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?

TO BEE, OR NOT TO BEE

The Natives are restless and, like their human counterparts, their land is being taken from them. I’m not speaking of the Algonquin, Sioux or Navajo. I am speaking about tribes with names like Megachilidae, Colletidae, Osmia, and Bombus. These are tribes of the Native bees of North America. They have lived here for centuries prior to the invasion of the European interlopers, the Honey bee. There are somewhere between 3500 and 4000 species of Native bees in North America. That means that all pollination done in North and South America prior to the 1600’s was accomplished by these little known creatures.

They are cataloged and typed by several different names. Sometimes they are collectively called “pollen bees” because they carry far more pollen than honey bees. They are also known as “solitary bees” because they do not form large colonies. Each female develops her own nest without honey stores or workers. They are largely invisible to the average person, but of huge significance to the world. There are so many different types of these Native bees that it is hard to talk about them all at once. But there are a few simple facts that are relative to most.

Perhaps most importantly, Native bees are highly efficient pollinators. They often do the lion's share of pollinating crops, although this is not always recognized or appreciated. They have a number of advantages over honeybees as pollinators.
• Many are active early in the spring, before honey bee colonies reach large
size.
• Native bees are active earlier in the day and later in the afternoon than
honeybees, thus providing more pollination time.
• Native bees tend to stay in a crop rather than fly between crops, providing
more efficient pollination.
• Native bees seldom forage more than a couple of hundred yards from their
nest, whereas Honey bees may travel many miles.
• Because they fly faster than honeybees, they can pollinate more plants.
• Unlike honeybees, the males also pollinate the crop.
• Native bees are usually gentle, and do not sting since they have no honey
stores to defend. When they do sting, it is mild.
• Many native bees do not get disoriented in greenhouses.

Because of these differences, many Native bees are far more efficient pollinators than honey bees. Some experts suggest they accomplish more than 100 times what the Honey bee does. For example 250 Mason bees can pollinate one acre of apples. The same job would generally require a honeybee hive of about 20,000 bees.
Native bees have been shown to increase crop yields when they are present. Over 50 species of native bees specialize in plants such as watermelon or sunflower and over 80 species have been shown to be involved in berry crop pollination in Maine and Massachusetts. Native bees tripled the production of cherry tomatoes in one study in California. Many of these crops simply would not exist without native bees.
Often, growers don't realize how much pollination is performed by native bees. Signs of inadequate pollination are often misinterpreted as weather problems or disease. In one study it was found that of the 1700 bees trapped, only 34 were honeybees. This means that Native bees were performing almost all of the pollination in that area. Experts suggest that the economic value of pollination by Native bees greatly outweighs the traditional value of honey and wax produced by honeybees.
The drastic decline in feral and domestic honey bees has made it even more important to conserve and study wild bee populations.

The number of Native bees has also declined, but the reasons for these declines appear to be different from honey bees and are not well understood. Though some Native bees can be managed and used in commercial agriculture, most of them are regional. We do not know enough yet about their biology to know why they are declining, or how to manage them effectively.

So the fading drum beat of declining natives is once again affecting the North American continent. Likewise there may be serious consequences to the conqueror. However, if we can understand and preserve these native tribes, we may, at the same time, better feed the world. Towards this end biologists at Mesa State College will be collecting, identifying and attempting to culture local species of native bees in the future.

ART AND SCIENCE

Science is uniquely concerned with physical things. Historically science is born of questions such as: How many are there? Why do apples fall down? How does a falling thing fall? What shape is it? How big is it. How much does it weigh? Why does that object act that way? This requires scientists to restrict their attention to a limited single object and study that one object carefully.

This study may require tremendous physical skill and special techniques. The scientist may have to invent new methods and perfect new skills to conduct his studies. Often numerous studies are done which simply attempt to establish a pattern or direction. But from this careful, and sometimes lengthy, study the scientist attempts to distil some kind of general understanding about the object or event that they have studied.

This general understanding is sometimes called a theory. As it becomes more reliable and useful, it is sometimes is called a Law. These general ideas can then be used to compare other similar objects, evaluate the theory further, and make predictions about events under certain conditions.

But the overall conclusion is that scientists tend to begin with some real-world physical object or phenomenon and conclude with a general idea. They turn the world of reality into the world of imagination and thought.

In contrast, art appears to be concerned with ideas. Much of art, including visual art, music, language arts and performance, appears to be born from such matters as: religious concepts, political movements, cultural characteristics, imaginary events or social ideals. This requires the artist to restrict their attention and focus on a specific idea they wish to explore.

This exploration may require an extended period of time to consider all the ramifications of the idea they wish to explore. This is followed by an extended period of time when the artist may have to invent new methods and exert considerable skill in his chosen medium to produce a model. Often the artist may make several models or attempts to capture the ideas he is contemplating.

In the end the artist creates a physical object which represents his view of the purely ethereal idea he has been contemplating. The important thing is that the end product is a function of the physical world. It may be visual, audible, or palpable; but it is real. This object can then be used to test the accuracy of the artists (and societies) understanding of the idea, explore the ramifications of the idea, explain the idea more fully to others, or even test the truthfulness of the idea.

But the overall conclusion is that artists tend to begin with some non-physical idea and conclude with a real object or physical manifestation that can be detected by the senses. They turn the imaginary world of ideas into reality.

It seems that both groups of people are concerned with understanding our world, arriving at some form of truth and increasing understanding. Even the skills and talents involved are very similar in a general sense. What appears significantly different is that they initiate their mental journeys from separate starting points.

Unfortunately, because of their opposite trajectories, scientists and artists often see themselves as in conflict. Understanding similarities enriches each field significantly. This can be especially powerful in educational endeavors where numerous studies and pilot projects have shown that using one approaches to study the other is especially effective.

For example, having students write about math or science has increased understanding for many students. Writing computer programs that artistically animates scientific phenomenon has proven animate to be an excellent learning tool. The discipline of assigning an artist to explore a specific scientific concept in an art class leads to greater understanding of both art and science.

The world appears to need fewer engineers and poets, and far more people who understand the relationship between ideas and objects. The creation of ideas has an effect on the physical world. The creation of objects has an effect on the creation of ideas.