THE DOG CHASES THE TAIL

Evolution is a dog chasing its tail.

Humans do not do well in the natural world. That is precisely the reason we have built our unnatural world. The natural world is cold and hot, full of predators, disease and discomfort. So it did not take long for humans to change the world to be more hospitable. But of course, changing our circumstances changed the natural world, which then requires us to change our circumstances in another way.

This IS the natural world. When a coyote makes a meal of a prairie dog, it decreases the world by one prairie dog. Repeated at regular intervals, by enough coyotes, and the world we become prairie dog shy, and the coyote will have to begin to dine on other tidbits, or die itself. This will make the world coyote shy.

People who study evolution often get very excited about the fact that animals generally have abundant offspring and only the fit survive. Of course, the factor that determines which offspring survive is the environment. However, the surviving offspring change the environment, literally determining which environments survive and which collapse, or change. This brings to mind the phrase, “ever learning but never arriving at the truth”.

People cannot live apart from this cycle. People may forget they are a part of nature, but that does not remove them from being a part of nature, Environmentalists who want to eradicate human presence and industrialists who want to eradicate nature, both miss the mark. What is needed is for humans to try to be a part of the cycle so as to not harm the cycle. But if we fail it will not matter greatly because nature will make the correction for us. God has made it so.

The gene changes the environment and the environment selects the gene. They are both going nowhere. But that doesn’t mean the humans are going nowhere. The natural world is the platform humans walk through as they enact their own character and salvation. Nature is simply Gods way of preserving the platform.

THE HUNGRY AMERICAN

The number of farms in the United States since I was born in 1945 has declined by half.  Of course the size of individual farms has increased accordingly.  Not all farm land has been simply moved into larger farm holdings.  Some has been lost to non-farm holdings and activities.  It was recently estimated that the number of arms in the US at the beginning of 2010 was 2.08 million.  This is a decline of 0.6 percent from the previous year.  We have the fewest number of Americans living on farms as we have ever had in the history of the country. 

While many people enjoy gardening for some of their food, growing food is not as simple as it seems.  Further, many people live in circumstances where they could not grow a substantial amount of their food if they wanted, or needed, too.  Only sixty three percent of Americans own their own home and many of these homes are condos or in suburbs with restricted lot size and water availability.  Keeping animals is very difficult to impossible in most suburban locations.

In the most recent American Bee Journal an article showed that the number of bee colonies kept in the United States has declined to the lowest level since the Second World War.  However, the loss has come primarily from hobbyists, people who run ten or fewer hives.  The big operators have gotten bigger and the little guys have gotten out.  The bee journal suggested this was due to the increased difficulties of keeping bees in recent years due to disease and other stresses in the environment.

However, I think it is because of the cultural changes that have occurred in the last fifty years: where many people no longer own their own homes, those that do have smaller tracts of land, with many zoning and homeowners association rules restrictions on the use of their land, and when the average stay in a house is less than five years. 

 

The end result is that the knowledge of how to grow food, at least enough to support a family, produce honey, or in other ways care for ourselves is being lost.  The ability to do so has already been destroyed.  This has occurred due to government policies that reward production but ignores the damage done by the producer. 

One of the damages government policies and large corporate farms have cause is the massive reallocation of people off of the land and into cities where they are employed by corporations, or not at all.  When Pol Pot, or the Chinese, or Stalin, did this it was universally condemned.  When we do it we call it progress. 

          When things change, and they always do, there will be many hungry Americans. 

LIVING TOGETHER

I watched my little bee break out of its cocoon today. I was surprised at how proud I felt over her success. The male hatched out while I wasn’t looking, but I did see him for a few minutes. Man, are they fast! When he left I could hardly tell which direction he went.

You probably didn’t know that bees have cocoons. Most folks think all bees are honey bees, the kind that live in hives and make honey. (Do honey bees “make” honey, or do they “gather” it? Technically, honey is nectar from plants, so bees simpy gather it. Of course it is changed while in the bee’s stomach and then stored in the hive, so I guess they make it also.)

But my little pet bee that hatched out today is what is sometimes called a solitary bee because each female bee builds a single nest, deposits her off-spring with provisions and then dies. She works alone. I like to call them native bees because they were the only bees on the American continent until the early pilgrims brought the honey bee with them. Specifically this little bee that hatched out of its cocoon today in mid-March is named Osmia lignaria by the scientific community. Others call it the Blue Orchard Bee, or the Mason Bee.

She’s a cute little bee that doesn’t look much like a honey bee. To begin with she is black, or a very dark blue if the light is just right. She is also smaller than a honey bee, probably about a quarter of an inch or a little more in length. Somehow she is endearing in a way I didn’t expect. I can’t quite exxplain it, but she was just cute in a way that I had never thought about a honey bee. She sat for a few minutes, groomed some stray hairs, walked a few paces, defecated following her long winter in the cocoon, sat in the sun for a few minutes, and then, in a flash, was gone also.

We had lived together all winter now. I got my bees last fall and have been carefully storing them, first outside, then in a refrigerator all winter. I hope to release them this spring, let them pollinate some orchards and then collect their babies for release the next year. I guess it is sort of free-range bee ranching, but without the branding and roundup necessary in running cattle.

I have been fascinated by things “living together” since my senior year in college when I took a course in Parasitology, the study of parasites. I know that sounds gross, but I found the concept of things living cooperating and adapting to live together especially fascinating.

In fact, every animal ever examined has at least one specific animal that lives exclusively in, or on, the host. In addition every animal examined shares some collection of animals that live in, or on, it with some other species. Inescapably then, there are more “parasites” than free living animals in the world. The term for these co-dependent creatures is “symbionts”, and most symbionts do not cause disease or in anyway harm their hosts. Many benefit their hosts and are in turn benefitted.

Bees aren’t parasites. But they are symbionts. Their entire lives are entertwined with the flowering plants that provide them both pollen and nectar. But in turn the flowering plants are entirely dependent on the bees to provide the very intimate service of reproduction. Or maybe flowers are the symbionts of the bees? Sometimes it is hard to tell.

But in turn, this mutual intimate relationship between insects and flowers benefits humans with the very world in which we live. About eighty or ninty percent of all flowering plants are pollinated by animals. There are about 200,000 animal pollinators in the world, and the great majority are insect. And the most successful insect pollinators are bees. The world as we know it simply ceases to exist without pollinators.

So in yet another sense I have been living with my little Blue Orchard Bee much longer than just the past winter. I have been living with bees all my life. In fact, I owe my very existence, at least as it now exists, to the birds and the bees.

And that’s why I have my little bees. If I can create a home for these little creatures, I create a little earth for me. When I tend the bees, they attend to my needs by providing sweet fruit, healthy vegetables, new seeds and beautiful flowers. And maybe by building a better world for myself, I also create a better garden for my neighbor’s, more flowers for my community, and just a better world for my world. Not a bad deal. And I got to watch my little bee hatch this morning, on top of it all.

THE FAILURE OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The industrial revolution has failed. Oh sure, it increased industrial production for the world, providing us with machines, technologies and things. But men assumed that living things could be industrialized. That potatoes could be planted, tilled, harvested and rotated in a way similar to the manufacture of cell phones. We have also assumed that humans would be happy working for others and living in city tenements. I think that has been sufficiently shown to be untrue.

The industrial process is basically extractive. That is, it takes materials, makes them into something else, uses that object, and in the end discards the item (and much waste along the way. But there are hidden costs to this approach which are typically not paid by the industrialists. The taking of raw materials leaves behind residua that the taker usually abandons: waste, extraction damage, pollution, and human dislocation to name a few.

Farming on the other hand is primarily a nurturing activity, where animals and plants are nurtured, cared for, used and recycled. Traditional farming has not only been about production and profit, but about home, pride of ownership, love and care of the land and property. It has, and is in much of the world, been practiced in a small community which provided support and connection. But when a farm is treated industrially the losses may be more hidden.

What is lost on an industrial farm (meaning essentially all farming in the United States today)? Some of the losses are topsoil, energy, homes, employment, exercise, human displacement, decay of country towns, water pollution, air pollution, food pollution, production inequalities and loss of pride of ownership and community. Even disregarding these costs, which are not covered by the corporate farms, American agriculture is one of the most expensive in the world. Corporations like to tell about their production. They do not like to talk about their efficiency.

This is all exemplified in the honey industry. But that is the next blog.