HAS THE WORM TURNED?

It may surprise some people to know that earthworms are not native to the North American continent. They were introduced here by early colonists when they brought earthworm cocoons embedded in potted plants they brought with them. Through agriculture, fishing and on their own earthworms have been disseminated across the continent. In some forested area they are spreading at the rate of about seven meters a year.

The glaciated forests of North America existed for millions of years without earthworms as part of their soil makeup. These forests depend on a rich top soil layer of slowly composting leaf litter and a unique microbial population to supply nutrients to the thin mineral soils. As the worms invade an area, they hasten the breakdown of the leaf litter. The trees of the northern forests of the US depend on the leaf litter to help tree seedlings to survive. The thick leaf litter provides protection against temperature extremes, moisture loss and protection from browsing animals. The leaf litter is essential to seedling survival. So as the leaf litter layer is destroyed by earthworms, the reproductive success of the forest is compromised.

Normally, this earthworm activity has been seen as a good thing because it hastens nutrient liberation and spreads nutrients deep into the soil. However, this conclusion was reached based upon the studies of Charles Darwin from the limited sample of the English countryside. There is no indication that he knew earthworms were not universally distributed. What may be good for a damp cold climate may be less beneficial to a different environment. The reported thick top soil of the American mid-west may have existed because there were no earthworms to hasten decomposition. We'll never know since they are now ubiquitous.

There is also evidence that the microbial makeup of the northern soils is changed with invasions of the earthworm. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the changes in leaf litter and soil nutrition. But there is growing suspicion that the collection of earthworm mucus within the soil structure may also account for some of the changes in microbial balance.

Researchers at the Hebei Agricultural University in China examined earthworm mucus for antibacterial activity and found a short peptide (small protein like chemical) that possessed antibacterial properties against several common bacterial strains. What role this chemical plays in the actual protection of the earthworm, the amount produced and how broadly this peptide protects against bacteria is yet to be determined.

Once again we see that "Man doesn't know what he doesn't know."

LIVING TOGETHER

Sometimes the most important truth can be hidden in plain sight. There are over 250,000 flowering plants that have been described. That is probably a modest estimate, but I am not a Botanist and don’t want to over-sell. There are over 750,000 insects described. That number is actually much bigger and is expected to go over a million.

Together this means that two thirds of all life forms are monopolized by these two groups. This is not an accident. These two groups of living things live together in an intimate way. Flowering plants could not exist without the service of insects to aid them in sexual reproduction, which we call pollination. And most insects could not exist without the shelter, surface, and food (nectar, pollen and plant parts) provided by the plants. These two groups are completely symbiotic: dependent on living together.

This concept of living together is a delicate and changing arrangement. There are flowers like Passiflora incarnata, the Maypop, common in the southern United States in areas like Tennessee, that are only pollinated by Xylocopa virginica, a carpenter bee. If the bee is lost, the flower will also become extinct. Or the “bearclaw poppy”, Arctomecon humilis, which is only pollinated by a solitary bee, named Perdita meconis, unknown until just a few years ago. If the flower is lost the bee will go extinct. These last two live near the Virgin River in Southwest Utah, or Northwest Arizona, as you see it.

Sometimes this balance between organisms is upset and we call the result predation, or parasitism, or disease, or extinction, or pollution or some other term. The problem is that it is very difficult to know what will upset the balance between any two or three organisms. How do we know what to avoid, or how to avoid it. It is akin to a complex structure built out of toothpicks. It is hard to predict which tooth pick can be removed and which cannot without causing the collapse of the whole system. Generally humans don’t have a clue what we are doing in this regard.

Mankind has put a lot of energy into killing insects. Many insects compete with us for our food. Some insects transmit diseases. But ironically, mankind relies heavily on the flowering plants for food and fiber. High mountain peaches, cherries, apples, pears, and apricots are just a few of the hundreds of plants we find desirable that rely on insects. So if plants need insects, and insects need plants, and man needs plants, then doesn’t man need insects?

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.

KILL THE INSECTS?

Sometimes the most important truth can be hidden in plain sight. There are over 250,000 flowering plants that have been described. That is probably a modest estimate, but I am not a Botanist and don’t want to over-sell. There are over 750,000 insects described. That number is actually much bigger and is expected to go over a million. Together this means that two thirds of all life forms are monopolized by these two groups. This is not an accident. These two groups of living things live together in an intimate way. Flowering plants could not exist without the service of insects to aid them in sexual reproduction, which we call pollination. And most insects could not exist without the shelter, surface, and food (nectar, pollen and plant parts) provided by the plants.

This concept of living together is a delicate and changing arrangement. Sometimes this balance between organisms is upset and we call the result predation, or parasitism, or disease, or extinction, or some other term. The problem is that it is very difficult to know what will upset the balance between any two or three organisms. How do we know what to avoid or how to avoid it. It is akin to a complex structure built out of toothpicks. It is hard to predict which tooth pick can be removed and which cannot without causing the collapse of the whole system. Generally humans don’t have a clue what we are doing in this regard

Mankind has put a lot of energy into killing insects. Ironically mankind relies heavily on the flowering plants for food and fiber. High mountain peaches, cherries, apples, pears, and apricots are just a few of the hundreds of plants we find desirable that rely on insects. So if plants need insects, and insects need plants, and man needs plants, then doesn’t man need insects?