancestral heritage.

The dispossession created tension between the Klamath and Modoc leading to the Modoc War between 1872-73. The Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin people mostly remained loyal to one another; and they remained industrious. As part of the treaty, the United States agreed to provide services and support aimed at assimilating these native people into Western culture and livelihoods. Article 5 of the treaty states:

“The United States further engage to furnish and pay for the services and subsistence, for the term of fifteen years, of one superintendent of farming operations, one farmer, one blacksmith, one sawyer, one carpenter, and one wagon and plough maker, and for the term of twenty years of one physician, one miller, and two school-teachers.”

Elders encouraged young people to learn the new ways of living and farming; including farming timber. By 1870 they constructed a lumber mill and began selling timber back to settlers. They even sold lumber to the United States to build Fort Klamath – a U.S. military outpost used to deter attacks from Indigenous people on encroaching settlers.

KILL THE TRIBES, STEAL THEIR MONEY

By the 1950s the Klamath Tribes became one of the most prosperous tribes in America. In keeping with their traditional ways, they owned, managed, and sustained the largest stand of Ponderosa Pine in the West. Driven by a self-sufficient determinism millennia old, they were the only tribe to make enough money to pay the United States Government for the services their people utilized.  

But their success made them a target. The 1950s marked the beginning of the Cold War as communist paranoia swept through the United States. The reservation system the government had thrust upon Indigenous people was suddenly deemed communist. These people, and their alien ways, were seen as anti-American. Worse yet, most tribes were dependent on a central government – clear evidence of communism. This is the same central government that stole their land, attempted genocide, and forced the remaining survivors onto reservations.

America was also building highways at this time and needed land; they were selling cars and needed oil; they were building atomic bombs and needed uranium; and they needed money to fund wartime debt and nation building of countries we had destroyed or help to destroy in two World Wars.

The United States surveyed the country in search of valuable land and resources and the reservations and treaties they had invented were getting in the way. They needed that land to tax, sell, and exploit for natural resources and money. In the words of former Cheyenne Senator from Colorado, Ben Nighthorse Campbell:

“In Washington’s infinite wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that they had been tribes for thousands of years.”

In 1952 the House of Representatives issued Joint Resolution 698 which called for a list of tribes to be terminated. The focus was first on tribes that had demonstrated self-sufficiency, had been adequately acculturated, and were willing to accept the termination of federal assistance.

The Klamath Tribes stood out. Having demonstrated just how profitable their land could be, it was time the United States took even more than they had a century prior.

On August 1, 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 was issued by the United States Congress announcing the official federal policy of termination. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Klamath Tribes. Included were the Flathead, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all tribes in the states of California, New York, Florida, and Texas.

Between 1945 and 1960 Congress terminated more than one hundred tribes and small bands, 11,500 Indigenous people lost their native legal status, and over one million acres of land lost its trust status. Not a single tribe has improved economically since, while corporations have profited handsomely.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon – an unlikely preacher of morality and legality – issued this statement of repudiation to Congress:

“Because termination is morally and legally unacceptable, because it produces bad practical results, and because the mere threat of termination tends to discourage greater self-sufficiency among Indian groups, I am asking the Congress to pass a new Concurrent Resolution which would expressly renounce, repudiate and repeal the termination policy as expressed in House Concurrent Resolution 108 of the 83rd Congress.”

Since the end of termination, as of 2013, “78 of the 113 terminated tribes have been recognized again by the United States government and 35 now have casinos; 24 of these tribes are now considered extinct; 10 have state recognition but not federal recognition; and 31 are without land.

GAMBLING OUR EXISTENCE

In 1974, a Federal Court ruled the right of the Klamath Tribes to their Treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather. They also ordered that the tribe be consulted on land management matters that may infringe on their Treaty rights. In 1986 the Reagan administration restored their Federal recognition, but did not return their land. They were then asked to come up with a plan for how to remain self-sufficient if they were to remain in the area.

They were determined to honor their commitment to their ancestors who, like them, cared for the land they lived on for thousands of years. And already demonstrating their ability to coexist with colonial settlers, they also wanted to adhere to their belief, “We help each other; We will live good.” So they proposed building a casino.

In 1997, 45 years after termination, and the Reagan administration’s approval allowing tribal casinos, they opened the doors to the Kla-Mo-Ya Casino. While casinos indeed infuse money and resources into challenged tribal communities, there’s also evidence casinos lead to gambling addictions – especially among economically vulnerable residents – including aging tribal elders.

The Klamath Tribes water rights are front and center as wells run dry in the Klamath River basin. For millennia, people of the Klamath Tribes celebrated the return of fish in the spring after long harsh winters had drained their food supplies. Two of the most prominent species they welcomed home were the c’waam and koptu – also known as Lost River and suckers.

Since 1991, the number of juvenile c’waam has all but vanished. In recent years, Klamath tribal biologists have begun a program to rebuild their populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started their own program in 2018. But it may be too late. Over 75% of the fish habitat is lost. Dams have reduced their territory, runoff from agricultural chemicals have polluted the waters, and irrigation systems have drained the marshes they need to survive. The same marshes the Klamath people had cared for and depended on for generations – alongside their finned friends.

The federal government has been working with the tribe to rehabilitate the marshes by pulling water from the lake. But with extreme drought conditions, there’s little water to go around.

As residents and ranchers see their wells and irrigation pipes dry up, they’re calling on the government to release more water from the lake. But both the state of Oregon and the U.S. Federal Government have determined the Klamath Tribe has superior rights to the water. The last time conflict over water rose to this level was back in 2001. That was when three White men drove through a local town firing 12-gauge shotguns yelling, “SUCKER LOVERS.” The local sheriff called it an act of terrorism.

Surely Klamath County Commissioner, Kelly Minty Morris, has prepared her community for this “extreme alert." I’m afraid not. Once again, Kelley has been taken off guard echoing the same words she used just three years prior when dealing with the thought of an airborne missile attack. “This is something that you don't really think of having to deal with in a country like ours," said Klamath County Commissioner Kelley Minty Morris. "It's unimaginable to me even though it's going on right in my community."

Having to drive for water is not something people like Kelley are accustom to, but the descendants of this land’s caretakers have been doing it for hundreds of years. Just ask residents of America’s largest nation within our nation, the Navajo Nation. To combat the spread of Covid-19 that ravished this area, hand washing stations were installed that people had to drive or walk to just to wash their hands.

It can take two hours to drive to the nearest voting box in Navajo Nation. But that didn’t keep the U.S. Supreme Court from recently upholding voting rights legislation in Arizona that will make it even harder for these people to cast a vote for change. The judges 6-3 vote claimed a two hour drive doesn’t exceed the “usual burdens of voting.” That’s what systemic racism looks like.

I don’t mean to diminish the suffering of people in Klamath County, including Commissioner Morris. Human suffering knows no history, social standing, or ethnicity. After all, some of the ranchers and residents who need the water are also Klamath Tribal members.

Water will become increasing scarce in the arid West. It’s time we stop pretending we can build more housing developments, plant more lawns, water thirsty crops, feed more cattle, frack more gas, green more greens, sprinkle more sprinklers, or build more dams. It’s clear the climate will change faster than our behavior, but we don’t have time.

The recent IPCC report highlights water as a pressing global issue. It warns that in addition to increased rainfall like we’ve seen in parts of the United States recently, droughts will also increase in some regions, fire weather will become more frequent, and oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds will become warmer and more acidic.

Since 1991, the Stockholm International Water Institute has been studying water governance, transboundary water management, water and climate change, the water-energy-food nexus, and water economics around the world. They remind us that by 2050, our plant could be home to 10 billion people. Even as populations grow, the amount of freshwater remains constant. Here are five ways they recommend we avert a global water crisis:

* VALUE WATER

If we increase the value of water, we will reduce use and pollution. All sectors of society must learn to manage water in a way that strengthens the water cycle.

* SHARE WATER

Competition over water will only increase, so we need to manage it together. The better prepared we are for erratic rainfall, droughts, and floods the better we can handle the fallout.

* TRANSFORM AGRICULTURE

Agriculture must be massively transformed. To avoid mass hunger from degraded lands, we need to make freshwater available for alternative uses – food production practices today account for 70 per cent of freshwater withdrawals. Those practices are the main drivers of water pollution and global warming.

* RESTORE ECOSYSTEMS

A mass extinction of species, like the threatened c’waam, koptu, and salmon, could threaten human existence. We depend on healthy ecosystems for food, water, and livelihoods. By protecting and restoring ecosystems we can limit climate change, stop the loss of biodiversity, and improve water security.

* BUILD RESILIENCE

Droughts, heat waves, floods, and rainstorms are expected to become more frequent and more severe. All sectors of society need to redesign for resilience. Communities that protect their local watersheds and manage forests in a way that improves groundwater recharge tackle several of the world’s greatest challenges simultaneously.

It’s taken a team of Western educated PhDs and three hundred years of ‘enlightenment’ to arrive at five things the Indigenous populations around the world have known for thousands of years. We chose, and continue to choose, to silence them. But the tide is turning.

I’m convinced, as these Swedes are, that a combination of traditional knowledge and new science, technology, and invention will yield the best path forward for managing our global climatic conundrums. But we can’t just tech our way out of this. We’re going to have to change our food habits, reduce extractions, eliminate commercial and consumer waste, and overhaul the global food system.

The dam has been cracked, but it needs to be broken wide open. All living organisms depend on water. They depend on us. Let’s listen to the ancient words of the Klamath people: When we help each other, we will all live well. Expanding on the words of Kelley Minty Morris: we don’t want to be waiting for the edge of human extinction to then figure out what we should have done to avoid it.  

Hello Interactors,

I spent this week listening to my favorite Rolling Stones songs and fretting over whether democratic infighting in Washington would end our best, and perhaps only, hope of climate change legislation. I can’t get no satisfaction and my sympathy for the devil is wearing thin. I hate to be the beast of burden, but can somebody gimme shelter?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MAINTAINING ORDER

The drummer for the Rolling Stones, Charlie Watts, passed away this week at 80 years old. The Stones have been around longer than I have and Charlie was their only drummer. He was never the flamboyant type, seeking drum solos or surrounding himself with racks of drums to satisfy some insatiable percussive proclivity. He just sat there in his suit doing his job – keeping rhythm for a singer who dances like he has ants in his pants.

Drummers never get the credit they deserve. They live in the shadows of vanity seeking vocalists and guitarists grasping for glamour. They’re always the brunt of sinister jokes about lacking the intelligence or talent to play a ‘real instrument’; so they’re stuck beating sticks on thin bouncy membranes stretched over cylindrical cannisters.

But having played in bands with no drummer, I can tell you it’s no fun. It’s hard to find drummers, and even harder to keep them. I wonder if Mick and the boys knew how good they had it? Keeping a beat is no easy feat. A good bass player helps, and while we’re all drawn to a pleasantly sounding harmony, it’s the lowly drummer who sets tone. Without a steady beat, music quickly unravels into a chaotic cacophonic calamity.

The world could use a drummer right about now. Nature, humans, society, and the climate have lost the beat. After decades of operating in regular 4/4 time, with occasional key changes or transitions to alternating rhythms, the universe has devolved into a seemingly extended random free-form improvisation. Pure chaos. How does this happen?

Learning new songs with a band hints at how it unravels. Humming along and feeling good about yourself, out of no where some band member misses a chord or drifts off beat. Everyone starts glancing around at each other in search of the culprit as you sense it getting worse. As the piano player and band leader, I’d sometimes start to pound my keys a little harder — emphasizing the beat in the process. Kind of like speaking louder and with a DIS-TINCT CA-DENCE TO SOME-ONE WHO DOES NOT SPEAK YOUR LANG-UAGE in hopes they’ll suddenly clue in.

But invariably another band mate would follow my lead and start playing louder to match my increasing volume. The next thing you know the drummer does too. It’s hard to play drums loud and slow, so the pace of the song quickens. Each change from one single individual results in corresponding feedback from other individuals in the group; that, in turn, induces more reactions from individuals – a dynamical system in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Soon things evolve into a loud frenetic chaos. That’s when you understand how punk music was born.

Eventually everyone realizes that while playing fast, loose, and loud is fun for awhile it’s also exhausting and futile. Especially when learning songs like the sanguine but melancholy jazz standard, My Funny Valentine. We managed to learn enough songs to be hired for a wedding once, but we’d joke that music critics probably would have slotted us somewhere between jazz, R&B, and comedy.

Many classic jazz standards start out steadily predictable, but then cascade into chaotic frenzied solos that pass from one instrument to the other. I suspect even the subdued Charlie Watts took his turn soloing in his early days as a jazz drummer. Another standard of jazz standards is to collectively return to the steady state of the song’s uniform pattern played in unison — restoring order after the disturbance.

Many jazz conventions are rooted in the 12-bar Blues. Blues is recognized as blues, and jazz as jazz, because there are strict underlying rules governing the controlled creative chaos of soundwaves emanating from instruments and vocal chords. The Rolling Stones knew as much. That’s why Mick Jagger described their work on the 1972 album, Exile on Main St., as "runaway outlaws using the blues as its weapon against the world.” That album took the world by storm and is the highest ranking Stones album on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. That’s one storm nobody could have predicted.

THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR

That same year, 1972, MIT mathematician and meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, published a paper on the challenges of predicting storms titled, Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas? His paper was the first to describe chaos theory. And the premise of his paper’s title has been shortened to what we now call the Butterfly Effect. Poetically, a certain set of values in an equation that exhibits a concept central to chaos theory called a strange attractor yields a plot that resembles a butterfly.

While studying mathematical models of weather systems, he discovered one small change in these dynamical systems could result in disproportionate and unforeseen effects. It was a major discovery. Chaos theory is believed by some to rank up there with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics as three of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century.

His research showed prediction of dynamical systems is dependent on an initial condition. He posited the gentle small flap of a butterfly’s wings could be an initial condition that could lead to a massively destructive typhoon on the other side of the globe. That’s not to say weather systems actually work this way, but his point was no meteorologist can accurately predict the weather without first knowing the initial condition of the weather system.

When our band would spiral into chaos, it was the result of some initial event; a band member playing too slowly or quickly, off melody, out of tune, or a myriad of other mitigating circumstances. It could have even been the locally brewed Hefeweizen we were drinking or the spicy green curry we sometimes ate before practice at the hole-in-the-wall Thai place down the street.

Dynamical systems are complex systems that change over time and are fundamental to chaos theory;  weather systems are just one example. We are surrounded by dynamical systems. Our own bodies are dynamical. Ecosystems, societies, companies, local, state, provincial and national governments, continental regions, and global institutions all exhibit elements of dynamical systems.

And like members of a band playing from the same sheet music, they don’t stand on their own in isolation, but instead are connected and bonded through mutual interactions. They influence each other and are in-turn influenced. But complex systems are also self-healing systems. If a single component is removed, the system can carry on. Just as many bands do when they lose a drummer.

People who study complex dynamical systems, like Lorenz did, use mathematical models – equations that represent a simplified model of real phenomena – to simulate the behavior of these systems. One such model is called a logistic model.

Not to be confused with military or freight logistics, this word was offered by the Belgian mathematician, Pierre François Verhulst in 1845. He presumably chose the word logistic to both contrast and relate it with the more well known term logarithmic which he used to describe a curve that today we’d call an exponential curve – a curve that shows a greater increase in growth over time.

A logistic curve appears ‘log-like’ or ‘log-ish’ in its appearance because it starts out looking like an exponential curve but then flattens out over time. Some believe Verhulst merged log with istic the same way we merge simple with istic to form the word simplistic, hence the word logistic. But by now some of you are thinking, “Brad, nothing about this is simplistic and the growth of my confusion is growing exponentially over time. At what point does my confusion level out and become more logistic?” Not yet, I’m afraid.

Logistic models can be used to simulate population growth, just as Verhulst was when he discovered it. Human populations around the world are growing exponentially and aren’t expected to level off until 2050 or 2060. Non-linear population growth is hard to fathom. The only compound growth we seem to relate to are our savings accounts. But with disappointingly low interest rates, even those are hard to imagine growing.

There’s also the issue of carrying capacity in studying population growth. Limited space and resources impact growth rates. So do viral diseases like COVID-19 – a deadly nonlinear dynamical system that is so dumbfounding that even the most reasoned people refuse to take steps to stunt its growth.

Epidemiologists, biologists, demographers, pathologists, economists, and climatologists all use mathematical models, and other elements of chaos theory and complexity science, to find patterns amidst what appears to be random disturbances within these dynamical systems.

In the 1980s two scientists expanded on the work of Lorenz’s logistic model. Lord Robert May, a theoretical biologist, and Mitchell Feigenbaum, a theoretical physicist, discovered a way to map variables of the logistic model to create a simple equation that when iterated over time can predictably display chaos. It was a discovery that displaced Newton’s idea that the universe operates like clockwork in an infinitely predictable fashion.

A universe that ends in chaos sounds scary. Learning that dynamical systems are mathematically proven to yield chaos makes good ole’ mother earth seem more like a tyrannical erratic witch. The work of the devil. But what May and Feigenbaum discovered, as did the French team of Pierre Collet and Charles Tresser a year later, is there is order to be found in the chaos.

They were able to mathematically determine the rate at which predictable patterns of disruption reorganize until the next point of disturbance. The time between these self-healing disturbances become shorter over time leading to what is called ‘the edge of chaos’ — the strange attractor. After which, predictability vanishes into chaos.

If I had a recording of our band spinning into chaos learning a new tune, I suspect I could probably predict when we were on the edge of chaos. But while we could all feel those moments of disturbance that returned to a steady state, and even the edge of chaos, there is no way we could have predicted them in the moment. Given the frequency of climate calamities, it sure feels like we’re approaching the edge of chaos, even if we can’t predict when.

THE TIPPING POINT

The abrupt change that occurs after the edge of chaos can sometimes be called a tipping point. The Paris Agreement includes a series of legally binding pledges various countries have taken to avoid a climatic tipping point. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), refer to the tipping point like this:

“An abrupt change is defined in this report as a change that takes place substantially faster than the rate of change in the recent history of the affected component of a system. In some cases, abrupt change occurs because the system state actually becomes unstable, such that the subsequent rate of change is independent of the forcing. We refer to this class of abrupt change as a tipping point, defined as a critical threshold beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly and/or irreversibly.”

When you hear reports like this of researchers using models to predict the effects of climate change, many of them are using these same techniques. Building models that more accurately simulate the real world offers better predictions of how long we have between periods of self-stabilization on a potential path to chaos.

The good news is improvements in large scale computing power enables nests of multi-variate differential equations to be calculated faster than ever. But some argue the divergence from the historical norm is often so great, that using the past to predict the future may be futile.

This graph of the recent Tennessee flood shows the time it took to achieve record flood levels over the last 1000 years. These record rainfalls were measured over a two day period. This area of the state reached a ‘once in a thousand years’ flood of 13 inches in just eight hours. By the end of the second day of measuring, it had peaked at a new record high of 17 inches.

We’re in a race between using mathematical models that leverage events of the past to understanding what’s happening to us now, and perhaps the future edge of chaos. But current events are nothing like we find in the past. This makes it all the more necessary and urgent to turn the Paris pledges into American action.

Step one is to pass the budget reconciliation bill the Democrats were hashing out this week. It includes most of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, including the recent bipartisan infrastructure package out of the Senate. We may have lost Charlie Watts, but our elected officials have a chance to get the beat back. This package includes what is needed for us to meet our end of the Paris Agreement and hopefully return to some kind of climatic stability. If not, we face the edge of climatic chaos – the tipping point.

Future generations will look back at this week and either credit us with being sinners or saints. I’m reminded of a Rolling Stones tune Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote off of the 1968 album, Beggars Banquet. It’s a song I sang with my buddies one summer nearly a decade after its release called Sympathy for the Devil. Mick sings in the first person as the devil; a metaphor for the historical devilish British behavior as he chronicles throughout the song. But, the mention of the Kennedy’s reveals the sentiment extends overseas to the Yanks as well.

The first verse introduces the devil embodied as a stereotypical Christian colonial capitalist. The final verse exits with a vision of a hellish wasteland of chaos the devil is willing to inflict if we don’t do some serious reflecting, repenting, restraining, and repairing. We need to restore the natural earthly rhythms, or else. It goes like this:

Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a man of wealth and taste

I've been around for a long, long year

Stole many a man's soul and faith

I was 'round when Jesus Christ

Had his moment of doubt and pain

Made damn sure that Pilate

Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Just as every cop is a criminal

And all the sinners saints

As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer

'Cause I'm in need of some restraint

So if you meet me, have some courtesy

Have some sympathy, and some taste

Use all your well-learned politesse

Or I'll lay your soul to waste

Hello Interactors,

It’s been a troubling week in international news as we all watched Afghanistan unravel. That country has been through a lot over the last two decades and centuries; most of which is due to Western invasion and intervention. To make matters worse, the effects of climate change are compounding their problems. I hope we can learn how to better help, they’re going to need it.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GOING SOLAR

Soon after absorbing the tragic scenes in Afghanistan this week, I was reminded of an article I read around this time last year. It was about successful deployments of solar technology by poor Afghan farmers to pump water from desert wells to grow crops. Afghanistan ranks among the lowest on the Global Adaptation Index making them one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. As if they needed more problems.

Solar energy can be transformational, even when deployed at small scales. We’re not talking about massive solar farms plastering the desert paid for by corporations, governments, or non-governmental organizations (NGO) through some kind of ‘Go-Green’ initiative. These are installations by rural farmers struggling to survive. The first remote solar array was notice back in 2013, but soon local towns were piled high with solar panels.

The panels are not cheap. Seed money usually comes from a dowry – money given from a bride’s family to the groom at the time of marriage – which is roughly $7,000. A single solar panel costs $5,000, so it’s a big chunk of money. But the panel pays for itself in just two years. They simply set it up, plug it into the provided pump, kick aside the old, expensive, and troublesome diesel motor and watch the water come streaming out of their well.

The number of solar panels has doubled every year since 2012 tapping wells far into the desert. By 2019 there were over 67,000 installations dotting a single narrow region in southern Afghanistan. And for every diesel conversion to solar comes an increase in productivity. The blue areas of these maps show less productive cultivation and light green as more productive. In addition to the increase in the number of farms, you can also see an increase in yield. Their success attracts even more people to the desert. Between 2012 and 2019, 48,000 new homes were built. Increased competition for a water supply that climate change has already diminished, the introduction of solar pumps has started a countdown clock as to when they’ll all run out of water.

Which, in one way, may be a good thing. While one of the crops farmers choose to grow in the desert are sun hungry plants like tomatoes, their main, and most profitable crop, is opium. The majority of opium is refined to make heroin. Afghanistan is the world’s leader in opium production making it the leading source of heroin, one of the most illicit addictive drugs there is. And this region of Afghanistan, Helmand, produces 80% of the Afghan supply to the world. Most of it to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Before solar entered the fray in 2013, Afghanistan was producing 3,700 tons of opium a year. By 2017, a record year, their production nearly tripled to 9,000 tons. It created a glut in the market and prices fell, reducing production among farmers still on the more expensive diesel pumps. Meanwhile, solar farmers continued to produce and profit at 2017 levels.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED : MISSION ADMONISHED

The opium market has been growing in Afghanistan since the 1990s, with the exception of one outlying year – 2001. That was the last time the Taliban took control and one of their many bans was on growing opium.

When the United States infamously invaded Afghanistan in 2002, opium production quickly bounced back to pre-Taliban levels, and has been growing since. England joined in the invasion, in part to curb the supply of heroin to the UK and other parts of Europe. They’ve found that as production of opium increases, the demand for heroin also increases; and with it crime as addicts resort to breaking and entering and aggravated assault to fund their habit. England’s biggest war casualties occurred in the region of Helmand, the world’s hotbed of opium and the country’s highest concentration of solar panels.

What a bitter twist of wartime irony this is. Britain was the first country from the West to invade Afghanistan in the mid-1800s; in part to increase the production and trade of opium to the Chinese through the East India Company as part of the Opium Wars between Great Britain and China.

Opium in China was first used for medicinal purposes, but by 1840 millions of Chinese were addicted. The United States saw this as an opportunity and a few decades later were dropping cigarettes from airplanes in China in an effort to supplant the Chinese addiction to opium with an addiction to nicotine. Journalist and East Asian writer, John Pomfret, notes that in the

“1890s, only a few people smoked. By 1933, the Chinese were puffing on a hundred billion cigarettes a year, more than any other nation except the United States.”

Great Britain invaded Afghanistan from India, a country they colonized a century earlier. Still smarting from their failure to gain control in the Americas, they reluctantly turned to the east. To conquer Afghanistan, they enlisted poor Indians as low ranking infantry and invaded Afghanistan in 1839. The British claim they were fearful the Russians would take control of this strategic trading route, but Afghans on the ground tell a different story. It seems what the British were really worried about was parts of India being invaded by growing numbers of Persians and Afghans who opposed British imperialism.

Indians put up a fight when England invaded India, just as Indigenous Americans did. Afghanistan was no different. War is ugly by any dimension, but the Europeans (and Americans) have an established reputation among victims of invasion for being particularly ruthless. Much attention is given to the atrocious behavior of the Taliban against women, but very little to none is given to how British, and their low ranking Indian infantrymen, treated women upon invading Afghanistan. Women of this region were formidable fighters during this time, leading thousands in battle and inspiring many more through poetry to take arms in defense of their homeland from encroaching colonial imperialists.

In 2018, Farrukh Husain, a Muslim Afghan history researcher, published a book called Afghanistan in the Age of Empires: The Great Game for South and Central Asia. It is one of the few, if not only, books written by a Muslim Afghan for a Western audience about the history of this region as told from someone with ancestral ties to these events. He reveals the power and leadership Afghan women held in those days. He writes of a battle near Helmand, where solar panels now dot the desert,

“…no contemporary author has written about the first such charge by a burka clad woman against the British, during May 1842, to avenge her husband’s death at the head of thousands of Afghans, which took place…in…Helmand.”

One month later, on June 17, 1842, British Brigadier General Thomas Monteath led troops into a peaceful remote village called Ali Baghan where they proceeded to rape and plunder.

The English language newspaper out of Calcutta, India, the Bengal Hurkaru, reported,

“To ravage and burn villages, and to violate the women inhabiting them, are not precisely the best measures calculated to restore the honour of Great Britain. We talk about national disgrace, and begin ravaging villages and violating helpless women, as though any misfortunes could disgrace us so irredeemably as these crimes.  A miserable hamlet about six miles from Jellalabad, on the Peshawaur side, is assailed by a brigade of British troops, who happen to find some accoutrements belonging to the men of the 44th; the village was given up to plunder, the women were violated, and the tenements burned.“

Atrocities like this and violence against women continue to this day in Afghanistan. The United States is no better as evidenced by the methods of torture throughout the United State’s so-called ‘War on Terror’. And while we continue to be bombarded with stories through Western media about how the United States was in Afghanistan helping to liberate Afghan women, I suggest you read this May 2021 article by Farrukh Husain as an alternative and local narrative.

Or if you have trouble trusting a Muslim Afghan man writing on Afghan women, check out this bit of ethnographic research from Dr. Teresa Koloma Beck, called Liberating the Women of Afghanistan: An ethnographic journey through a humanitarian intervention where she asserts the West’s

“humanitarian engagement further politicized the category of gender and, hence, amplified its importance. Yet, as in other places of the world, it also served to perform and reproduce ideal-typical images of the Western Self.”

CLIMATE MATTERS MORAL TATTERS

Climate change is expected to bring more unrest to Afghanistan and areas like it around the world. One report from the United State’s National Institute of Health reports, “both short-term shocks, such as natural disasters and associated losses of livelihood opportunities, as well as longer-term stressors, such as growing scarcity of resources associated with drought, can increase the risk of instability.” That instability can include armed conflict, as evidence by one Syrian conflict that “at least partially driven by drought, has, estimated conservatively, resulted in over 143,000 deaths as of 2016.”

These poor countries will need the help of rich countries if we care at all about saving the lives of humans and non-humans alike. But the West has to reckon with our past if we’re to be trusted with the future. We’re not very good at owning up to our mistakes or rubbing our own noses in the atrocities we inflicted on innocent people through an unbridled need to perpetuate our greed. Claiming moral superiority while killing people already suffering the effects of climate change – as Obama did with over 540 drone strikes during his presidency – should make us pause and reflect on our ethical standing. Whether it’s in the name of God or in pursuit of gold, the United States (and many other countries, clans, and conquerors) have a way of conveniently justifying colonial conquest, rape, abduction, torture, slavery, or genocide.

The 18th century English feminist writer and philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft, put it efficiently and accurately when she wrote:

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, which is the good he seeks.”

To sell our message of ‘good’, the United States also has what our victims of evil don’t have; a well crafted and well funded media machine – spanning the political spectrum – to lull the masses into a sometimes angry and sometimes celebrated, numbing complicity. But like any addiction, the more you feed it the harder it is to break. And this country, and our military, is addicted to aggression.

But Norway is one country that is taking a step back. As current chairs of the UN Security Council they issued a public statement on the recent plight of Afghanistan on August 16th asking the international community to be “willing and able to relate to, co-operate with, and support a future, new Afghan government in which the Taliban participates.”

But long before that, sensing the confluence of social and climate induced unrest and reflecting the West’s track record on foreign interventions, the Norwegian Minister of International Development funded research to better understand the successes and failures of climate mitigation strategies and efforts from the West. Their report titled, Adaptation Interventions and Their Effect on Vulnerability in Developing Countries: Help, Hindrance or Irrelevance?, came out in May of this year.

The study’s highlights read like this:

* “Adaptation interventions may reinforce, redistribute or create new vulnerability.

* Retrofitting adaptation into existing development agendas risks maladaptation.

* Overcoming these challenges demands engaging more deeply with the local context of vulnerability.

* Real involvement of marginalised groups is required to improve use of climate finance.

* Unless adaptation is rethought, transformation may also worsen vulnerability.”

What they found among the 60 internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability are four consistent themes:

*        Shallow understanding of the context of local vulnerability;

*        Inequitable stakeholder participation in both design and implementation;

*        A retrofitting of adaptation into existing development agendas;

*        A lack of critical engagement with how ‘adaptation success’ is defined.

Inequality is evident everywhere we look: income, race, religion, gender, social status, cultural norms, transportation, and so many more. Add to that environmental inequality. What these researchers concluded is that unless we start by first focusing on equality, no amount of government, private, or corporate funding of technological or financial fixes will matter. For example, building a sea wall, dam, or dike to stem flooding rivers or rising seas can easily be celebrated and manipulated into appearing to make progress on climate change. But if those efforts steal water from an Indigenous tribe, or limit physical access to schools of disadvantaged families, then simply throwing money at them or subsidizing a move to the city does not constitute an equitable solution that is sensitive to their local context of vulnerability. But it’s easy to see where such engineering feats would fit an existing corporate or governmental agenda, possibly even win sustainability awards, or get endorsed by a Western celebrity complete with a selfie that goes viral.

Don’t get me wrong, getting solar technology scaled to the point where a poor Afghan farmer could afford it is a marvel of technology and a demonstration of the positive effects of innovation in free-market capitalism. But if it also results in the increase of heroin worldwide, how can we feel good about the outcome? The vast majority of heroin in the United States doesn’t come from Afghanistan, it comes from the deserts of Mexico where surely solar pumps are also being sold. In 2018, marijuana sold for $80 per kilogram in the United States. Meanwhile, heroin sold for $35,000 per kilogram. What would it take to persuade those Mexican farmers to grow vegetables instead of opium? And what kind of moral standing can America have as we lead the world in drug disorders and are the number one consumer of opioids – with heroin as the second leading cause of overdose behind pain relievers.

Afghan women are number two behind United States women in drug disorders. Is that what we mean when we claim we liberated Afghan women? Few women in Afghanistan, especially under Taliban rule, have access to their own land; a clear inequality that needs addressed. But there was a bright spot for Afghan women and farming in recent years in a good example of what appears to be a more equitable climate intervention.

Ghuncha Gul, and Afghan farmer, always dreamed of owning her own farm. With the help of the United Nations Development Program she fulfilled that dream in 2018 by offering her training, land, and resources for her own greenhouse and beehives. Her village friends now affectionately call her ‘honey’ عسل.  She proudly admitted,

“Women in villages work just as hard as men. In fact, we work alongside the men." Two hundred years ago, she just may have been leading the men.

As money wielding climate adaptation efforts take shape by the privileged and powerful around the world, let’s ensure people like Ghuncha are given equal rights and their knowledge and customs are understood and respected. In the process of co-designing and implementing climate adaptation strategies in the context of local inhabitants of their land, let’s also make sure we leave the exchange more enlightened than the Age of Enlightenment, more righteous than Western imperialism, and more informed than the Western propaganda machines leave us believing we are. Maybe if we do, these people will return the favor when we discover our own crisis have left us equally, if not more, vulnerable.

Hello Interactors,

This has been an eventful week, but also a week of more extreme heat and smoke. Just when climatologists warned of the certainty of more extreme weather patterns. I’m ready for fall and we’re barely halfway through summer. My plants are struggling too. Does anybody out there know how we’re going to adapt?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE RIGHT TURNS LEFT FOR RIGHTS

Monday of this week, August 9th, was International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Did you know that? What about Tuesday, August 10th. That was the anniversary of the Pueblo Revolt in what we now call New Mexico. In 1680, the Pueblo people forced 2000 Spanish colonial settlers off their land. Given this was the first example of American people rejecting European rule, some consider this to be America’s first Revolutionary War – nearly 100 years before the more popular version. Oh, and on Wednesday, August 11th my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. But even fewer people know about that historical date.

The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples was created by the United Nations in 1994. The date honors August 9th, 1982; the first day of meetings for the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations. This group’s mandate was to:

* Promote and protect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Indigenous peoples;

* Give attention to the evolution of international standards concerning Indigenous rights.

August 9th celebrates the achievements and contributions Indigenous people have made, and continue to make, to governance, stewardship of the environment, and knowledge systems aimed at improving many of the challenges our world’s environment’s face today.

Indigenous people make up 5% of the world’s population and use one quarter of its habitable surface. But, they protect in reciprocity 80% of the world’s biodiversity.

The UN defines Indigenous People as:

“Inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment.”

The United Nations’ recognition of the sovereign rights of Indigenous people stems from the International Indian Treaty Council which grew out of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s and 70s. The United Nations recognized the rights of Indigenous people before the United States did. In fact, when the United Nations put the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to vote in 2007, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia voted against the declaration. They have since reversed this vote, but the American Indian Movement had long recognized the United States was in violation of treaties signed over the last 300 years. So acting as sovereign nations – that happen to reside within a larger, dominant, and controlling nation – they turned to the United Nations for recognition.

Much of the legally binding language used in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples comes from the legal language written into the original treaties by the United States. Which is why the conservative originalist from the West, Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch, sided with liberals last year in a landmark ruling over McGirt v. Oklahoma. The Supreme Court determined that much of that state was legally ceded to Indigenous people by the United States Federal government two centuries ago and it was high time the country obeyed their own laws. The year prior, Gorsuch did the same in the state of Wyoming. Oddly, the recently deceased Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a darling of the left, has a mixed record voting in favor of Indigenous people. A 2021 article from Cornell University states,

“During Justice Ginsburg’s first 15 years on the court, 38 Indian law cases were argued. The rights of Indigenous nations prevailed in only seven of those cases. Indigenous nations lost in eight of nine Indian law cases for which she wrote the court’s decision.”

After the Oklahoma ruling, John Echohawk from the Native American Rights Fund – an organization that has spent 50 years fighting for Indigenous rights – was quoted as saying,

“This [case] brings these issues into public consciousness a little bit more…That’s one of the biggest problems we have, is that most people don’t know very much about us.”

It seems Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of those people.

John Echohawk is following in the footsteps of those who kicked off the American Indian Movement back in 1968, drawing attention to Indigenous rights. Their focus was on the systematic poverty and police brutality toward Urban Indian’s who had been forced off of their land and into cities for generations. This Indigenous grassroots movement rose out of the city that was recently put the international map for its display of obvious police brutality – Minneapolis, Minnesota.

GRANDMA KILLS A CHICKEN

I was not yet three years old when the American Indian Movement was born. I grew up about 250 miles due south of Minneapolis, in Norwalk, Iowa. It’s a suburb of Des Moines surrounded by farmland – much of which is being converted to housing developments. We didn’t live on a farm, but we always had a garden. I wasn’t that keen on gardening as a kid, but I wasn’t shy about eating the beans, corn, and potatoes that Iowa’s rich soil and climate yielded. My Mom’s surefire way to get me motivated to weed the garden or pick beans was to say, “Ok, you’re going to want to eat these beans once their picked, so maybe you should be the one picking them.”

My parents learned to garden from their parents. My Grandma on my Mom’s side always had a big garden. It ran the width of her backyard and was flanked by a dirt alley on one side and a shed on the other. Off to the side of the yard was a rusty barrel I remember being as tall as me. That’s where we’d burn her garbage; now that was a job I enjoyed. I’d haul a bag full of stuff to the barrel, step up on a log nestled next to it, dump in the combustible waste, and drop a fiery wooden match on top of it. Poof. Those trips to the barrel also included carrying a bucket of kitchen scraps into the garden. We’d dig a hole with a shovel, dump the smelly scraps into the hole, and cover it up. Direct injection composting.

My grandparents also kept chickens in the backyard. Our trips to grandma’s house on Sundays usually included a fresh chicken from her yard and vegetables from her garden. She’d walk out back, chase down a chicken, wring its neck, chop its head off, and get to pluckin’.

Occasionally, my uncle Bud would show up with a pheasant or two (or three) strung out in his trunk, shot with his shotgun on his way to grandma’s house. I was always careful to avoid eating the lead shot dotting the glistening meat like embedded peppercorns. In the summer, dinner ended with a bowl of fresh berries and cream from a cow just down the road. But most of the time, it was pie. My grandma made a pie – using lard for the crust – almost everyday until the day she died.

My grandparents on my Dad’s side had a garden and a few apple trees too. My Dad was born in the depression into a family with 11 siblings in the same town my Mom was born. He and his brothers and sisters lived off of the eggs from the chickens they kept. In the dead of winter, they’d hunt squirrels and hang them from the clothesline in the backyard where they’d freeze stiff; more protein to feed hungry mouths during Iowa’s harsh winters. My grandma Weed made a loaf of bread everyday to feed all those hungry tummies.

I am one generation removed from that lifestyle and I’m having trouble keeping a single pepper plant alive. My parents were not farmers, and we did not hunt, but they had learned how to grow and hunt enough food to keep a family alive. Sure their childhood tables were also augmented with store-bought foods, but there was a concerted effort to grow, eat, can, and store as much food as possible. That desire and knowledge seems to get lost with every generation.

Many of the techniques my parents and grandparents used to grow food was taught to them by their European ancestry – knowledge that was passed down from generation to generation. Settlers settling farms and homesteads across America brought with them agricultural methods taught to them in their European homeland. One such convention are rows of segregated crops; a row of beans, a row of squash, and a row of corn, for example. But that’s not how those crops were being grown by people they found here already farming this land.

THREE SISTERS SHARE

Colonial settlers were clueless as to what to do with corn when they first arrived. The locals did teach them to farm corn, a plant first domesticated 10,000 years ago by the Indigenous people in what we now call Mexico. But, in return, some puritanical settlers thought they could show these folks a thing or two about farming. Dismayed by the untidiness made from the climbing clumps of squash at the base of corn stalks gently strangled by spiraling bean vines, the settlers went about mansplaining how to properly plant plants in neat tidy rows – one for corn, one for beans, and one for squash.

But it turns out planting each of these crops to grow alone yields fewer ears of corn, beans, and squash. What the native farmers had learned over those 10,000 years is that when you plant these three plants next to one another, they uniquely help each other above and below ground to grow and prosper. Native people call this method of planting The Three Sisters and it was often planted in waffle-like gardens that create gridded microclimates.

The first sister born is corn. It peaks its head out of the soil in the spring and shoots up straight like a pole. With enough growth to stand on its own, sister bean is born. Bean vines quickly start swirling in circles in search of something to cling on to – like a blindfolded kid playing pin the tail on the donkey. It latches onto the knees of it’s older sister, corn, and they grow toward the sun together. Then comes baby sister squash, crawling along the ground eager to choose its own path in the shadows of its older siblings.

The baby sister, with its broad abundant leaves, helps shade the soil trapping water destined for the three sister’s roots in its water retaining waffle divot. It also keeps sun from tempting pesky weeds from popping up. All three sisters need nitrogen to grow, but lack the ability to siphon it from the air – despite the fact our atmosphere is made up of 78% nitrogen gas.

What these Indigenous people learned over centuries of ecological observation and experimentation is that beans are the secret to providing the missing nitrogen. And Western science has proved it by providing the tools necessary to observe and understand the microscopic biological mechanisms that allow this genesis to unfold. Indigenous people knew it to be true, and Western science allowed it to be seen and described in consistent, repeatable, mathematical, and physical terms that transcend languages, cultures, and geographical boundaries.

What we now know is that nitrogen comes from a fastidious underground bacteria called Rhizobium. It loves to make nitrogen, but only under special conditions. For starters, it needs to be free of oxygen. Given soil is filled with oxygen, it needs to find a suitable host willing to provide an oxygen free environment. As sister bean sends her many roots in all directions it invariably encounters the lingering Rhizobium nodules. Through microscopic chemical communications, the two strike a deal. In exchange for the much needed nitrogen, the bean root provides an oxygen-free nitrogen manufacturing facility for the bacteria; the benefactors of this underground nitrogen source are not only the beans, but her sisters, corn and squash, as well.

I learned all this from Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi tribal member as well as the Distinguished Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, at the State University of New York. She sums up this symphony of familial biological reciprocity in her landmark book, Braiding Sweetgrass, with a lesson for us all – not just plants. A lesson taught and practiced by Indigenous people for generations. She writes,

“The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others. Being among the sisters provides a visible manifestation of what a community can become when its members understand and share their gifts. In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies.”

There was one more big event this week from another UN organization called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is a team of climate researchers from around the world and they came out this week to report what they’ve been saying all along about climate change, but this time with an unequivocal warning. The extreme weather events we’re experiencing is indisputably caused by humans. Oh, that’s us. Past reports have used words like may and could but scientists have tossed away their gloves and came out swinging this week. We’re in trouble and it may not be reversible.

Three years ago I ripped out my lawn and planted drought tolerant succulents. Well, the raccoons had the idea first I just went along with it. When the Northwest had its hottest June on record, the sun sucked the life out of plants that are naturally equipped to withstand prolonged heat. Some of the leaves didn’t just shrivel, they nearly evaporated. My backdoor neighbor’s peppers looked like they had roasted on the vine.

On Wednesday night I was talking to a restoration ecologist who works for the City of Kirkland. He organizes teams of volunteers across the city to help eradicate invasive species and plant natives in their place. When I asked him about one park filled with tall lush cedars and firs along Interstate 405 that also features a mining pit at one end where the state dug for gravel to build the freeway, he talked of the struggles getting plants to grow on this compromised soil. He went on to explain how they’ve decided to pick a species that can handle not only the rocky soil, but also the increasing temperatures in Western Washington. So they’re trying a tree more commonly found on the more arid side of Washington state, the ponderosa pine.

One of the big takeaways in listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book is that while we humans have a way of beating ourselves up over the damage we’ve caused the environment, we also have the capacity (and the obligation) to help heal it. When we care for the earth, it cares for us in return in a symbiotic act of reciprocity. Indigenous people figured this out eons ago and the hubris of “Enlightened” European colonial settlers regarded their ways as “savage”. I’m not advocating for some romantic pastoral nirvana where we all trade our homes for huts, tend to our own chickens, and live off the land. But I do believe we live among millions of people who possess ancestral knowledge that, when paired with modern science and technology, could yield a more fruitful outcome. Many cultures living together on the same soil exchanging nutrients and knowledge in an act of reciprocity that benefits us all as individuals and as a global community faced with few alternatives for survival.

Hello Interactors,

I’ve spent many a night this week watching the Olympics. I’m also trying to get back into running shape; which to me feels like training for the Olympics. It demands a lot of energy and patience, but also reaps a lot of rewards — like ice cream. But I’ve also been thinking back to the energy my family consumed flying across the country and then driving all over New England. We rarely give it a second thought, but we humans expend a lot of energy. And we’ve been doing more and more of it for some time.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WINNING GOLD ON THE COUCH

I love watching athletes compete at the Olympics. The power and grace exhibited by the world’s best athletes is a wonder. I imagine burgeoning, and aging, every-day athletes around the world running, jumping, gunning, pumping, throwing, and rowing just a little harder over these few weeks – inspired by super-human performance. It takes an amazing amount of skill and energy to run 23 miles an hour over 100 meters; as the world’s fastest human, Usain Bolt, did in 2012.

To go fast requires generating force that is transferred from the body into the ground. Athletes competing for gold in the 100 meter dash create five times the force of their body weight to hit that those speeds. This week I watched Athing Mu win the first U.S. Olympic medal since 1968 in the Women’s 800 meter. I marveled at her ability to generate the required force to hit the speed necessary to both lead the race and win while conserving just enough to endure the full 800 meters (two laps around the track). This event is eight times longer than the 100 meter race, but Mu was still creating upwards of 3.5 times her body weight in force.

Sprinters spend more time in the air then they do on the ground. Generating 5 times their body weight in force requires them to lift their knees high enough to transfer energy through their feet and into the ground. Marathoners, in contrast, spend more time on the ground than they do in the air. They have to spread the necessary force to win running over 42 kilometers or 26 miles in two hours. To do this, they lengthen their stride to conserve energy thus minimizing the time their feet spend in the air. This excellent interactive piece by the New York Times breaks it all down with videos and graphs.

Having evolved from hunter gatherers, our bodies are tuned to conserve energy. We take well advantage of the first law of thermodynamics: in a closed system (like our bodies) energy isn’t created or destroyed, but is instead transferred. Metabolism is a good example. It takes energy from the food we consume and transfers it to energy the body needs to function. Our ability to sweat, while sometimes annoying and uncomfortable, is another example of the first law of thermodynamics. It gave us a sizable advantage over other species by cooling our body while tracking prey on the wide open savannah; or chasing down a competitor for an Olympic gold medal.

I too was expending energy sitting on the couch with my bowl of ice cream watching 19 year old Athing Mu dominate her competition. I was creating around 100 watts of energy just sitting on my butt, whereas Athing Mu would have been generating 20 times that at 2000 watts. Active humans moving about the earth expend an average of 120 watts of energy a day – enough to power a very bright old fashioned light bulb. But I was actually expending way more energy than Athing Mu. There was electricity powering my TV, my satellite receiver, and the amplifier powering my speakers. That says nothing of the triangulated satellites circling the earth, the equipment in Tokyo broadcasting the signal, and all the cameras, microphones, and computers needed to entertain me.

And what about the energy that went into my ice cream. The oil extraction for the fertilizer for the grain that fed the cows, the gas in the tractors that grew the grain, the trucks and trains that delivered the grain, the lights in the barn, the machinery for milking, the truck that picked up and delivered the milk, the cascading energy flowing through the steely factory that made the ice cream, the many trucks (and their refrigerators) that delivered the product, the energy to run the freezer and lights in the store, the energy in our car that drove to the store and back, and our own refrigerator keeping it cold. All so I could satisfy a craving for sugar while pressing buttons on my remote control. Sugar: a product that requires delivery on container ship from an island half in the middle of the Pacific half way from my home to Japan where the race was unfolding.

THE MEASURE OF PLEASURE

Simply sitting there I generated way more watts than an Olympian. Gold medal for me! In addition to our body’s naturally occurring metabolism, we’re all part of what is known as social metabolism. This is the flow of energy through and between nature and our global societies. In addition to biological ecosystems and metabolisms made of plants and animals, the globe’s human occupants have created an industrial ecology with its own metabolism. To fulfill our lifestyle industries extract natural resources, transform them into products and services, and we humans gobble them up. The more people on the planet yearn and earn the money needed to climb out of poverty and up the social ladder, the more energy and materials flow through the system. Just like animals, the more we eat the greater the waste; the faster the pace, the greater the heat. So, hooray for humanity, we’re winning the poverty race! But, boo for humanity, we can’t sustain this commodity consuming pace.

Commodity is derived from the Latin word commoditas which means amenity or convenience.  Most commodities are raw materials extracted from the earth like oil, iron, or gas. But they can also be basic resources that are grown and farmed like the milk and sugar in my ice cream. Prior to the practice of agriculture, humans were left to feed off of the fruits of the naturally occurring landscape. They had to walk or run in search of their commodities. It meant having to spread out in small bands roaming the earth for basic energy providing resources.

But once humans figured out how to colonize plants and animals the amount of metabolic energy available from food became proportional to the land available to them. The practice of agriculture represents a fundamental shift in biological metabolism that occurred in select spots around the world soon after the ice age over 10,000 years ago. Within 1000 years the dispersed geographies of New Guinea, East Asia, West Africa, the Amazon, and the Andes – all places completely cut off from communication with each other – discovered the practice of agriculture.

They could also concentrate and conserve their energy within a designed and confined space. The more land they had the more food they could grow, animals they could raise, and time and energy they could spend on other things. This allowed for the invention of improved farming equipment, optimized farming techniques, and conflict resolution over available space.

Quantitative historians like Ian Morris and Jared Diamond study the intersection of resources, energy, and societies over time and narrow in on geography as a major driver of increased social metabolism. Morris documents his methods in his 2013 book, The Measure of Civilization. With empirically derived models, Morris landed on the premise that it was physical geography that determined the West’s rise in global domination more than the great White man’s intellect, religion, politics, or genetic lines.

Oxford Geography professor, Yadvinder Malhi, has taken the data Morris provided and calculated the social metabolism of societies over time. You might imagine a steady linear growth of social metabolism as nomadic hunter-gatherer societies morphed into organized agricultural societies, but the curve is more exponential featuring anomalous peaks and valleys here and there. There’s also evidence that the West indeed had a bit of a jump on the East stemming from the Mesopotamia’s initial forays into agriculture. (Morris considers Mesopotamia as West in his historical analysis) But once China latched onto agricultural practices 1000 years later, the social metabolism of the East and West more or less rose together.

But clearly the data shows something significant has happened in the last few thousand years. From roughly 2000 BCE/BC to today we see a steep exponential climb in social metabolism, from around 1000-1500 Watts per person to 2000-2500 leading up to the first century CE/AD and then a precipitous decline back down below 2000 Watts person. The decline halted sooner for the East than the West and then the East began to rise again as the West continued to fall.

In examining that period more closely we see social metabolism stagnated at around 2000 Watts per person from 500 CE/AD until the 1700’s when social metabolism began a meteoric rise – shown as nearly vertical lines on an exponential curve – to over 4000 Watts per person today. Shown together in the context of historical societal development, Malhi shows the peak of that metabolic mountain occurred in the middle of the Roman Empire in the West and the Han Dynasty in the East. But as both of these dominant realms declined, so did their social metabolism.

Around 500 CE/AD the data shows the West continued to decline as the East began to rise. Then, in 900 CE/AD, China’s Song (Sung) Dynasty emerged. There is increasing evidence revealing how much more advanced Chinese civilizations were during this era than in Europe. China’s national income was triple that of Europe in the 12th century as their population doubled over the preceding two centuries. By the end of the Song dynasty around the 13th century China had over 200 million people – the largest population in the world. Europe’s Middle Ages population peak is estimated to be only 75 million people.

THE HUMAN’S RACE

The growth of the Song dynasty led to the increase in cities, the invention of the world’s first paper money, and the decline of centralized governmental control of the bank. The first movable-type made of ceramics allowed for broad dissemination of knowledge and culture; as did the invention of the first compass depicting true north. Coupled with the world’s first organized and sustained navy and the first chemical formula for gun powder, it’s easy to see how China was a formidable power capable of expansion around the world. And a growing social metabolism.

Their growth came about through the expansion of commodities. They perfected the cultivation of rice in the regions of central and southern Song and created markets and exchanges that utilized early ripened rice from southern regions. Soon rice products and other foodstuffs could be created and sold as commodities in an economy that was expanding in numbers and complexity as the population swelled.

Malhi theorizes the decline and stabilization of social metabolism through the Song dynasty, and China through to the 1700s, was a limit on the land necessary to grow agricultural energy. It’s a plight that can be argued for medieval feudalism in Europe as well during roughly the same time period. Societies that enter into a metabolic limit become vulnerable to various economic, societal, and climatic shocks to their system. We are all witnessing just how devastating the spread of disease can be to a society; or how income inequality can lead to societal strife; or a single storm can wipe out 90,000 square miles of farm land creating $13 Billion of economic loss in a single day.

But humans adapt when our potential goes untapped. With the dawn of the 16th century came the European age of enlightenment and a shift in societal, economic, and intellectual dominance from the West. We also learned energy for fuel need not only come from the carbon stored in the wood that surrounds us, but from ancient deposits made of fossils buried deep in time and in the ground. The industrial age introduced fossil fuels — a source of energy more dense than any society had ever experienced prior. And today, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, we still rely on oil and coal to fuel a seemingly insatiable appetite for increasing social metabolism.

But things are changing. This week the Wall Street Journal reported banks, including Chinese banks, are curtailing funding for new coal-fueled power plants in countries like Viet Nam and Bangladesh. However, within the borders of China and India — the world’s largest populations of rising social metabolism — they still have plans to expand coal-fueled power plants.

And while oil companies are enjoying their biggest profits since the onset of the pandemic, they’re deciding not to invest this windfall in additional oil exploration and refinery expansion. Facing pressure from investors, they’re instead assessing the shift to renewables. While predictions of peak-oil have stymied prognosticators since 1919, perhaps we’re entering a time when the market will decide when enough is enough.

Speaking of predictions. I could have predicted the U.S. men’s 100 meter relay team would have not made even the semi-finals this week. A country (and sport) known for its individualism, our U.S. Track and Field organization routinely struggles with coming together to run as a team for the Olympics. The great American sprinter, Carl Lewis, agrees in a Tweet he issued just after the race while coaching some young amateur athletes.

It wasn’t so much a matter of metabolic performance, these were some of the fastest and physically trained men on the planet, but it was a matter of failed hand-offs in the transition zone. You lose the race if you can’t master handing the baton to the next athlete on your team. Any relay athlete will tell you that and it requires a lot of discipline and practice.

Looking at the data and analysis Morris and Malhi provided, each generation in the East and the West, from the 17th century to today, have successfully handed the baton to the next generation in a progressive race of growing industrial and social metabolism. With the help of historical and predictive modelling, many historians, climatologists, and ecologists have identified the finish line of our biosphere. We’re all a part of a generational relay race and the finish line is fast approaching. Let’s all do future generations waiting to run their leg of human endeavor a favor and not botch the hand off.

Hello Interactors,

My family and I are safely back home in Kirkland, Washington. It feels good to be home and dry and mosquito free. Reflecting on our visit to assorted colleges and the words uttered by students giving campus tours and admission counselor pitches, I imagined my kids embarking on their collegiate journeys. It’s a grand opportunity to pattern-match what you know and what you love with what a school can offer. The trick is finding a pattern that is close and then adapting to the environment or finding an environment that can adapt to your pattern. Is there such a school?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

RELIGHTING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

We’ve all experienced movies and TV shows where the camera slowly pans across a vast landscape, often with mountains and steep valleys. And then, just as your eye registers wilderness, our visual sense is rewarded by the sound of a screeching, soaring bird echoing through the valley. It’s a Hollywood convention that blends suggestive artistry with the absoluteness of nature. Sometimes the sound of the screech is accompanied by the image of an eagle. That’s when my daughter and I look each other and roll our eyes and think to ourselves, “That’s not an eagle.”

We got to witness the true marrying of the bird with that sound while sitting on the deck at my sister-in-law’s house in Connecticut. And right on cue, my daughter and I looked at each other with jaws agape only to return our squinting gaze back to the sky as a hawk soared above us unleashing that familiar sound. Our senses, primed by the repetitive artificiality of film, were substantiated by the naturally occurring biology of a bird. The blending of art and science.

Arts and humanities have been separated from math and science through decades of academic and societal tribalism. But don’t tell our brains that. It really can’t tell the difference. Our family can’t either. My wife and I found this overlap to be our grounding attraction. Separately growing up finding fascination and success in blending the arts with mathematics; we continue to insist the braiding of these individual strands yields a stronger rope. Nature and nurture has seemingly put our kids on similar paths.

Our daughter is equally adept at communicating with the environment as she is drawing it. She recently went to the Seattle Zoo to draw some animals. When she approached the tiger cage, alone, the tiger rose, stretched, and chuffed – an audible non-threatening breathy snort through the nose typically reserved for another feline friend or zookeeper. The big cat then proceeded to pose for her. She has a way with animals. She also immerses herself in the mystical ancient worlds of Chinese fiction and then exquisitely draws the scenes from memory. As she focuses her college search, she’s attracted to programs that will teach her mind to invent and her hands to make interpretations of both natural and imaginary worlds.

Our son is more interested finance and economics. As a self-proclaimed car nut, perhaps he’s driven by the immediate desire to amass enough money to own his own exotic car collection. Or maybe as a budding car photographer he too is attracted to programs that celebrate the blending of arts and sciences. After all, despite attempts in recent decades to attach economics to rational mathematical certainty, it is still a branch of the social sciences. And it’s confounded by the interwoven and interdependent uncertainties of human behavior who’s desire to attain worldly possessions is bounded by the limits of our natural resources.

In the words of esteemed biologist, E. O. Wilson, from his book Consilience – The Unity of Knowledge:

“But the theorists cannot answer definitively most of the key macroeconomic questions that concern society, including the … strength of ”externalities” such as the deteriorating global environment. The world economy is a ship speeding through uncharted waters strewn with dangerous shoals. There is no general agreement on how it works. The esteem that economists enjoy arises not so much from their record of successes as from the fact that business and government have no where else to turn.”

Wilson goes on to argue that of all the fields in social science, economics, as it was intended to be studied and practiced, is furthest along the path of integrating the arts and sciences. Economics has embraced the lucidity of calculus and analytical geometry that advanced fields like physics, chemistry, and biology.

But it was the behavior of the physical environment that inspired Newton to invent the language of calculus to describe it. It was through the manipulation of environmental conditions that he arrived at the mass and distance laws of gravity and three laws of motion – all in the span of just three years. For the first time the world had a way of consistently and empirically describing and understanding astronomical orbs in motion and earthly sand in the ocean. Poet Alexander Pope summed up Newton’s nudging of the world from darkness in two lines:

"Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

FROM NEWTON TO NEEDHAM

Newton’s influence on the age of Enlightenment cannot be understated. Once great thinkers of the time realized the power of analyzing and describing complex phenomena in repeatable, fundamental terms, they sought ways to apply it. In 1835 Belgian astronomer and mathematician, Adolphe Quetelet, asked why not apply these methods to social phenomena? Soon the field of “social physics” was born; what we now call sociology. Quetelet was interested in applying statistical methods to the social sciences believing they could help explain phenomena like crime rates, marriage rates, and suicide rates.

He was criticized by other scientists for assuming such events had an explanation other than freedom of rational choice. Here we are 186 years later and many in the social science of economics still believe humans are rational actors and insist personal choice will ultimately lead to our collective good; despite a world economy with historic income inequality, exploitive labor practices, fragile global supply chains, extractive capitalistic markets, and dwindling natural resources. Their math does not compute.

The enlightenment’s insistence on precise reduction of the natural world into mathematical minutia was the work of Newton’s predecessor, the inventor of algebraic geometry and modern philosophy, and France’s preeminent scientist, René Descartes. He believed that because the world exists in three dimensions, it should be described in three dimensions. I spent last spring focused on the chopping of America into a grid made of dots named after Descartes: the Cartesian coordinate system.

Descartes vision for a unified knowledge grounded in a fundamental reduction of the world into mathematical terms came to him in 1619 in a single night of successive dreams. He recognized everything in the world, from rainfall to reasoning, results from cause and effect. This rational description of naturally occurring phenomena is what led him to marry the idea of physics with medicine to create the field of biology.

But as a devote Catholic and a believer in God as the perfect creator, he had a conflict to resolve. He solved it by creating the separation of mind and body. With one phrase, I think, therefore I am, he was able to justify the idea of God as being all powerful in his head while his body was of this world and thus scientifically testable and mathematically measurable.

Some historians believe is was this logical and rational separation that fueled the explosion of scientific discovery throughout three centuries of Enlightenment in a Europe dominated by religious belief, power, and control. An era of discovery unique to Europe. British scientist and historian, Joseph Needham, spent most of his career trying to understand and explain why countries like China and India didn’t have their own ‘Enlightenment’ given their advancements in science that predated European discoveries.

In 1969 he posited what has become known as “The Needham Question.”  He asked,

“Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo.”

He was particularly interested in why the same discoveries “had not developed in Chinese civilization.” After all, Needham pointed out later, in 1985, that even one of the founders of the Enlightenment, Francis Bacon,

“had selected three inventions, paper and printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass, which had done more than (anything else), he thought, to transform completely the modern world and mark it off from the antiquity of the Middle Ages. He regarded the origins of these inventions as ‘obscure and inglorious’ and he died without ever knowing that all of them were Chinese.”

In 1937 three Chinese students came to study at Cambridge where Needham was doing work in biochemistry. One of these students, Shen Shih-Chang, studied under Needham, another, Wang Ying-lai, went on to be the first to create a synthetic insulin, and the third, Lu Gwei-djen, was a biochemist and historian who taught Needham Chinese and went on to co-author the influential book, Science and Civilisation in China with Needham.

Their knowledge of science and history inspired him to take many extended trips to China to meet and consult with an array of Chinese scholars, artists, and scientists. His commitment to this cross-cultural exchange is what led him to co-found the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1945.

Needham concluded that China’s

“focus stayed on holistic properties and on the harmonious, hierarchical relationships of entities, from stars down to mountains and flowers and sand. In this world view the entities of Nature are inseparable and perpetually changing, not discrete and constant as perceived by the Enlightenment thinkers. As a result the Chinese never hit upon the entry point of abstraction and break-apart analytic research attained by European science in the seventeenth century.”

[Wilson: Consilience] As Needham’s interpretation of the history of Chinese science unfolded, he became increasingly convinced the ancient spiritual belief of Taoism played a central role in their discoveries and advancements.

THE TAO OF YOU

The word Tao is a Chinese word that can have many meanings depending on tonal variation. According to one Chinese dictionary, said one way it has 39 meanings all related to “way” or “path”, but if said with another variation it has six meanings related to “guide” or “lead.” Etymological scholars seem to agree on the root meaning: “to tend in a certain direction.” The Traditional Chinese characters for Tao pictorially construct such a meaning: 迪.   辶 ti  "walk" and , 由 yu  "to proceed from”. Taken together they can mean "follow a road," "go along," "lead", "direct", or "pursue the right path." Maybe we could add another popular English word the western world adopted, “enlightened.”

Like Needham, my daughter was also influenced by the presence of Chinese students. What started in middle school as an obsession with K-Pop has morphed into a fascination with a genre of Chinese fantasy novels called  仙侠, Xianxia. The literal translation is 仙 xian “immortal” 侠 xia “hero” and the novels feature mortal protagonists known as ‘cultivators’ who nurture life experiences and resources through struggle and pain to become immortal beings or xian. Like Needham’s interpretation of Chinese science, this genre draws heavily on Taoist beliefs and also Chinese martial arts. Cultivators are often students of Tao philosophy and they’re “following a road” in “pursuit of the right path”.

My daughter is enamored with the Taoist doctrine of living simply and honestly and in harmony with nature. It’s what she experiences in her Dr. Doolittle-esque interactions with animals, drawing them in their habitat, or even recreating scenes depicting twisted plots from one of 300 chapters found in her voluminous Chinese novels. The word plot was first meant to mean a building site. Then directors came along to plot areas on a stage for actors to enact a scene — for a story that we now refer to as a plot.   

We humans have been plotting through the visual arts, depicting stories of animals and humans interacting with people and place, for at least the last 30,000 years. Caves have allowed these images to remain all this time, but many scholars believe people were drawing on whatever they could find; countless images washed away by weather and time. What my daughter is doing is in her DNA. It’s in yours too.

Drawing is what provided a shortcut through Darwinian evolution. Before our brains were able to draw, pre-human creatures were stuck evolving at the same evolutionary rate as any other species. But once our brains became powerful enough to take what we saw in the world and then draw it, that knowledge could be stored for generations. Over successive iterations, the plot thickened.

By drawing scenes and telling stories humans could communicate between tribes and generations about what worked and what didn’t. The sound of the hawk screeching across the sky. What does it look like? What does it mean? We cheated the system of evolution through maps, drawings, and depictions of life and death; humans in search of advancement, economic utility, with minimal negative externalities. We drew images of struggle on the path of mortality in search of the right path; cultivating a journey to the immortality of our species through artistic genetic shortcuts. Without images our species would have evaporated ages ago. Given the climate crisis, and our economy that fuels it, what stories will the images tell to future generations?

Epigenetics is the study of how our behavior and our environment influence how our genes work. We shape our environment and our environment shapes us. We all inherit a set of DNA from nature, but epigenetic environmental changes alter how a DNA sequence is influenced. Nature and nurture. My wife and I have given our kids the genes they have and we’ve provided the environment for their DNA to be influenced. In another year they’ll be embarking on journeys into environments of their choosing learning new ways to shape their own DNA and the environment around them. Like the bird flying high in the sky, let’s hope they find ways to live simply and honestly and in harmony with nature. Let’s hope we all find the right path.