Strawberry moon and summer solstice

Beautiful, orange, almost-full moon this morning at the Delta outpost.  Meadowcreekers are most interested in the longest day of the year tomorrow–when the moon will be full.  A full moon on the summer solstice hasn’t happened in 70 years, according to those who keep track of such things.

Here’s what one of the cognoscenti says about it:

The 2016 North American summer solstice happens on June 20, 2016 at 6:34 PM EDT. That’s the very moment when, essentially, the sun stands still at its northernmost point as seen from Earth. Its zenith doesn’t yearn north or south, but waits patiently at the Tropic of Cancer before switching directions and heading south again. This is where the word solstice comes from; the Latin solstitium, from sol (sun) and stitium (to stop).

It’s the day of the year with the most sunlight, the grand dame of long summer days. Even though technically it is only the first day of summer, it may actually be the best one of all. In New York City, we will have a whopping 15.05 hours of daytime. (You can check your day length at the Farmer’s Almanac sunrise and sunset calculator, if you’re so inclined.)

The summer solstice alone is iconic enough. It’s a day with a time-honored history rife with pagan celebrations and all things Stonehenge. But this year we get the big beautiful bonus of a full moon, which hits its peak on the same day. This hasn’t happened in 70 years.

“Having a full moon land smack on the solstice is a truly rare event,” says Farmer’s Almanac astronomer Bob Berman. “We probably won’t push people off pyramids like the Mayans did, but Slooh [a live-streaming global network of telescopes] will very much celebrate this extraordinary day of light with fascinating factoids and amazing live telescope feeds.” (See below.)

Meanwhile, adding a touch of poetry to the whole shebang, the June moon was known as the Strawberry Moon to early Native American tribes, who measured time by things like the moon, rather than a grid on a piece of paper or an electronic device. The full moon that happened now marked the season of strawberries – as it still does. More and more people have started harkening back to these more-seasonal full moon names; it’s an especially lovely practice.

(Read more about the full moons here: Full moon names and what they mean.)

Meanwhile, Slooh along with the Farmer’s Almanac will have a live broadcast of the summer solstice/strawberry moon one-two punch from their flagship observatory at the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands. You can view it here … or better yet, go outside, gaze up and pay homage to the heavens above.

Grit and resilience in narrow mountain hollows

Driving through the beautiful, green mountains of Eastern Kentucky, we stop the truck now and then to talk to local farmers.  Their joy, independence and persistence are infectious and inspiring.  Grit is the psychological equivalent of resilience.  A person with grit is able to survive and thrive through a variety of disturbances, similar to a resilient food system or community.  Individuals with grit arise in very dysfunctional families.  A farmer with grit may survive and thrive in a declining community.

Grit and resilience depart company, however, when we look at sustainability beyond and outside the individual.  Resilient systems at such scales depend on qualities beyond the grit of individuals.

Resilience Project staff are on a research trip in central Appalachia.  We’ve met lots of farmers with grit and determination to develop systems which survive and thrive in the face of disturbance.  With some, however, the system will end with them.  Their children have moved on to other endeavors and they haven’t succeeded in recruiting their neighbors into their system. Their systems lack what ecologists call redundancy.  They are so independent their system will die when they do.

Other ecologically sound farmers here are tightly connected to their communities.  They are part of multigenerational families who are marketing and processing locally.  They use rotational grazing, integrated pest management, and build their soil organic matter.  They focus on creating healthy food for themselves and their community.

Such Eastern Kentucky families are a very small minority in the region. Other families have become dependent on government welfare checks, drugs and unhealthy foods.  Coal mining by large outside companies has supported a huge population which lacks land for locally organized productive enterprises.  Dark, narrow hollows are chock-a-block with trailers and ramshackle housing and no space for even a garden.

We are beginning to see how Eastern Kentucky can have resilient farms amidst low health and high poverty.  Two parallel and opposite cultures have diverged in Appalachia.  One with grit and resilience.  The other propped up by well-meaning charity.

These correlations are the opposite of what we have found in other regions.  In most places, high resilience of food systems is associated with good health and low poverty at the county level.  But all counties have pockets of lower health and higher poverty.  Maybe Eastern Kentucky is just an extreme version of many of our communities.  Resilient and dependent cultures seem to coexist in many places.

We’ll continue our observations for awhile, but the future looks steep and rocky here.  No matter how tough a seed, it needs at least a little soil to grow and reproduce.  Little good soil is available to expand the few resilient agricultural systems of Eastern Kentucky.  The culture of dependency is steep and rocky land on which to build resilient communities.  Especially when the superficially attractive culture of drugs and welfare and unhealthy foods is allowed to capture and enslave new generations.

You’re a part of Nature, act like it.

 

Cities have done a good job of destroying natural systems.  Some city folk are so out of touch with nature, they see it as something totally different from Man.  The only solution they see is to remove people from Nature if we want to save it.  They want to save Nature as an untouched, pure oasis, unsullied by the hands of humankind.

What they don’t realize is that pristine Nature does not mean untouched by man. A recent study shows that our impact on the planet didn’t simply take off with the Industrial Revolution, but was actually observable many thousands of years before in the Late Pleistocene, in the form of species extinctions linked to movement of people from Africa into Asia, Europe and the Americas.

The researchers say the most significant example of this is the dramatic reduction in megafauna between about 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, which had dramatic effects on ecosystems in terms of things like seed dispersal.  The original settlers of Europe, Asia and the Americas killed off megafauna wherever they went.

The advent of agriculture put even greater evolutionary pressures on plants and animals, creating “unprecedented and enduring impacts on species distributions”. But these impacts didn’t just lead to extinctions. The kinds of animals humans favored – such as domesticated dogs, plus sheep, goats, chicken, and cattle – surged in numbers.

Humans also colonised islands, which had big effects seeing as islands’ natural ecosystems lack “the resilience of continental biomes”. As new species were introduced, indigenous ones were overpowered. The expansion of trade from the Bronze Age onwards has compounded many of these effects, and all long before the Industrial Revolution kicked off.

In other words, simply by colonising new land and farming animals we wanted to eat, we had an impact on every single part of the planet.

The researchers say the discovery of this long-term human environmental impact means we should take a broader and more pragmatic approach to conservation efforts – as clearly it’s in our nature to alter nature, and we’ll need to plan accordingly if we realistically want to help save the planet from environmental threats.

“If we want to improve our understanding of how we manage our environment and conserve species today, maybe we have to shift our perspective, by thinking more about how we safeguard clean air and fresh water for future generations and rather less about returning planet Earth to its original condition.”

According to the researchers, we should focus on the good we can do for the sake of the planet as it is now, rather than aiming to restore a long-gone oasis that only exists now in our imaginations.

“Rather than an impossible return to pristine conditions, what is needed is the historically informed management of emerging novel ecosystems to ensure the maintenance of ecological goods and services.”

Cumulative archaeological data clearly demonstrates that all humans transform their environments.  It’s in our nature.  It’s what we do.

“Now the question is what kind of ecosystems we will create for the future. Will they support the well-being of our own and other species or will they provide a context for further large-scale extinctions and irreversible climate change?”

The evidence of archaeology also argues against the inclusive, grassroots, indigenous approach to Nature.  The only way to preserve ecosystems is a top down approach which convinces and enlists the average person in enjoying and preserving natural ecosystems.

Man, left to his own devices, has always destroyed ecosystems.  Unfortunately, only in places where an enlightened few have led campaigns of conservation and preservation have endangered species ever been restored to resilience.  So get out there an organize, cajole and work for conservative innovation to integrate man with Nature.

 

Advice for the next President

America will have a new President in a few months.  What should that President do about food and the environment?  Resilience project staff will be deciding just that at a national meeting of sustainable agriculture organizations in Maine in August.

We’d like to bring along your ideas to the meeting.  So tell us what you think the President should do.  Make a comment here or send us an email (meadow@deltanetwork.org) or call us at the Resilience House (870-363-4711) or come by Meadowcreek anytime if you want a long policy discussion.

And share this with your friends, so we get even more ideas.

Specifically, we are looking for input in three areas:

1. First Hundred Days:  Changes the new President can make immediately without any further act of Congress (no new laws, no new money).  We are looking for low hanging fruit with a big bang for the buck.  These recommendations should send a strong message about how the new President will work hard to create a resilient food system, resilient communities, a resilient nation.
2. Immediate Budget Requests:  The outgoing Obama administration will have produced a draft budget, but that budget will go through major editing by the new administration.  This is an immediate, must-do task for the new President.
3. Input for Administration’s Farm Bill Proposals.  Not quite as urgent as the first 100 days administrative actions or the immediate budget request actions are recommendations for the 2018 Farm Bill. If a new Administration hopes to have any input going into the farm bill debate, it will need to have its proposals on the table by late 2017 or early 2018, meaning that they have months and not years to get up to speed and be prepared.

If you’ve followed our work over the last few years, you probably have guessed the Resilience project will focus on recommendations to help farmers help the planet by creating better soils by pulling carbon from the atmosphere.

However, in August in Maine, we’ll be developing recommendations on all sorts of topics, including:

• New and Minority Farmers
• Good Food (local, regional, food access, organic, product labeling, etc.)
• Conservation and Environmental Stewardship
• Farm Safety Net Reform
• Food Safety
• Fair Competition and Contract Reform
• Agricultural Research
• Immigration Reform

So send us your ideas on any policy changes in anything which impinges on rural America and the food and environment of all Americans.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

 

Love and the letter of the law

The moon is full, the night is clear and moon shadows are everywhere.  The moon’s brightness is so strong that only a few stars are visible.  And it does this magic so regularly.  The moon has always gone through all its phases in 29.53 days.  Many ancient counting devices called tally sticks have 29 notches.  The Lebombo tally stick  with 29 distinct notches was left in a cave in South Africa about 35,000 years ago.  No wonder the word month is derived from moon.

The regularity of the moon and sun and other natural phenomena are called laws of nature, but we really need a better term.  Laws of nature are facts, while laws of men are not facts at all.  Laws of men were established because the laws of nature no longer worked to control man’s behavior.

The oldest law code was written about 2100 BC during the reign of King Ur-Nammu who ruled the city state of Ur in present day Iraq.  Ur-Nammu is also famous for building the gigantic Ziggurat–a temple dedicated to a moon god.  Three hundred years later, another ruler of Ur, Hammurabi, carved his Hammurabic Code of 282 laws into a black nine foot column so all his people would know the rules of the kingdom.  Abraham, father of all Arabs and Jews, was born in Ur.  About 300 years after Hammurabi, Abraham’s descendant, Moses, came down with a set of laws somewhat similar to Hammurabi’s but dedicated to one god.  The Hittites, Egyptians and Chinese all soon followed with their own written laws.

All these codes of written laws were turned on their head by a movement which claimed that “the letter of the law kills, but the spirit of the law give life.”   This new movement claimed that love is the foundation of all natural law.  Loving your neighbor as yourself and loving the one God were declared as the foundation of all law.

In the two thousand years since, most have strayed from trying to know the spirit of the law and instead have become practical and down to earth and, consequently, gazillions of laws have been established.  Lawyers have multiplied like bunnies and made modern America the most litigious society on earth.

A small remnant of lawyers continues to try to make human law consistent with the laws of nature.  To these jurists law should be natural, meaning: consistent with the  instincts and emotions common to man and the lower animals, such as the instinct of self-preservation and love of offspring.

Written laws, then, are just attempts to put into words the laws found in nature.  They will always be lacking, never totally true, and slavishly following them will always lead to problems.  Man-made laws are made to be broken.  Only by breaking and perfecting them can we bring them closer to natural law.

The trouble is that most folks nowadays don’t have any concept of the “spirit of the law.”  As man loses touch with nature, he ceases to know natural law.  The cities where most people live are designed to exclude nature.  Nature is an enemy to be fought.  Those whose world is the city will invariably become separated from natural cycles and natural communities.

All natural cycles and communities are built on cooperation and complementarity.  You may have difficulty seeing how love is manifest in nature.  After all, nature is alleged to be “red in tooth and claw” based on survival of the fittest.  Recently, ecologists have come to realize that the selfish, individual selection central to classic Darwinism is misleading.  The fittest individuals are not single individuals.  They are individuals which are part of communities which help each other.  Each species is part of a community of all sorts of species which are complementary to each other and help each other.  It is the community which is selected, the individual is just the mechanism by which the community is selected.

So think about cooperation and complementary species if “love” seems too wishy-washy and sentimental.

But, please, when abandoning the notion of individual selection and the capitalism which logically sprang from it, don’t trade it in for another set of rules such as socialism  or organic agriculture.   All these rules are imperfect and made to be broken.  Instead focus on the consistencies in natural cycles and communities.  Look at which communities survive and thrive, not which ones meet your external criteria.

Organic agriculture, for example, is appealing in so many ways.  If you define qualities of systems which survive and thrive (e.g., are resilient) in line with most ecologists and define organic farming by IFOAM Basic Standards, you’ll probably contend:  “for most criteria, organic farming displays encouraging and promising features and mirrors the characteristics of farm resilience.”

Yet 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.

Similarly, so many societies have been founded on the principles of socialism and grew weak and declined.  You may argue that unfettered capitalism has always resulted in the obliteration of species and pollution of the earth.  And you’d be right.  But why not try to understand natural cycles and natural communities rather than put your faith in yet another man-made philosophy which you know will be proven wrong?

Any if you don’t know that any man-made philosophy or law has flaws and will fail you, then you are stuck in a polarized and polarizing position.  You will inevitably come into conflict with other totally convinced people at opposite poles.  You will help create the wicked problems which bedevil our world.

Born again is natural

Rebirth is a characteristic of all resilient natural systems.  Woods have fires, become prairies and then woods again. Prairie potholes become barren in drought and then teem with life when the rains return.  Yet non-Christians and some mainstream Christians denigrate the concept of being born again.  They sound like Nicodemus, a Pharisee ruler of the Jews: “How can a man be born when he is old?”

Psychologists have started trying to come up with a response to this question.   Psychologists finally noticed that children who grow up with alcoholic, unemployed or mentally ill parents often do not exhibit destructive behaviors such as chronic unemployment, substance abuse, and out-of-wedlock births. They can be just as happy and successful as children from happy and successful parents.

Psychologists adopted the term resilience from ecology and defined it as a “positive adaptation” after a stressful or adverse situation.  Resilient people bounce back.

Psychology is wedded to the external environment as cause of behavior.  Accordingly, psychological researchers have been devoted to discovering environmental factors that explain people’s adaptation to adverse conditions, such as maltreatment, catastrophic life events, or poverty.  When no such external causes were found, empirical work shifted to understand the underlying protective processes.

Many have discovered that “spirituality is a component of resilience.” People with regular spiritual practices (yoga, meditation, prayer, nature walks, and so on) are more resilient than those without.

Resilient people are increasingly seen as folks who have the capacity to reorganize their lives after trauma.  They recreate their lives after tragedy or misfortune.

Ecologists have long recognized this ability of resilient systems.  Disturbances are a part of the adaptive cycle of all living systems: growth (r), maturation (K), disassembly (Ω) and reassembly (α) leading back to the growth phase.

Unluckily for our species, we are so adept at prolonging the K phase that we often destroy the capacity for reassembly.  Adults don’t want to disturb the stability of their lives, so they don’t have children.  We like sitting looking at screens and grow out of shape, weak and unable to cope with disturbance.  Cities maintain themselves by extracting wealth from the surrounding rural area–eventually creating hundreds of dead cities in man-made deserts.

What will break us out of our seemingly uncontrollable need to stay in the K phase?   Some business folks have been convinced by the Austrian school and the creative destruction of Schumpeter.  They realize that resilience means embracing disturbance and using it to create new systems.

Most of us keep trying to maintain our somewhat satisfying pleasures in our K phase and never induce the Ω required to get to α.  We fail to realize that devotion to the pleasures of the K phase just insures a more cataclysmic destruction.  In the midst of that destruction, we’ll cry out in anguish, wondering where we went wrong.

The adaptive cycles are indifferent to our anguish, to fairness, to our limited sense of right and wrong.  They just are.  Or, if asked what you should call them, they might say “I am.”

So you can learn more about r, K, Ω, α and the qualities which lead to resilience and transformation.  Or you can just let them buffet you around as they wish.  Ω will come.  The only question is whether you use it or it abuses you.

The ecological approach to rebirth and being born again is not quite what you’ll find in the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or even the Tao Te Ching.  But you will find it whenever you study Nature.

Spring without Winter?

Spring has lasted longer this year than I can ever remember.  It warmed up in February and has stayed nice and comfortable ever since.  All too often we just jump from winter into summer, with hardly any time for Spring.  It’s tempting to wish for this weather to continue forever.

Quito, Ecuador, and Lalibela, Ethiopia, have this kind of weather all year round.  Working there was simply delightful.  The weather is just heaven.  If you’re close to the equator and at the right altitude, you can have spring-like weather all year.  With perfect weather, you’d think the locals would be happy and productive and engaged.   They aren’t.  Places with perfect weather all year round have less productive and engaged citizens.  They are among the poorest countries in the world.

Minnesota has eight months of winter and three months of blackflies, yet many residents are happy, productive and engaged and wouldn’t live anywhere else.   All of Northern Europe is chilly and cloudy and generally miserable most of the year, yet it’s citizens have historically been more productive and engaged than any in the world.

Changing and challenging weather lays a foundation for the ability to adapt and innovate in response to any disturbance.  Systems which have been exposed to periodic disturbance develop an adaptive capacity to absorb periodic change.  This is not the case with systems which experience extreme events infrequently.

Adaptation to disturbance and change causes systems to increase their response diversity leading to even higher abilities to withstand and adapt to change.

Temperate forests can survive and thrive in extreme and extremely variable weather.  Tropical forests have high levels of diversity, but not of response diversity.  Cold temperatures wipe out tropical forests as they have multiple times in our planet’s history.  Temperate forests respond and adapt to changes to cold or hot climates.  Change to a colder climate may cause a temperate forest to seemingly disappear, but often the seeds of trees remain dormant and the temperate forest rebounds when the climate moderates.

The temperate forest has worked out a multitude of responses and mechanisms of adaptation which enable it to survive and thrive in conditions where the tropical forest disappears.

The same is true in human organizations.  Organizations that survive and thrive are quick to read and act on signals of change. They have worked out how to experiment rapidly, frequently, and economically—not only with products and services but also with business models, processes, and strategies. They have built up skills in managing complex multistakeholder systems in an increasingly interconnected world.

The tropical forest depends on an essentially stable environment to survive.  Many large, established organizations have built their operations around scale and efficiency—sources of advantage that rely on an essentially stable environment.

Nokia once dominated the smartphone market with scale and efficiency.  It was the market share leader with a strong cost position. But Nokia was attacked by an entirely different kind of competitor: Apple’s adaptive system of suppliers, telecom partnerships, and numerous independent application developers, created to support the iPhone. Google’s Android operating system, too, capitalized on a broad array of hardware partners and application developers. The ability to bring together the assets and capabilities of so many agents allowed these smartphone entrants to leapfrog the experience curve and become new market leaders in record time. As Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, wrote in a memo to his staff, “Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem.”

Organizations are learning to be adaptive like the temperate forest and not depend on stability, scale and efficiency.  The resilient system is seldom the most efficient, the biggest, or the most stable.  In fact, efficiency, size and stability can all undermine resilience when conditions change.

As much as I’d like Spring to hang on forever, I don’t really want it to.  I like adapting to Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.  Bring on change.  We glory in it.

 

What makes you happy

The predawn sky is not very clear this morning, so maybe its time to explore murky topics such as the relationship of happiness, greed, individualism, and selfishness to resilience.

Classic evolution theory can’t explain altruism and tries to explain it away.  Altruism lowers an individual’s chances of passing its own genetic material on to the next generation, yet persists in organisms from slime molds to wolves to humans.  Classic evolution theorists (such as Richard Dawkins and his Selfish Gene) contend that selection occurs at the level of the individual.  Selfishness, individualism and greed are therefore enshrined as necessary and sufficient for explaining human behavior.  Classic economic theory follows the same assumptions.  People know what they want and will try to amass as much of it as they can.

One economist who criticizes classic economics, Amartya Sen, illustrates the failure of such thinking with the question: “What should you do if you see a person trying to cut his fingers off with a pair of dull scissors?”

The response of most people: stop him from cutting off his fingers, call the police for help, etc.

“Offer him sharper scissors,” was Professor Sen’s answer. Classic economics assumes that people know what they want and that the economic system should help them get what they want.

Counter to classic theory, behavioral economics makes three related claims. First, people do not know what makes them happy. Second, fewer options are sometimes better than more options. Third, more may not make you happier.

The origin of behavioral economics was catalyzed by guests at a party one of it’s founders hosted.  Richard Thaler served cashews as an appetizer. His guests were voraciously eating the nuts; so much so that Thaler worried their appetites would be satisfied before dinner. He removed the remaining cashews. The result? His guests thanked him.

What do cashews have to do with economics? Classical economics argues that people should always be happier with the option to eat cashews. Thus, Thaler’s guests should have been unhappy when he reduced their choices.

Perhaps, Thaler realized, standard economics is wrong in assuming people are rational maximizers. If this is true, perhaps the person in Harvard square attempting to self mutilate with blunt scissors would be happier with fingers than without.

We don’t always do what is best for ourselves.  Often we do what was good for our ancestors.  Up until fairly recently, humans were often hungry and extremely physically active. Our ancestors would have benefited from a day on the couch eating high-caloric foods. Compared to us, they had very high activity levels, lower caloric intake, and fewer possessions.

While our world has changed incredibly rapidly, our genes and brains have not. Thus, our tastes still reflect the world of our ancestors. So we think more money will make us happier, because more resources would have led our ancestors to greater success. Similarly, we are built to be energetically thrifty because because our ancestors were on a tight caloric budget.  In short, we love to eat and sleep because eating and sleeping were good for our ancestors.

We tend to love money because resources were good for our ancestors, and many of us hate useless exercise because it was bad for our ancestors.

Classic economics and evolution are also increasingly being shown to be wrong about social behavior.  It’s now clear that it’s not the strong who survive, it’s the strongest group which survives.  Individualism, selfishness and resulting isolation is the result of classic economics and evolution theory.  We want and need to be around people and help people because it leads to us to survive and thrive–that is, it increases our resilience.

In the last few years the concept of the selfish gene has been replaced by the idea that natural selection occurs at multiple levels: acting not only on genes and individuals, but also on entire groups. Groups with high prosociality — a suite of cooperative behaviors that includes altruism — often outcompete those that have little social cohesion, so natural selection applies to group behaviors just as it does to individual adaptations¹. The process of group-level selection has made humans a profoundly social species, the bees of the primate order.

Morality and religion, according to this view, are biologically and culturally evolved adaptations that enable human groups to function as single units rather than mere collections of individuals.  Religions have enabled people to achieve by collective action what they never could do alone.

Religious believers often compare their communities to single organisms and even to insect colonies.   They may be literally correct.

We need to be in communities which limit our options and provide opportunities for us to help the community.  Happiness comes not from selfishness and greed but from helping your family and your community succeed.  Then, when you realize your community also includes some woods and fields and animals, you can know joy.

 

 

 

Ecosystems aren’t politically correct

Ecosystems can be pretty rough on individual species.  Even without man’s interference, several species will go extinct every year.  It’s a natural process.  Species which aren’t resilient disappear.  To survive many species are rough on themselves.  Many fish species eat their young when they overpopulate a area.  If they didn’t, the species would run out of food and disappear.  A resilient species has lots of offspring, but must be able to control reproduction when resources are limited.

Other species are kept in check by predators.  If deer overpopulate an area, they will destroy most vegetation and cause erosion and destruction of habitat for all species in a forest.  Coyotes and wolves (or human hunters) are needed to kill the excess to keep deer from destroying their own homes.

We have an excess of kindness in our suburbs and cities.  Many hate to see any animal die, especially Bambi.  So suburbanites are often up in arms when deer population explode and must be controlled by killing some of them.

This desire to be  kind and nice to others (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”) is so strong in Western culture that some words and phrases are banned because they offend some groups.  Using these words incurs severe castigation.

In August 2015, “anchor baby” was the term the politically correct decided to eliminate.  Dozens of phrases are banned by various universities because they offend certain groups.  At the University of California saying, “There is only one race, the human race,” is offensive because it denies “the significance of a person of color’s racial/ethnic experience and history.”  Saying “America is the land of opportunity,” implies that “People of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder.”  At UC, asking an Asian, Latino, or Native American “why are you so quiet?” is tantamount to giving the order “assimilate to dominant culture.”  And stating the opinion, “Affirmative action is racist,” is also verboten.

In ecology, a race is a physically distinct subset of a species.  Races suffer physical
insults regularly and few care.  The resilient adapt and survive.  Many suffer the ultimate insult of being eliminated and the ecosystem doesn’t cry but just adapts to the change.

Ecosystems are not politically correct, they just roll with the punches. It’s wonderful to study wild species where there is no PC police to hinder your speech or thinking.

One of our endangered species at Meadowcreek is the yellow snail darter.  We try to keep our streams free flowing because that’s the habitat the darter needs to survive.  The snail darter was made famous by a 1970s conflict over building the Tellico dam and flooding the Little Tennessee River.  Dam opponents fought successfully to include the llocal race of the snail darter on the Endangered Species List in 1975 and the dam was halted. In 1978, the Supreme Court sided with environmentalists, but Congress declared the fish nonendangered, the Tellico Dam was built and that race of the snail darter disappeared.

Humans have vastly increased the extinction rate of other species from a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Ecologists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day.

We are so worried about being politically correct that we censor our language and thought to avoid offending the ears of the easily offended.  Yet we ignore the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems.

Ecosystems don’t much care what you call them.  If they are resilient, they will keep perking along.  If they aren’t resilient, they will fall apart. We can argue all day long about which is more resilient.  The ecosystem doesn’t care.

The ecosystem will adapt no matter how many species we wipe out.  It won’t weep and cry and mourn the hurt.  It will just adapt.

Likewise the planet won’t weep and mourn if humans continue to overpopulate the planet and deplete its natural resources. It will just continue to adapt.

And if man continues on a non-resilient path and wipes himself out, nature will not weep or mourn.  Nature will just adapt and begin creating new species to populate the planet.