Lobelia (pukeweed), jewelweed, aloe and other totally natural pursuits

I never get tired of hearing bucks snort, but this morning one snorted repeatedly right outside my bedroom window just when I’d just decided to be lazy and sleep in.

So I changed my mind, listened to what the buck was telling me, and got moving.  I’ll take natural motivation wherever I can get it. Besides, I need to get some desk work done before the sun comes up and I’m ineluctably drawn outside to  enjoying the colors turn. My mother, die Naturfreunde, says if a colorful fall leaf lands on you and stays, you will have good luck.  You can’t try to make them land on you, it must be just serendiipity. Two did yesterday and I’m looking for another two doses of luck today.

We keep talking about sharing Meadowcreek with folks who would pay big bucks to have fall leaves land on them and such.  Untold hunters would love to see as many turkeys and deer as I do every day.  But we seldom get around  to inviting them.  Maybe we just want it for ourselves.  All I know is that I like it as it is. No need for any big changes.  Don’t fix something that works.

That’s the way I look at medicines too.  If it works, use it.  If it doesn’t, eschew it.  We have a lot of medicinal herbs at Meadowcreek.  Several here like to study them and be able to recognize them, but I don’t use them unless I know they work.  I’ve been afflicted by stinging nettle before, applied fresh jewelweed and the sting totally disappeared.  I’ve had bad burns and applied fresh aloe juice and the burn virtually disappeared.

But I use very few medicine, herbal or otherwise.  Anyone who advocates you use herbs or traditional medicines regularly is suspect to me. There are amost as many incompetents in herbal medicine as there are in traditional medicine, so watch out when people push an herbal supplement on you.  A little knowledge combined with blind faith in natural healing can be a dangerous thing.

First, beware anyone who suggests you consume anything they  don’t.  Especially if they are a physician (with emphasis on the “fee” in the first syllable).  Even if they don’t charge a fee for their advice, I’d still think twice.  Especially if they have a sick dog and a sick husband and others have died in their care.  (Actually, don’t listen to me, several of our dogs have died over the years and not all due to our neighbors’ gunshots and their own rambunctiousness.)

Wild lobelia is one herb which many herbalists advocate.  It can have sedative properties, according to numerous double blind studies.  Native Americans used lobelia to treat respiratory and muscle disorders,  They smoked it and asthma symptoms disappeared.  White settlers in Appalachia felt it worked and it became a part of their medicine chest.  The species used most commonly in modern herbalism is Lobelia inflata (Indian tobacco).  

Since traditional medicine can’t cure asthma, it might be worth trying if nothing else works for you.

In the 19th century, American physicians prescribed lobelia to induce vomiting in order remove toxins from the body. Because of this, it earned the name “puke weed.” Today, lobelia is sometimes suggested to help clear mucus from the respiratory tract, including the throat, lungs, and bronchial tubes. .

Some pharmaceutical companies, thinking a lobelia extract, lobeline, has similar effects to nicotiine, prescribed as a nicotine substitute in many preparations designed to break the smoking habit. In 1993, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibited the sale of smoking products containing lobeline. The FDA reported that such products were not effective in helping people quit or reduce smoking.

Researchers now think that lobeline may actually reduce the effects of nicotine in the body, particularly the release of dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in brain cells.  Work is ongoing to see whether lobeline has any potential in other sorts of drug addiction.

Lobeline, has been shown to reverse P-glycoprotein-dependent drug resistance in certain tumor cell lines in lab studies.  So work continues and we all have hope that cures will result.  In the meantime, be careful.

Lobelia is a potentially toxic herb. In moderate-to-large doses it may cause side effects ranging from dry mouth and nausea to convulsions and even coma.

 L. siphilitica and L. cardinalis, were once considered a cure for syphilis and now we know they are totally ineffective,

Herbalist Samuel Thomson popularized medicinal use of lobelia, goldenseal and a bunch of other native herbs in the early 19th century,  The preacher/charlatan from New England, Elias Smith, plagiarized much of Thomson’s system. A unique feature of Smith’s system was the identification of Lobelia with the plant of renown’ referred to in Ezekiel 34:29.  Believing that the United States held eschatological significance, Smith believed that this plant was provided by God to democratize medical treatment, just as Smith’s preaching was a democratization of theology.

One species, Lobelia chinensis (called bàn biān lián, 半边莲 in Chinese), is used as one of the fifty fundamental herbs in traditional Chinese medicine.

Just take any advice on herbs with a grain of salt, just as you should question any physician’s advice.  Know one knows your body better than yourself.  Trust your intuition.  If  you are interested in using a specific herb, we have lots of the old remedies at Meadowcreek.  And it will do you good just to walk around in the woods looking for them, even if you never use them.

Drying up the Aral Sea and creating a new Death Valley, a new Dead Sea

Watching the fire die after supper, I heard what seemed like owls and coyotes calling to each other.  Probably just a bunch of loquacious owls, but one can always dream.  No shortage of night sounds at Meadowcreek.  All manner of insect, amphibian and mammal are making themselves known.

Such a contrast to the complete and utter night silence early this morning in the Delta.  A combination of drought and industrial agriculture has stilled all the natural voices.  It is graveyard quiet in the Delta these days.  Even the coyotes seem less tallkative.

Or maybe its just that it’s cold in the mornings these days (teetering close to the 30s at Meadowcreek).  I’d rather blame it on industrial ag and its chemicals, but I could be a little bralnwashed by the organic types I hang around.  My farmer friends from the Grand Prairie might point out that its really quiet on cold mornings at Meadowcreek, too.

The drive from the Delta to Meadocreek featured brown tree after brown tree. Lack of rain means no color this fall in most of Arkansas.  (What’s with this weather, anyway?  Why can’t those smart meteorologists on TV figure this weather pattern out?  I guess they are spending too much time on their hair and outfits and not enough studying chaos theory and the complex adaptive system which is life.)

Just a few maples in well-watered front yards were showing any color.  And then, out of nowhere, the road veered into this valley of seeps and springs where the colors are vibrant.  And everything is alive.

Until you look closely, the valley seems really dry.  I know that’s what I thought when I first saw it in 1995.  The county road blows up dust on the few tourists who know how beautiful our valley is this time of year.   That’s because the  moisture mostly flows down through the root zone to the bed rock.  That which isn’t absorbed by roots of our consequently colorful trees follows the bedrock down to the Little Red River.  The only places where you can see Meadowcreek flowing these days are where the creek has cut down to bedrock.  So strange to walk down a seemingly dry creekbed and come upon a waterfall emerging from below the limestone boulders to flow over a granite outcropping.  Just above the Blue Hole is a great example.

On my weekly trip to pick up trash left by our urban visitors (mostly Bud Light cans as usual), I pulled off the road twice to let tourists speed by at city driving speed.  Wonder how long before they kick up a rock and bust their oil pan?  Just after one passed, a flock of nine turkeys left their camouflage and moved through the field next to me.  Sure glad the tourist was riding my tail and convinced me to pull over.

Just now, coming back to the dorm, four deer were inspecting our freshly cut wood pile.  We wore out the chain on a dead oak, but we have a new chain and will get back at it tomorrow.

Also time to plant the winter greens and get the greenhouses covered.  Never a shortage of fun projects here.  We’re planning a new greenhouse based on a design used in Northern China. The last people to get this excited about this design were a group of Turkmenistan farmers.

As much as some decry the ecological damage done by Delta agriculture, my Delta friends don’t hold a candle to the Turkmen.  They and their comrades in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have managed to dry up what was the world’s fourth largest inland sea.  It would be like Minnesota farmers managing to dry up Lake Superior.   The Aral Sea is turning into the Dead Sea.  Just as the Lebanese and Syrians cut down their cedars and dried up the Jordan.

Turkmenistan is one vast desert with two main resources: natural gas and a huge river flowing through the country from the Himalayas.

Melting snow and glaciers fill the mighty Amu Darya which flows North from the Pamir Mountains on the border of Tajikistan and China.  A western extension of the Himalayas, these are among the world’s highest mountains.  They are called the “Roof of the World” in the local languages.

Up until the third quarter of the 20th century the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth largest inland lake. The two rivers that feed it are the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, reaching the Aral from the South and the North respectively. The Soviet government decided in the 1950s to divert those rivers so that they could irrigate the desert region surrounding the Sea.  They wanted to raise cotton to clothe the proletariat.

They succeeded.  Today, school children are let out of school in Turkmenistan to pick cotton, much as they were in Arkansas less than 100 years ago.  My Turkmen trainees were learning to grow vegetables instead of cotton, but they had to wash their soil seven times with pure Himalayan glacier water to get out all the salt which evaporation in the desert brings to the surface.

All this salt now flows to the remnants of the Aral Sea, making it saltier than Irael’s Dead Sea or California’s Death Valley and Salton Sea.

Khrushchev and his successors decided they had a better use for the 80% of Aral Sea water that used to come from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Evaporation caused the water level to decrease by the same amount that used to flow into the Sea–a wonderfully resilient system.   No longer, my Russian friends.

Level of salinity rose from approximately 10 g/l to often more than 100 g/l in the remaining Southern Aral.  When traveling through the desert, rivers, unless they are traveling really fast, collect a bunch of salts.  When all the farmers along the way are washing salt out of their soils so they can plant crops, its even worse.

Miles and miles of seabed are now vast salt flats.  Good for racing cars and shooting post-apocalyptic movies, but not much else.  Once prosperous fishing villages and packing plants along the Aral Sea coast used to provide millions of tons of fish for Moscow, Leningrad and Minsk.  Now they are vast ghost towns. Fish can’t survive in new and improved Communist Aral Sea.

I really hope I’m not causing the same thing at Meadowcreek by showing our new residents how to build a hot new greenhouse using practical Chinese peasant technology.  But you never know.  All we can do is try our best and hope that the government upstream of Meadowcreek doesn’t divert all the water to grow cotton.  Not much chance of that, so I guess we’ll go ahead with the training.

Can organic agriculture be resilient agriculture?

In the early 90s I started hanging around with some rough and ready Florida Organic Growers.  The have a great acronym: FOG and a pretty responsive state University at Gainesville.  I much prefer Gainesville, Missouri, pop. 773, and spawning ground of Leesa Johnson and her clan, but that’s beside the point.

Nowadays, Marty Mesh runs FOG with support from his academician wife at the Florida Gainesville.  No one who knows Marty can doubt the power of organic ag.  I’ve had multitudinous discussions and contretemps with Marty at various National Sustainble Agriculture Coalition meetings.

Following is a foolish attempt to win him and other organic advocates over to the insights of ecological resilience.

It’s foolish because organic is more a religion than anything else.  People believe in organic agriculture.  Such faith is not open to question. They are just as impervious to evidence and logic as folks who detest organic agriculture because it undermines their profits.

Now I’ve made everyone mad.  Someday soon I’ll quit writing this blog.  At least two hours a day every day since early July–that’s too much time. Time I should devote to more practical pursuits, like fixing buildings at Meadowcreek and finding the funds to do so.  I guess I could make this blog subscription-only and charge you to read it.  But that’s a hassle and with a max of 323 views a day (only 230 yesterday) the income would be minimal. And then you might feel entitled to get one every morning and I might feel obliged to write one when I wasn’t inspired.  I don’t ever want to get in that position.

Maybe this will be the last one. You never know.  But as I was standing watching the night sky earlier tonight, I realized one more is begging to be written.  One more sacred cow needs to be skewered.

I know and respect a bunch of organic farmers.  I also suspect many organic farmers cheat.  In the late 90s I took a visitor from Cuba to see an organic rice farm here in Arkansas.  The owner of the business was a really affable guy.  We had a great time driving around his fields.  We didn’t see any weeds, nary a one.  When we asked how he controlled his weeds, we got lots of evasion and circumlocution.  Never did get an answer.

The organic inspector comes once a year; weed pressure is almost 365 days a year in the Delta.  Unfortunately, even when organic farmers play by the rules, it has become just another variant of industrial agriculture.  Though organic farms as originally conceived build the soil, increase diversity and embrace many of the other qualities present in resilient systems, in practice organic ag is just a list of compounds you cannot use.  Every farmer, whether organic or not, has such a list.  Even the worst culprit would not use DDT, if only because he can’t buy it.

As far back as the turn of the century, some far-sighted folks realized that ecological resilience was the answer to what ailed organic.  Rebecka and Ika published a paper in 2003 called “Building farm resilience.”  You should read it.

They like organic farming.  After defining resilience  in line with Carpenter et al., 2001 and organic farming by IFOAM Basic Standards, they contend:  “for most criteria, organic farming displays encouraging and promising features and mirrors the characteristics of farm resilience.”

The paper argues that organic farming has become dominated by farms which focus on stability using the command-and-control approaches of classic resource management.  This class of organic farms has become just a set of industrial farms which follow slightly different rules but the same philosophy as their conventional brethren.  They follow the letter of the law and not the historic spirit of organic farming.

I buy organic spinach and arugula nearly every time I go to the grocery store.  I love it.  It’s standardized and cheap and tastes great.  I believe its good for me.  But I’m under no illusions that organic farming is going to change the world.  It’s been co-opted.

That happens to any word–especially when material gain is possible. Words always get divorced from their biological reality.  People are already using resilience in ways totally inconsistent with its biological reality.  Just read some of the thousands of articles devoted to psychological resilience. Or don’t.  They are just about all worthless.

Instead get outside and enjoy these last beautiful, crisp fall days.  I can’t wait to get back to Meadowcreek later today and see the vibrant colors missing in the rest of the state.

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Rebecka Milestad and Ika Darnhofer’s prescient, clear and charming little paper, “Building Farm Resilience: The Prospects and Challenges of Organic Farming” can be found in the 2003 Journal of Sustainable Agriculture Volume 22, pages 81-97.

Why are the Great Smoky Mountains smoky?

I don’t know why, but I woke up today thinking about terpenes.  Probably because the skies down here in the Delta have been hazy lately and I have to stay here another couple more days.  In any case, I believe what you wake up thinking about is usually what you are most passionate about for good or ill.  Then I went outside and saw the biggest meteorite I’ve seen in a long time.  Since terpenes that woke me up so I could see that meteorite, terpenes are in my cross-hairs.

President Ronald Reagan said in 1981. “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles,”  After the poor fool and tool was much pooh-poohed by the scornful and supercilious left, environmental scientists ruefully confirmed he was partially right. Especially in hot weather, trees release volatile organic hydrocarbons, some of which are terpenes.  Terpenes from trees act as catalysts to increase the rate at which sunlight breaks down oxides of nitrogen – mostly from agriculture and cars – to produce atmospheric ozone.  Ozone is great stuff high in the trophosphere where ti keep UV radiation out.  It’s no good down where we live, according to most health experts.

In very hot weather, the production of terpenes accelerates.  The terpenes released by trees appears to have a cloud-seeding effect to stimulate rain if enough moisture is in the atmosphere.  Maybe that’s what’s happening here in Arkansas.  The plants are trying to get it to rain.  The clouds formed around terpene molecules allow the forest to make its vicinity cooler.

America’s Great Smoky Mountains take their name from the smog caused by millions of hectares of pines.

Terpenes are produced by a variety of plants and even insects such as termites and swallowtail butterflies, but mainly by pines and other conifers.

The name “terpene” is derived from the word “turpentine” which is produced from the resin of pine trees.  Terpenes are also major biosynthetic building blocks within nearly every living creature. Steroids, for example, are derivatives of the terpene called squalene.

Terpenes are often strong-smelling. They protect the plants that produce them by deterring herbivores and by attracting predators and parasites of herbivores. Terpenes are the primary constituents of the essential oils of many types of plants and flowers. Vitamin A is a terpene. Essential oils are used widely as fragrances in perfumes, medicines and  aromatherapy.

I really don’t think terpene essential oils can cure depression or any other mental problems.  They might help, but depression is caused by people who punish you no matter what you do–like hell fire and brimstone preachers or mean mothers.  When that happens as a child, you internalize it and you begin to punish yourself no matter what you do or don’t do.  Terpenes and other anti-depressive medicines can only mask it.  The depression lingers on and will rear its ugly head in other ways.

The aroma and flavor of hops, which some like in beer, comes from terpenes.  Beer also is no cure for depression, but it can make the opposite sex look more attractive.  The famous beer goggle effect.

Terpenes are released by trees more actively in warmer weather, acting as a natural form of cloud seeding. The clouds reflect sunlight, allowing the forest to regulate its temperature.

Ozone is three bonded molecules of oxygen. High in the stratosphere it is a godsend, screening out cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. But in the lower atmosphere it is a toxin: it causes stinging eyes, prickling nostrils and aggravates severe respiratory problems. In the really hot 2003 summer in Europe, more than 500 British deaths were attributed to ozone pollution.

Terpene specific activity regarding air pollution is to break down nitrogen oxides.  Nitrogen dioxide is the real problem. Nitrogen oxides (NOx) consist of nitric oxide (NO), nitrogen dioxide (which is similar to synthetic fertilizer) and nitrous oxide ((N₂O)) and are formed when nitrogen combines with oxygen.

Nitric oxide has no colour, odour, or taste and is non-toxic. In the air it is rapidly oxidized to nitrogen dioxide.

Nitrous oxide is a colourless, slightly sweet-smelling, non-toxic gas which accounts for about 5% of the greenhouse gases produced by man’s activities. Man-made nitrous oxide is used as the anaesthetic commonly called “laughing gas”.

Nitrogen oxides occur naturally. In nature, they are a result of bacterial processes, biological growth and decay, lightning, and forest and grassland fires. The primary source of man-made nitrogen oxides is from the burning of fossil fuels in cars, trucks and power plants.

Of the nitrogen oxides emitted, most is nitric oxide, some is nitrous oxide and less than 10 per cent is nitrogen dioxide. The amount of nitrogen dioxide emitted varies with the temperature of combustion; as temperature increases so does the level of nitrogen dioxide.

Agriculture, fossil fuel combustion, wastewater management, and industrial processes are increasing the amount of N₂O in the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide molecules stay in the atmosphere for an average of 114 years before being removed by a sink or destroyed through chemical reactions. The impact of 1 pound of N₂O on warming the atmosphere is almost 300 times that of 1 pound of carbon dioxide.

In 2013, nitrous oxide (N₂O) accounted for about 5% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, according to the EPA. Globally, about 40% of total N₂O emissions come from human activities. 

Agriculture is the biggest culprit in nitrous oxide production. Improper use of synthetic fertilizers is the largest source of N₂O emissions in the United States, accounting for about 74% of total U.S. N₂O emissions in 2013. Nitrous oxide is also emitted during the breakdown of nitrogen in livestock manure and urine, which contributed to 5% of N₂O emissions in 2013.

Nitrous oxide is also generated as a byproduct during the production of nitric acid, which is used to make synthetic commercial fertilizer, and in the production of adipic acid, which is used to make fibers, like nylon, and other synthetic products.

Nitrous oxide is removed from the atmosphere when it is absorbed by certain types of bacteria or destroyed by ultraviolet radiation or chemical reactions.  So we could blast the earth with UV or coat it with bacteria and get rid of the stuff.  Might get rid of humans too.  That would sure reduce human-caused pollution.

I’m getting depressed just thinking about terpenes, nitrous oxide and pollution.  Maybe I need some terpene essential oil aromatherapy to get in a better mood.  Or I could just become a climate-denier and stick my head in the sand.  I’ll bet when I go to church in a few minutes I’ll be distracted from this depressing topic.  Hope so.

Or I could start a campaign against synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, but that already exists, its called organic agriculture.  And, anyway, the sources of nitrogen used in organic agriculture also forms nitrous oxide.  There is no hope.  Except to reduce the human population of the world.  I’m not going to volunteer though.

Peepal, pines, good air, puja and Homecoming

Halloween and other cultural rituals are highly valued in Arkansas.  Last night was Homecoming at the local high school.  We saw the queen’s court take off their heels and greet the football players as they ran onto the field.  We probably saw more fumbles than ever seen in high school football history.  We saw the Ricebirds pound the luckless River Rats.  That must not be the real name of the opponents, but the announcer had some accuracy issues.

Finally, falling asleep in the best seats in Ned Mosley stadium, we violated nearly all the rules of decorum for adults in the in-crowd and headed home before the band had even finished at half-time.  Early to bed, early to rise.  Now I’m up and at ’em and enjoying the fresh predawn air.  You have to get up early to get the good air before it is all used up.

Good air is hard to come by in much of the world.  One objective of ecological resilience research is to predict from present characteristics which systems will survive and thrive in the future.  That’s one tall order.  But I think a good indicator is air quality.  As it goes down, the system is showing less and less ability to survive.  It’s poisoning itself.

We like to think of humans as more advanced, yet a few nuclear bombs or even fewer volcanoes and the fungi might take over as they did after the last mass extinction.  When no light penetrates the dust, smoke and debris-filled atmosphere and dead organisms are everywhere, the saprophytic species who like the dark will do especially well.

As you know, I don’t particularly like pine trees–except as lumber.  I don’t care how good they smell, they are just too dang selfish.  All those piles and piles of acidic, tannic pine needles carpet bombing wherever they live.  Killing almost anything which tries to live or be born close to them.  Creating an environment ideal for themselves and death for anyone else.  Just too much like a typical Chinese farm for my taste.

Have you ever been on a Chinese farm?  There is no wildlife at all.  All is tamed.  All is tainted by the touch of humans.  The sky is murky, the ground is all tilled, few birds fly by.  Yet the Chinese are abundant, just like pines.

In China, Nepal, and dry regions of other overpopulated Asian countries, sometimes the only tree you see is the Peepal tree, also called the Bodhi tree (Ficus religiosa).   It is supposedly the tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment.  Many revere this tree and advocate having one in your bedroom.

Most plants largely uptake carbon dioxide and release oxygen during the day (photosynthesis) and uptake oxygen and release CO2 during the night (respiration). Some plants such as Peepal tree can uptake CO2 during the night because of their ability to perform a type of photosynthesis called Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM).  This type of photosynthesis is especially useful to plants growing in hot, dry conditions.  They can remain protected from the hot, desiccating daytime air and don’t open their stomata except at night.

However, CAM is an energy-inefficient reaction compared to the C3 and C4 photosynthetic routes.  Hence plants use CAM only during hot, dry conditions.

We have a different CAM plant in our greenhouse.  It is slightly less revered than the Peepal tree.  Mother-in-law’s tongue is a sharp-leafed plant that thrives with little water.  I mistakenly bought it for my wife for Valentine’s Day, mostly due to a vindictive salesgirl.  It grows from a huge bulb which has busted the pot it was planted in.  Now we just splash water on the top of it and it continues to grow and grow.  It’s to the ceiling now.  Monday we’ll move it to a two story greenhouse at Meadowcreek. Some advocate having a Mother-in-law’s tongue in your bedroom, saying it will do as good a job as the Peepal loved by the Asian devout.  I have my doubts.

The Peepal tree is a hemi-epiphyte in its native habitat. That means its seeds germinate and grow on other trees, but take no nutrients from them, only from the air, compost on its leaves. and rain.  When the host-tree dies, the Peepal seedling falls to the ground and roots in the soil.

Hindus worship the Peepal tree and perform a puja, showing reverence to its spirit through invocations, prayers, songs and rituals. Nobody knows where it came from, no known wild progenitors exist.  The origin of the Peepal tree can be traced back to the times of Indus Valley Civilization (about 3000 BC – 1700 BC).

In an ancient Hndu holy text, when the demons defeated the deities, Vishnu hid in the Peepal tree. Since this lord resided in the tree for some time, people began worshiping the tree, offering prayers to Lord Vishnu.  Other texts say Vishnu was born under the peepal tree. One story says the tree is home to the Hindu’s holy trinity of gods, the root being Brahma, the trunk is Vishnu and leaves represent Shiva. Another popular belief is that Krishna died under the Peepal tree.

The Upanishads (Hindu texts answering spiritual questions much like the Christian catechisms and Jewish Talmud ) use the Peepal tree to define the difference between the body and the soul. In one section, the body is the Peepal tree and the soul is the seed which leads to the tree.  In another, the soul is a bird who sits in the tree, eats the tree’s fruit and deposits seed from the fruit to grow into a new tree.  This is a tough one to incorporate in a sermon.  The soul eats the soul and defecates it so the soul can produce a new body.

Another Hindu text says a person who does not have a son should consider the peepal tree as his own child. It says that the family will prosper and have a good name, as long as the peepal tree survives. Cutting a peepal tree is regarded as a big sin, almost equivalent to murdering a Brahmin.  We just can’t murder one of the 1%, according to the 1%.

Some Hindus only touch the Peepal tree on Saturdays, but the Nepalese touch it all the time.  I remember the relief of finding a huge shady Peepal tree to lean against while on an otherwise treeless trek to a remote village agricultural project. When we got there the town was convulsed with a Maoist demonstration.  Later the area was taken over by communist rebels who finally did get rid of the decadent royal family of Nepal.

The Goddess Lakshmi (who is also an NPR newsreader) dwells in the Peepul tree on Saturdays (but she’s on NPR every weekday). Women who are not blessed with a son tie a red thread around the trunk or on its branches asking the deities to bless her and fulfill her desire.

To our minds, maybe these rituals seem colorful, but a bit superstitious and primitive.  Not at all like our Homecoming activities.

You might say we are so much more evolved.  They are a primitive race.  We are a more advanced species.

Ecological resilience research indicates that no system of living species is more evolved or primitive than another.  Some have conserved more features from their ancestors.  Others may adapt to change more rapidly.  But all are resilient, all have survived–at least till this point.

Pines are definitely resilient, just like sagebrush which poisons all the soil around it.  That doesn’t mean I like them.  Crows, you also realize, are among my favorite species.  Not because of their beautiful, lilting voices or their bright and colorful plumage.  But because they are so smart and adaptable.

Maybe some of us humans like crows because they are like us: smart and quick to adapt.  Maybe we change too quickly. Maybe we should stress a little more the conservative aspect of the conservative innovation quality of ecologically resilient systems.  Then maybe our air and water wouldn’t be so polluted and our extinction growing closer every day.

Embarrassment, guilt, fear and resilience

Meteorites are such a treat.  It’s before dawn in the Delta and I’m just back from a little walk outside.  A huge one streaked across the Southern sky.  The sky’s nearly always a little murkier here than at Meadowcreek, but we’ve got so much more sky than in the deep, narrow Meadowcreek valley.  The Delta is flatter than a pancake and a great place for nighttime walks to see what you can see.  It must be sad to be a person scared of the dark and not able to go out and enjoy meteorites.

Fear is a debilitating obsession with personal vulnerability, the lack of resilience.  You’re afraid something is going to happen which will hurt you.  Sure there is plenty to be scared of in this world.  You can dwell on how horrible things are or you can focus on the good and pure and true and try to increase them in the world.

Now that we have eliminated all the predators which used to eat us, the only predator left for man is other men.   But that’s the way it’s always been.  We have a lot of healthy competition with each other.  And some not so healthy. Some people are just no good.  They survive and thrive by taking advantage of others.  They are worse than predators, they are parasites. They extract from others and never provide anything that will help others grow.

Every living system is made of multiple competing and cooperating subsystems. In a resilient system, the subsystems have modular connectivity.  That is, they have a lot of connections to other subsystems but they can survive on their own if need be. A human group is a system made up of people.

However, all resiient systems are not made up of resilient subsystems.  Some systems which can outlast and defeat all sorts of threats and disturbance have subsystems which are very vulnerable without the larger scale system–in other words, they have no modularity.

For example, a family may be very resilient, but one member of the family, a handicapped child or an old grandmother, may be very fragile.  The overall resilience of the family can be increased by the increased cohesiveness required to care for a fragile child.

A wife may be very deferential to her husband and unable to survive without a man.  Yet she could be the rock on which the entire family is based as long as she has a male to serve in the protection role.

A man may love and protect his very vulnerable and fragile wife who provides the love which enables him to survive in a tough world.  Complementary diversity is a good thing, a quality of resilient systems.

Other people somehow become separated from their family and alienated from society.  They don’t need a man, they don’t need anyone.  They feel they can make it on their own.  Many go to the grave without realizing how far from the truth they have strayed.  Some react by saying there are multiple truths and all are equally valid.  Tell Nature that.  Nature doesn’t care what you think or how you philosophize.

Man is a social animal.  We need people.  We crave honest interaction with people.

However, some people should just be avoided.  As a Dutch Calvinist theologian once told me, there is no place for guilt and embarrassment in your life.  Sure all people are “totally depraved.”  But we don’t let it get us down.  People can try to make us feel guilty about something, but it doesn’t stick.  Unlike many orthodox Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Jews, we know we are guilty of messing up and will continue to be guilty of messing up, but we also know we will just plow ahead, do what’s right and not get depressed and worried.

Some people are so racked with guilt or worry that they try as hard as they can to make other people feel the same way.  That is their world; it seems very real and inevitable to them; they can’t even fathom anyone who isn’t phased by guilt, worry or embarrassment. They are so wracked with guilt and worried about embarrassing themselves that they can’t imagine anyone who isn’t.

We have a good fishing pond at Meadowcreek.  You can kinda see it from the road if you know where to look.  It’s got a species in it that I’d never heard of before I got to MC.  Pickerel.  I’d caught pike in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, but I didn’t know they had a Southern relative.  These guys love to jump out of the water when you hook them. I think sometimes they jump out of the water just because they can.

Most fish just stay underwater all the time.  That’s the only world they know.  Manipulative people are like that.  The world they live in requires them to be manipulative and they create a world where manipulation of people is rewarded.  They also instill it in everyone they meet.  Manipulative people are also attracted to each other.  They don’t really have good friends, but their associates are either fellow manipulators or under their thumb.

They are like a fish who lives in the water and couldn’t imagine what it would be like outside.  Some fish learn to jump out of the water and get a brief experience in the non-water life, but most fish have no idea what it’s like outside the water.

Some people think they can manipulate other people into feeling embarrassment and guilt.  And they can in some cases.  They use this skill with Machiavellian glee.

They will use anything they can to control others around them and make those others do what they want.  They try to induce guilt and embarrassment to manipulate others.  They are toxic, unless you understand them and can manage them.  You have to just play to whatever good you can find in them, encourage that, and ignore their silly, pathetic attempts to control.

These folks are like meteorites.  They are just flashes in the pan.  You can enjoy the flash they make because you know they are dying.  And you don’t want to get too close to one.  They can hurt you.

Keep your joy.  Share it with them when you run into them.  Hope they come around, but don’t count on it, especially if they are over 35 or so.  They are lost and you are joyful and resilient.

Weeds, glorious weeds

Being grateful for weeds is tough.  So much psychological research tells us that cultivating gratefulness leads to a more peaceful, healthier life.  But grateful for weeds?

Gratefulness wasn’t my immediate response when I saw how weeds invaded my newly planted strawberries while I was gone.  The new strawberry beds were totally free of weeds when I left.  I didn’t think of them at all for three weeks in Africa.  Now they are totally infested.  The weeds have done what they always do in resilient agroecosystems: cover the ground I’d left bare.  They cover the soil–stopping erosion and adding organic matter.  If weeds don’t cover your bare ground, you have real problems.  Rains may have failed or the soil may be just too rocky or poisoned.  So be grateful for weeds, they mean resilience.

I just finished cleaning out the strawberry beds as the thunderstorm moved in.  Its been wet here so the crab grass and its friends pulled out of the ground easily.  A sunny day would have helped my weeding.  Weeds pulled up and tossed into the sun will die. In our rich Delta soils, lack of sun means weed pulled out and left on the surface often roots again, especially if it rains soon after.  Our rich soils also mean our weeds aren’t quite so vicious.

Rocky soils generate much meaner weeds.  At Meadowcreek, we get invaded by all kinds of weeds with thorns and stickers.  In one bottom, the locust trees, thistle, and even prickly pear cactus have taken over.  It’s been overgrazed and neglected for 20 years.  When the cactus blooms in the Spring, the yellow flowers are spectacular.  Until we get the time and resources to clean up this field, we’ll just enjoy those flowers.

In newly cleared areas on the slopes–such as above our new pond, blackberry, greenbrier and Canada thistle are the main problems.  Just as in the infertile soils in the bottom, all these species have thorns.

Why do the weeds which infest stony, infertile soils so often have thorns?  Weeds in infertile conditions need more protection to do their jobs.  Since fewer plants can survive the infertile conditions, they get gobbled up by deer and other herbivores.  Only the ones with a solid defense survive.

In really dry, infertile soils the defenses of plants are much worse than just thorns.  .

.In hot, dry, infertile Australia, the Gympie-Gympie is a poisonous plant covered in tiny hairs.  In contact with human skin, these hairs deliver a string that can remain  blindingly painful for up to several months — or, if you’re unlucky, over a year. One scientist (who was wearing welding gloves when she got stung) compared the sensation to “being burnt with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time.”  There’s lots of folklore centered around the Gympie-Gympie, such as horses jumping off cliffs because of the pain the plant inflicted on them. There’s even a story of a World War II officer committing suicide after mistakenly using the tree’s leaves as toilet paper.   Seeds of gympie-gympie germinate in full sunlight after soil disturbance.  Their poison insures they won’t be eaten or pulled up and the ground stays covered.

It doesn’t necessarily take infertile soil for noxious plants to thrive.  Stinging nettle and poison ivy love deep rich soils in creek valleys.  Luckily jewelweed usually grows close by and its juice counteracts the sting of the nettle and the itch of poison ivy.

Other plants produce chemicals which have little effect on animals, but kill other plants.

You know about white pine privilege, right?  Pines are like people.  They make it easier for other pines to survive.  They lay down a lot of acidic needles which acidify the soil and make it way difficult for oaks and hickories to survive near them.  Azaleas and blueberries do fine cause they like high pH soils.  Pines make the world better for pines.

So we can call these plants evil, but all that really means is that we don’t like them.  To be either evil or good, something has to have a purpose, doesn’t it?  And plants don’t have a purpose.  They just are.  They are the way they are because of a unique history their species has had in adjusting, adapting and innovating in response to all the other species around them and to their physical environment.  Just as all the other species are similarly adapting and innovating.  It’s coevolution.

Read more about it in Chapter 4 on working with nature and Chapter 5 on complementary diversity in our book at: https://meadowcreekvalley.wordpress.com/projects/land/roots-of-resilience-the-book/

 

 

Venus in a red oak tree

It’s 8 pm at the Delta outpost of the Resilience Project.  The lawn chair constellation, called Scorpio by some, is shining brightly in the Southern sky.  Coyotes are howling.  it’s a beautiful crisp fall night.  Cassiopia forms a double-u above the North Star.  We’ll have to wait a few more days until Venus becomes the Evening Star.  Right now she’s the Morning Star (not to be confused with the eponymous town near Meadowcreek where our friend has a buffalo ranch). Interesting that the Babylonians knew Venus was both the Morning and Evening Star.  The knowledge was lost on the early Greeks who conquered Babylon.  Only the later Hellenistic Greeks rediscovered the fact.  Makes you wonder what knowledge ancient societies had which we have never recovered.

We’ve eaten well after working hard all afternoon.  Four of us have come here to work on the Delta office and land. For those not used to it, the Delta is a forbidding place.  Mile after mile of monoculture.  Our office is on five acres surrounded on three sides by corn, soybeans and rice depending on the year.  Organic matter has been depleted in these fields after nearly a hundred years of increasingly intensive row crop production.  Our office site has never been plowed.  It’s the home to huge old oaks.  The soil is black and its surface stands at least six inches higher than the fields around it.  The organic matter in the surrounding fields, carbon fixed over eons, has been volatilized by over-cultivation.  The life giving soil organisms have been murdered by fertillizers and pesticides.

These industrial agriculture fields appear white as death after drying out.  We won’t fix that problem today, though.

The office foundation needs work. One of the oaks has died and needs to be cut down.  It threatens to fall on the power and electric lines to the main barn.

A mass of dozens of inch thick vines have strangled and starved the old oak.  They swarm up its trunk twenty five feet into the air.  Honeysuckle is a sweet and delicate flower. but its vines can be killers, suffocators.  And they sure are in the way when we need to cut the tree inside.  Our best lumberjack cut away the vines and felled the old oak neatly away from the lines.

The inner core of the oak is a deep mahogany with fascinating patterns.  Huge knobs make the trunk useless for lumber but great for wood sculpture.  We don’t really have time to whittle it into something beautiful.  But, It’s too intriguing to use for firewood.  And it’s dense and hard as rock.

When oak dries it becomes harder and harder.  Not as hard as Osage orange, but hard enough that even pounding a nail in it is tough.  The chainsaw refuses to cut it.  We should take that as a sign.

We should save the main trunk and stand it on end in the barn.  Someday we won’t have better things to do.  Making art is not what we are up to these days.  But this piece of oak trunk beckons us.  It will be incredibly enticing to have it standing in the barn waiting for our knives and gouges and mallets.  We can imagine all sorts of figures taking shape in it. Venus comes to mind.

One of the oldest statues ever discovered depicts an obese woman with swollen breasts. The Willendorf Venus was discovered in Austria, and is 26,000 years old. Some feel It is highly unlikely that any member of an ancient society would be so overfed as to be obese.  Such analysts are just too brainwashed by today’s mainstream fixation on skinny women.  Skinny women are good for magazines, but not for life, as my Ukrainian friend says.

Most likely the statue is not just symbolic but representative of an ideal form: a mother figure worshiped by the hunter-gatherers who carved her from stone.

Such rotund figurines are present at many ancient sites, especially in today’s Ukraine where ancestors of all Northwestern Europeans rode out the ice age on the Crimean peninsula.  They suggest that the earliest-known religious practices were related to the worship of femininity.  And the goddess they worshiped did not have the emaciated look favored by 21st century women indoctrinated in modern culture.  Fat women were favored in many ancient cultures.  Only the rich and idle could become that fat.  At least one who did was worshiped.

Today its not so hard to become fat.  Immense, obese women who look like this Venus are more likely to be stereotyped as loud-mouth, stupid, welfare queens than as goddesses.  But we can almost see a Willendorf Venus in this trunk.

So we can’t bear to cut into it.  Anyway, both our chain saws refused to work.  So we descended on the foundation while we decided what to do with the trunk.  I think the decision is pretty much made.

Pines switching to winter clothes or going naked on Tierra del Fuego

Pine needles are falling like mad right now.  They know winter is coming and they are switching out their summer needles for their winter needles.  Kinda like you are wearing sweat pants and a hoodie instead of shorts and a t-shirt.  Except its not the temp that does it for pine trees, its the daylength.  Days are so dang short now.  I like cooler weather, but not these short days.  Not as many hours to work outdoors.  So we have to do stuff indoors.  Like making salsa and working on resilience research proposals when we really want to rake up pine straw for mulch.

Indoor biologists who never really observed Nature decided pines were not deciduous because they had needles in the winter.  Weren’t they over-educated fools?  That’s why I don’t let on I have a Ph.D. the first time I meet a farmer.

Anyone who has had pine trees knows that in the fall they get rid of their old needles, just like oaks and other deciduous trees do.  The only difference is that pines grow new ones ilmmediately and oaks go naked all winter.

Seems more sensible to wear clothes in the winter, but oaks have never learned how.  Kinda like the primitive tribes on Tierra del Fuego. The reason it;s called Land of Fire is because of the lack of technology of the native Americans who lived there when the Spanish explorers passed by.  They didn’t know how to make clothes, but they did know how to make fires.  So they kept a lot of fires going all winter. Or maybe they just preferred to go naked.  Nobody really asked them and they are all gone now, so we’ll never know.

But we can be pretty sure that they didn’t wear clothes because they didn’t ever develop the systems required to make clothes.  Some think they were the paleoindians who had been pushed South by the invading second wave of more advanced humans coming from Asia.  Humans who don’t innovate get run over.  They don’t have enough resilience to survive.  You might say, well they are plenty tough, they must be resilient.  But toughness is not the same as resilience.

We can also be pretty sure oaks would have evolved winter leaves if they could have.  What is it that makes oaks only have summer leaves?  The obvious answer is path dependency.  Something in the oak genetics makes them unable to innovate that much regarding their leaves.

Much like the Norwegians who settled Greenland and Vinland.  They were too stuck in their cultural traditions.  So as the climate cooled, they kept trying to raise sheep and grow barley instead of switching to a seafood diet.  The oxygen rich cold waters off the coast of Greenland are teaming with fish.  And with lots of fish comes lots of seals, walruses and other species which could have been food for the Norwegians.  So if they’d learned from the Inuits, they would have survived.  They also hastened their demise by continuing to send tribute back to Norway to the Catholic church.  They had to pay through the nose to get priests to come out and perform services.  What priest wants to go to such a forlorn place?  None would stay, so they had to pay to send him back and get another.  And they had to outfit churches like the relatively rich Norwegians did back home.  Switching to a less expensive religion was not an option.  So they died.

I wonder what would have happened to if the Norwegians were vegan.  Wow, they would have been wiped out really quick as the Little Ice Age took over.  No more turnips and potatoes, even, in Greenland.

I tried to get the Peace Corps vegans in Moldova to drink milk, eat eggs and try meat in the winter.  They were too wedded to their ill-fitting beliefs.  The turnips and potatoes didn’t quite provide the fatty acids their hair, brain and nerves need.  So, these Peace Corp girls lost their hair and had neurological problems.  That’s what happens when diet becomes an inflexible religion.

If you like being bald and messing up your brain, be vegan in a poor Moldovan village in the winter. Resilience.  It’s everywhere.

Indigenous Megafauna Day

Happy Indigenous Megafauna Day!!!

Columbus Day weekend was effulgent at Meadowcreek.  The only bad part was leaving.  The colors have already come to the trees and they are unexpectedly vibrant.  Careful observation on the three hour drive to the Delta revealed no place where the fall colors were near as beautiful.

On that trip I also learned, from the radio, that the city councils of many US cities don’t have enough to do.  These politicians do have time to grease the squeaky wheel, though.  And the vast Know-Nothing-but-indignant-about-everything crowd is evidently squeaking.

St. Paul, Albuquerque and a growing slew of other ignorant city councils have declared today Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day.  I do like indigenous people, they strew around a lot of arrowheads for me to find.  I found a prehistoric knife sharpener on this trip to Meadowcreek.

I’m not sure which indigenous peoples I should celebrate today, though. The first humans to leave any calling cards on the North American continent migrated from Asia.  They are called paleoindians or Clovis people, hunted the mastodon, mammoth, horse, tapir, ground sloth, giant bison, giant beaver, giant tortoise, American lion, short-faced bear, and saber-toothed tiger. Over-hunting caused the mass extinction of these animals as the Ice Age ended. More than thirty species of large animals became extinct. By about 10,500 years ago, megafauna no longer roamed North America.

So, if these city councils were less ignorant, I’m sure they would not want to glorify the paleoindians because they wiped out some species that we all would like to see.  Kinda like the Africans of today are wiping out the rhinos and all the other big species that the Chinese want for some revolting practice.

The paleoindians were in turn wiped out by the more advanced Hopewell people.  The Hopewell people knew how to garden a little (so they could stay healthier than the Clovis people when game got scarce due to over-hunting) and they made captivating mound art.  On my way to visit the Worstell Building in Athens, Ohio, I stopped at the Serpent Mound.  Any modern artist would be extremely cocky if he had produced this 1330 foot long earth sculpture.  It’s impossible to describe it, but look at this drawing of it and you get a feel for it.  If you’re ever on the road between Cincinnati and Athens, Ohio, you gotta stop and see it.

Nearby have been found some giant skeletons in burial mounds.  These are similar to skeletons found from the eastern Mediterranean, mainland Europe, and the British Isles. These folks appear to have shared an identical material culture, a religion of constructing burial mounds for the dead and solar temples to track the movement of the sun.

According to the folks who investigated the site on a high point in Highland County, Ohio, these graves were made of large limestone slabs, two and a half to three feet in length and a foot wide. These were set on edge about a foot apart. Similar slabs covered the graves. A single one somewhat larger was at the head and another at the foot. The top of the grave was two feet below the present surface.

Some think these were the Nephilim mentioned in the Bible.  That seems pretty far-fetched to me, but if the Nephilim are the “indigenous peoples” the city councils are honoring, then I’d be all for it.

Maybe, though, the city councils mean to honor the tribe which wiped out the Hopewell.  I could see the politically correct honoring this culture (called the Mississippian).  This tribe invaded from Mexico, kinda similar to today, with an extremely resilient agricultural system. They grew corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and gourds.  They kept turkeys and dogs for food and feather coats.

Or maybe the city councils meant the tribes from the Plains who learned how to ride the horses they stole from the Spanish and used their new skills to conquer the more civilized folks who had previously invaded from Mexico.

I guess I just know too much about “indigenous peoples” (who are all related to ancient Asians and not really indigenous at all) for my own good.  It just makes it really hard to figure out why the city councils are honoring these blood-thirsty sun worshippers over some blood-thirsty Christians.  They were both pretty horrible to modern, politically correct sensibilities.

It must be some kind of self-hatred since most of these city council folk are white people.  Either that or they just  don’t like Italians like Christopher Columbus.