Winter is coming... Let the thermometer wars begin!

“Hold somebody's hand and feel its warmth. Gram per gram, it converts 10,000 times more energy per second than the sun.  You find this hard to believe?  Here are the numbers: an average human weighs 70 kilograms and consumes about 12,600 kilojoules / day; that makes about 2 millijoules / gram.second, or 2 milliwatts / gram.  For the sun it's a miserable 0.2 microjoules / gram.second.  Some bacteria, such as the soil bacterium ‘Azotobacter’ convert as much as 10 joules / gram.second, outperforming the sun by a factor 50 million.  I am warm because inside each of my body cells there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of mitochondria that burn the food I eat.”

Gottfried Schatz, in "Jeff's view on science and scientists", 2006

El Niño is in full swing, and most of the country is about to undergo the kinds of temperature extremes (not to mention precipitation events, many of which will be white and fluffy, or clear and slippery) which inevitably lead to discussions of weatherproofing one’s home, and finding ways to save on heating costs.

We at Myrtle’s place, of course, live in the sliver of Texas which is just north of subtropical, so we don’t actually have to deal with the white or slippery stuff very often (snow on average falls in the lower Brazos Valley about every four years, and hardly ever sticks for more than a few hours), but it does get cold enough that many of our neighbors flip their thermostats from “cool” to “heat” – we are not among them, as we throw open the windows and put the heating blankets on our beds.  (Few pleasures match that of sleeping warmly in cold air, but we digress.)

This seems an excellent opportunity to discuss the global effects of exceptionally local actions – most of the time, when winter heating costs are discussed, it is in the context of personal housekeeping, and this is appropriate.  The immediate impact of heating (and cooling, the summer equivalent of this discussion) on household budgets are not only in and of themselves important microeconomic considerations, but they also impact thousands of other decisions made by individual consumers which, in turn, have a great impact on the overall economy and (what we at Myrtle’s place consider more important) on the environment.

The usual suggestions involve things like weather-stripping around doors and windows, making sure attic and wall spaces are properly insulated, etc.  We do not disagree with any of these suggestions.  They are all good and proper (there are some ways to do each of those items which are more environmentally conscious than others, but that is another topic altogether).

What we are concerned with today is more of a theoretical understanding of how weatherizing one’s home works, and how that fits into the broader scheme of maximizing the philosophy of the 3 R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle).

There are two distinct concepts from the world of physics at play in heating or cooling one’s home which have a direct impact on how much energy we expend and how costly it is to do so.

Efficiency and effectiveness are sometimes compatible, and sometimes not.  The best practices in the home or business space involve that happy conjunction between these two ideas.

When discussing power transference for a particular use, efficiency is defined as the useful power output divided by the total power consumed.  Expression of this concept is very common in all branches of engineering; the formula is typically denoted by the Greek letter small Eta (η - ήτα).  Efficiency = Useful power output / Total power input.

Effectiveness, on the other hand, refers to the capacity to produce a desired result.  Since the desired result is a subjective concept, effectiveness may be represented in logical terms, but not mathematical terms.

This, of course, makes it impossible to objectively decide on the best possible system to use in pretty much any household application, whether weatherizing, cooking, cleaning, lighting or entertaining, just to name a few of the activities in which we all engage.

In terms of heating and cooling, this means that one must first decide what temperature range one wishes to maintain in one’s home (or office), and that frequently must be a consensus reached among many people with opposing desires.

Most often, the range in question will vary greatly.  Fortunately, the efficiency involved in strategies to keep within that range involve a large set of common tools (the aforementioned weather-stripping, insulation, etc.)  However, some clear variations exist in terms of personal aesthetic preferences, tastes, and the width of tolerable range. 

For example, one of the most effective strategies in heating and cooling very directly impacts the look of one’s home.  We have written before about the advantages of painting one’s roof white.  It drops the ambient temperature of one’s attic spaces by a huge percentage (in our case, the temperature of our roof dropped from 150° F to 108° F immediately after painting it in a Brazos Valley May several years ago).  Similarly, planting vines along one’s western or southern exposures can vastly reduce the amount of heat in summer reaching one’s home.

However… both of those strategies leave one susceptible to slightly more heat loss in winter.  That could, of course, be mitigated by use of extra insulation in those areas, but the point is that in isolation, one strategy or another might require some tweaking in order to maintain balance between efficiency and effectiveness.  And some home-owners associations might not look kindly on certain strategies, more’s the pity.

For our northern counterparts, winter is an especially good time to consider this balance, as the very choice of heating method involves a wide range of efficiencies, and not all engineers agree on the best choice of formulae to determine that efficiency anyway.  Just to give you an easy to understand anecdotal idea, the single most efficient form of heat transfer is that of simply burning any carbon-based fuel source with minimal water content (fossil fuel, wood, paper, mummies, you name it).  Typically 100% of the convertible material is consumed by flames.  So, theoretically, if you want heat, a fireplace is the best possible option.  Except… while it is extremely efficient, it is usually not very effective, because most of the heat goes straight up the chimney, or into the bricks and mortar right around the fireplace.  That’s usually not the desired outcome.

So, most people go with some kind of HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) system, utilizing either electricity or some kind of fossil fuel (typically gas, heating oil, or coal) for the wintertime heating functionality.

Calculating the efficiency of such a system is a nightmare, given the number of variables involved of which the manufacturers could not possibly be aware, so believe the BTU (or other) calculations at your own risk.  Typically, though, if they are claiming a higher efficiency than others, there’s a fair bet that they are correct.

The effectiveness, on the other hand?  That’s an entirely separate question.  The delivery method can directly affect bothefficiency and effectiveness, but then… the effectiveness being far more dependent on the delivery method, it can impact howefficient a system is required in order to achieve cost-effectiveness, measured only by how much one must spend compared to one’s budget.

To give you some idea, perhaps heat is only required at a certain time of day, in a certain part of the building.  In the frigid north, a lone radiator rattling away in one’s sitting room in relatively inefficient manner (but utilizing only a fraction of the fuel necessary to heat the whole house) would be much less expensive (and much less ecologically damaging) than an extremely efficient system which heats the whole house.

In our cozy home on the Gulf Coast, a small electric space heater might achieve the same result, at much less cost than running a full household heater that only has to be turned on three or four times a year.

The same principles, as we mentioned, may be applied to all other home activities – lights, in particular, have recently become a focal point for such concerns – one of the federal government’s greatest achievements of the 21^st century, actually, has gone relatively unheralded:  light bulb labeling has switched from emphasizing wattage (a measure of the total input) to lumens (a measure of the total output).  We may make a posting about that some time soon, actually, because in addition to the output quantity of light, there are vast differences in the output quality of light, which make the comparison of efficiency and effectiveness particularly interesting.

The bottom line for each activity, though, is to synthesize strategies which fit into the overall theme of reducing the amount of input necessary to meet particular goals (choosing not to heat or cool certain rooms in one’s house, for example), reusing any materials which might assist in meeting those goals (hanging old quilts on walls provides a surprising amount of extra insulation, and that’s just for starters – Google “decorative insulation” and see just how cool modern temperature control can be), and recycling whenever possible (using cellulose pulp insulation, for example, frequently means using recycled materials, though check with the manufacturer to be sure).

The calculations can be complicated to an inconceivable degree if one wants to get picky with absolute goals (zero carbon emissions, most efficient heat distribution, etc.) but if one keeps in mind just the broad concepts (efficient is different from effective; reduce, reuse, recycle when possible), the minefield of consumer angst when it comes to the seasons of extreme discomfort (“The hell with it, just turn on the bleepity-bleep heater!”) can be avoided.

Remember, just being alive is an exercise in temperature conversion and energy expenditure.  Being conscientious does not have to be a chore; it can be a game.

Plus, in winter, there’s hot cocoa.

Happy farming!

The Passion of the Grist

“We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”

– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832)

One of our favorite maxims at Myrtle’s place is that the best garden doesn’t start with the principle of “grow what is easy to grow” but rather with “grow things that are hard to kill.”  To that end, happily, one of the great principles of ecological sustainability – localism – is also one of the cornerstones of conservation of effort.  To whit:  as much as possible, grow food crops which occur naturally in your area.

There are some exceptions to this rule, of course, such as some of your more standard fare.  Tomatoes are grown almost universally now, in spite of originally being native to Central and South America.  Corn (maize to the rest of the world) does not even exist in nature, having been bred by Central Americans over several thousand years, and transported by agriculturalists to every corner of the globe.  Potatoes, pumpkins and squash, melons, etc. have all gotten cosmopolitan.

But the principle still holds that the simplest, most effective, and frequently the healthiest production methods involve growing in your garden those things which you might find growing wild in the nearest undeveloped land near your garden.

For our own part, we recently discovered a living verdant goldmine growing right on our own property, in the form of a number of volunteer passiflora incarnata, or “Maypop” plants.  Most commonly referred to simply as “Passion Flower” plants, they are closely related to the commercially grown passiflora edulis, which you can find in your produce store under the exotic name of “passion fruit”.

The South American variety of the egg-sized fruit is, perhaps, a little more aesthetically exciting, having a reddish-purplish exterior, with bright golden-green pulp that looks a little like the fleshy part of a kiwi wrapped around tiny seeds in little drupe-like pods much akin to a pomegranate.

Maypop, by contrast, is a rich deep green color right up until it turns golden when ripe, and the flesh and seeds are snowy white.  While it is an edible fruit, a surprising number of people grow it strictly for the showy purple and white flowers – understandable, as the flowers are exceptionally intricate and attractive, though unfortunate, as people who miss out on the fruit are not only losing out on the opportunity to eat some incredibly delicious drinks, preserves, garnishes, etc. (not to mention simply eating it fresh off the vine), but also one of the most beneficent sources of phytonutrients available anywhere.

Traditional nutritionists recognize maypop as high in Vitamins A and K, and as one of the best available plant sources of niacin.  In addition, though, it has been shown by several studies to have strong anxiolytic properties, owing to the existence of benzoflavones, essentially functioning on the nervous system like a low dose of diazepam (that’d be Valium^® for you brand-name shoppers).  If that makes you nervous, don’t be.  It is theoretically possible to overdose on maypop, but you would need to eat about 30 pounds of the stuff at one sitting to do so, which is not likely.  If, on the other hand, you simply want to have some calming peace-of-mind, a nice glass of herbal tea with a few slices of maypop can relax even the most frenetic of minds.  It has even shown therapeutic benefits in significantly reducing symptoms of withdrawal from and addiction and dependence on alcohol, morphine, nicotine, and benzodiazepines.  If you know someone trying to quit smoking, load them up with passion fruit.

We suspect that one of the major reasons this delightful locally available fruit source is not more widely known is the prominence with which it is featured in gardening literature written by northerners who grow it outside its natural range.  Unlike its South American cousin, passiflora incarnata handles colder temperatures fairly well, being able to grow back after a freeze, but its tolerance only extends so far.

While you can grow it in northern climates (and many people do so, because as noted it is a very attractive vining plant), it only produces fruit in its natural range, stretching from East Texas across to the Carolinas down to Florida.  Occasionally, it can produce fruit as far north as Illinois or Ohio… but for the most part it is a southern crop.

Traditional gardeners in the South have long been familiar with it as a foodstuff, though as people have moved away from the countryside and into larger cities, it has been naturally demoted out of most folks’ larders.

Historically, though, it has had high prominence.  The Cherokee referred to it as ‘ocoee’ and the Ocoee River is named for this plant.  In fact, it is the state flower of Tennessee.  It also featured heavily in Acadian cooking in their diaspora.  To this day, Louisiana’s Cajuns refer to it as ‘liane de grenade’, or ‘pomegranate vine’.  The taste is a bit sweeter, but the comparison is apt, as you can use maypop in pretty much the same way you would use pomegranates.

Typically not found below a thick canopy, it thrives on the edges of thickets, near waterways and in disturbed areas, where it gets the right combination of good exposure to sunlight (it can take medium shade, but not much more than that), climbing supports, and water.  It is pollinated by bumblebees and carpenter bees (honeybees manage to get nectar from it, but can’t generally move enough of the pollen from plant to plant to effect pollination) and is self-sterile, meaning there must be more than one plant to get fruit.

It also notably serves as the primary food source for two butterfly species, the Gulf fritillary (agraulis vanillae) also known as the “passion butterfly” owing to its larvae exclusively living on and eating passiflora leaves, and the Variegated fritillary (euptoieta claudia) which does not exclusively feed on passion vine, but does so whenever possible.

Gulf fritillary aka "Passion Butterfly"

While conservation of the butterflies seems like it just makes good sense, the relationship of the fritillaries to the passion vine provide an excellent glimpse into the wonders of natural gardening – the typical inclination of gardeners who do not get into permaculture methods would be to keep caterpillars from eating the leaves of their various crops.  In the case of the fritillary butterflies, though, a few leaves are worth the trade-off; birds avoid the butterflies, whose bright orange wings serve as notice to the various jays and other marauding avians that the butterflies are mildly toxic.  As a consequence, birds typically leave passion vines (and therefore passion fruit) alone.

So, as a wonderful exemplar of more principles of natural gardening than we can count, we gladly present for your edification.. the humble maypop.

Happy farming!

Pondering Maunder

“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

–Richard Feynman, in "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", lecture at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, (1964)

Global warming denialists got a shot in the arm in the last few weeks, with news that several prognosticators now believe that we are headed for a new Maunder Minimum type event vis-à-vis solar sunspot activity.  The implication, of course, is that rather than facing catastrophic global warming, we are actually headed (by as soon as the year 2030 C.E., no less) towards a repeat of “The Little Ice Age” which lasted from about 1550 C.E. until roughly 1850 C.E.

Solar weather in the news -- Sun spots are theorized to affect climate.

The conservative blogosphere has, to put it simply, gone giddy with these prognostications.  Unfortunately, the conclusion that warming is going to be magically dissipated is misguided at best, and is more likely calamitously, catastrophically wrong.

To explain why, we will attempt to deliver a crash course in space weather, vulcanology, paleometeorology, the bias of  recent observation, and the nature of ice ages.  After that, we will be making tea, and perhaps taking a nap.

First things first, what is this “Maunder Minimum” of which the news feed speaks?

The phenomenon known as a “sun spot” is a well known solar event similar in nature to a large cyclonic weather system on Earth – basically, it’s a big storm system on the surface of the sun.  We say “big” of course, because it is large enough to be spotted through telescopes and solar spectrometers, but compared to the overall surface of the sun, they are actually pretty small, hence “spots”.

The number of sun spots at any given time is a fairly variable data point.  In modern times, the average is between 40,000 – 50,000. 

During the “Maunder Minimum” there were fewer than 50 observed sun spots at any given time.

And since the “Maunder Minimum” occurred in the middle of the “Little Ice Age” there have been numerous climatologists over the last century and a half who have attempted to draw correlations between the two events.

Wouldn't you just love to be able to explain away the dips
and valleys in this chart?  Too bad it's not that easy.

There are several problems with this analysis, of course.  For one thing, the start of the minimum event was roughly 1645 C.E. – almost a centuryafter the onset of the Little Ice Age.  That alone is cause for healthy skepticism regarding claims of strong correlation between solar weather and planetary climate.  There is still some wiggle room for the possibility of the effect of sun spots on global temperatures, but without even diving into the data, it is easy to see that there is not an overwhelming one-to-one relationship.

Moreover, sun spot activity during the Maunder Minimum was only marginally lower than that seen during the Spörer Minimum, which lasted from roughly 1460 until 1550 – the Little Ice Age began when sun spot activity was coming out of a minimum, not when it was going into one.

To make matters more complicated still, observations of historical climate data are strongly dependent on subjective observations more susceptible to error than would be true of more objective measurements – to whit, the fact that in London the River Thames froze over during several winters in the time period in reference certainly sounds convincing… and evidence from ice core samples suggests that on average, winters in Northern Europe were, in fact, somewhat colder during this time period than for most of the Holocene… but these two facts in isolation do not mean much.   The Thames has undergone so much engineering over the last 500 years that there is no comparing the river today to that of the 16^th and 17^thcenturies – the water was slower moving when the “old bridge” was still in place, so it was easier to freeze.  In the 19^th century, it was removed; no more freezes.  And as for those ice cores?  Yes, they demonstrate that winter was colder… but they also show that summers were right at the statistical mean for the Holocene.

In short, if the Maunder Minimum had any impact, it was only felt for half the year.  Summer was just as warm as ever

The "Little Ice Age" was cold... in winter... (recency bias at its best)

during the Little Ice Age.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report of 2001 noted that “…the conventional terms of ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Medieval Warm Period’ appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries… [Viewed] hemispherically, the ‘Little Ice Age’ can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than °1 C relative to late twentieth century levels.”

There is another potential cause for the cooldown observed from 1550 through 1850 which would go a long way toward explaining this strange dichotomy – and which makes much more sense when accounting for all the data points.

In late spring or summer of 1257 C.E., Mt. Rinjani, on Lombok Island in Indonesia,  shook the world with one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the modern record.  To be precise, prior to this explosion, there were twin peaks on the island – Gunung Samalas and Gunung Rinjani.  After the explosion, there was only Rinjani, with a massive caldera.  Gunung Samalas  was spread throughout the upper atmosphere, along with a sizable chunk of Rinjani.  Deposits found in ice cores from the Arctic Circle suggest that the dust cloud from this explosion would have lasted for several years, dimming the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth, and quite probably having not just short-term impacts such as crop failure and changes to precipitation patterns, but also quite likely leading to shifts in long-term cyclic behavior in ocean currents.

Mt. Rinjani during a recent eruption.

Most notably among the ocean currents affected, of course, would be the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic where the warm water of the Gulf Stream travels towards the North Pole, cooling as it travels northward, finally sinking to form North Atlantic Deep Water, which then flows into the various basins of the deep Atlantic, only to upwell in the Southern Ocean to be heated again.  This ocean conveyor belt is the single greatest driver of climate in Western Europe, and as most of modern history has been written by Western Europeans, their natural biases in described weather will be directly related to changes in the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.

The Mt. Rinjani explosion certainly qualified as an event capable of altering the North Atlantic conveyor belt; several other volcanic eruptions during the same time frame were equally likely to have impacted European winters:  Bárðarbunga (Iceland) blew in 1477;  Kuwae in Vanuatu (South Pacific) in 1452-53; Huaynaputina in South America in 1600; Santorini (Greece) in 1650; Grímsvötn (Iceland) in 1783; Mount Tambora (Indonesia) in 1815.  In fact, the Tambora eruption was directly responsible for the 1816 “Year Without a Summer”.

As it turns out, even short term changes to local conditions can have dramatic consequences for New England, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Britain (and, if the change is dramatic enough, the rest of Europe).  The North Atlantic Oscillation is strongly susceptible to either a rise in temperature, which causes excessive ice melt in Greenland, spilling freshwater into the North Atlantic, decreasing the density of the surface water, causing the Gulf Stream to subside (that is, “dive” further south than it ought, basically turning off Great Britain’s natural space heater), or to a decrease in temperature, which forms a denser layer of surface water, which disperses the heat from the Gulf Stream too quickly, achieving the same effect.

The lake that used to be Samalas... Rinjani's twin mountain

Note that in either case, the total amount of heat transmitted to the planet is more or less the same as it had always been, but the effects on local climate are night-and-day different.  In a plot twist worthy of the most cynical of locally oriented climate denialists, there is a fairly good chance that global warming may actually make several countries (including but not limited to Iceland and the U.K., and possibly the New England states in the U.S.) much, much colder in the future.  No certainties on this score, of course, but it is one of the possibilities in play.

Which brings us to the impending solar minimum of the 21^st century.  The causality of impacts on Earth weather from sun spot activity are still theoretical at best, but even accepting for a moment the idea that the Maunder Minimum caused all of whatever cooling happened during the Little Ice Age… the IPCC finding was that the cooling in question amounted to less than 1°C over a three century time frame.

During the Little Ice Age, carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were around 250 parts per million.  During the Industrial Revolution, those numbers rose to the 300s.  The estimated warming for the 21^st century in a “best case scenario” has involved a 350 ppm cap on carbon-dioxide, resulting in a 2°C increase in temperatures.  At best the upcoming minimum event might reduce the rate at which warming is accelerating, and not even by half, at that.

However, we are already well past 350 ppm carbon-dioxide.  We are soon going to be looking at 400 ppm in the rearview mirror.

In short, catastrophic warming is every bit as much on the menu as it was before all this sun spot ice age talk started.  Don’t let propagandists take your mind off of the actual science.

Now then, not to leave y’all on a down note….

For those who prepare, climate change is going to present some incredibly awesome gardening opportunities.  We’ll tell y’all about them some time, but for right now, we have a cup of tea and a hammock calling our names.

Happy farming!

Which Cup is the Poison In?

“We scientists are clever – too clever – are you not satisfied?  Is four square miles in one bomb not enough?  Men are still thinking, ‘Just tell us how big you want it.’”
– Richard Feynman

“As a guide to engineering ethics, I should like to commend to you a liberal adaptation of the injunction contained in the oath of Hippocrates that the professional man do nothing that will harm his client.  Since engineering is a profession which affects the material basis of everyone’s life, there is almost always an unconsulted third party involved in any contact between the engineer and those who employ him – and that is the country, the people as a whole.  These, too, are the engineer’s clients, albeit involuntarily.  Engineering ethics ought therefore to safeguard their interests most carefully.  Knowing more about the public effects his work will have, the engineer ought to consider himself an ‘officer of the court’ and keep the general interest in mind.”
– U.S. Navy Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

The line between science and engineering has been blurred for a long time now, probably irrevocably.  What passes for “science” in many university laboratories these days is little more than one form or another of engineering – how to create vaccines that fight particular viruses, what materials make the best semiconductors, or the best solar panels, or the lightest plastics, or the strongest panes of glass.  These are manufacturing studies, not science studies.
The worst offender for this abandonment of the respective responsibilities of the scientist (who ought be concerned with little more than the secrets of the universe) and the engineer (who takes the knowledge scientists offer and turns it into useful products) is the realm of what often gets called “agricultural science” – an offensive term if ever there were one.

Too clever by half...

The study of plants is called “botany”.  The study of animals is “zoology”.  If you want to be a generalist who studies both, you are a “biologist”.

The study of how to create drought resistant crops through genetically altering existing plants, or new chemical combinations that more effectively deter pests or weeds… that should more properly be called “agricultural engineering” and it has a whole different set of ethical considerations from science, as Admiral Rickover so ably pointed out.  He was only wrong in one respect in his evaluation – the “3^rd party” he describes is not merely the entirety of the human population, it is the sum total of all life on Earth.

Farming is a roughly 10,000 year old invention.  It has altered the planet more radically than any previous human invention, and arguably any field of endeavor since.  Being responsible for the consolidation of human beings into larger and larger communities, one could easily make the argument of causality between early man defending stands of einkorn grain in prehistoric times, thereby ending their days as hunter-gatherers, to the fouling of our land, air and water caused by all of the pollution attendant upon the Industrial Revolution, not to mention truly horrifying things like war, crime, and reality television.

We did not stop at merely establishing local borders around our favorite wildly available crops, of course.   We began cultivating them, and even if some contemporary religious fanatics have a hard time accepting the reality of the Theory of Evolution… early man knew full well how natural selection works – and took full advantage, teasing crops along through selective breeding generation after generation.

Numerous plants we take for granted in our gardens only exist because of anthropogenic botanical evolution, in fact.  One of the most common crops in American culture – both for large-scale monoculture industrial farming, and for home gardens – is corn (maize, to most of the world).   10,000 years ago, it did not exist.  But numerous farmers in Central America and Southern Mexico noticed that certain tall grasses had useful succulent seed-kernels, and after selecting those with the most numerous and tightly bunched, generation after generation, came up with grasses that featured “cobs” (stumpy at first, but once they’d gotten to this point, the next phase of their agricultural engineering was obvious – bigger cobs, with sweeter kernels).

Early agricultural engineering has itself evolved, to the point where we are no longer satisfied with selectively breeding plants with desirable genetic traits – no, we are going straight to the source, and altering the DNA directly.  In addition, we are refining our treatment of not just the plants, but the soil, water and air surrounding our crops, in attempts to limit the natural effects of nutrient depletion, drought (or flood), competing plant-life, and herbivorous animals (both vertebrate and invertebrate).

Michael Crighton’s best-selling “Jurassic Park” featured an experiment in genetic engineering which lay towards the ridiculous end of the “suspension of disbelief” continuum, and yet… there are lessons in his fictionalized account of biological engineering run amok.  Ian Malcom, Crighton’s cantankerous fictional skeptic, coins a term for genetic engineers (and others who share their optimistic outlook for their form of technology):  “Thintelligence” – loosely defined, it is the ability to figure out how to do something, especially something very clever while lacking the ability toknow whether or not it ought to be done.

For the time being, we will ignore the question of genetically modified crops – there is certainly plenty of material for discussion there, including but not limited to potential health hazards, declining nutritional value of the food items in question, and the ridiculous notion of patented DNA sequences carried over into patent violations caused by fertilization of other people’s crops (basically, neighboring farmers can be sued because pollen from a field with GMO crops blew in, without the 2^nd farmer’s approval… causing his crops to have “unauthorized” DNA sequences).

Instead, we wish to highlight the folly – and, in fact, the lack of engineering ethics – in the objectives of the vast majority of forms of engineered agricultural solutions.

The most thoroughly documented (because it was the first to come to the attention of environmental scientists, who were much more interested in studying the effects of these inventions than were the engineers who made them) are the chemical herbicides and pesticides which have been de rigueur in the agricultural industry (and all too often in home gardens) for over a century now.

Some, of course, have long been illegal – the herbicide known as Agent Orange was manufactured by Monsanto and Dow Chemical for the express purpose of being used as an herbicidal defoliant with military applications, and its widespread use in the Vietnam War led directly to numerous chemical burns and long-term health problems including almost epidemic cases of cancer among veterans of that war.  Additionally, of course, it proved ineffectual both as a tactic (Viet Cong food supplies were only slightly diminished, owing to the dispersant character of rice farming, where affected waters were simply replaced with newly irrigated fields) and also as a practical engineering solution – the concept of clearing away massive swaths of jungle to make guerilla warfare difficult ignored the reality that not every plant defoliates precisely the same way – they managed to change the level of biodiversity in the jungle, but they did not kill it.

Likewise, the use of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), a 19^th century chemical invention the use of which as an anti-mosquito pesticide was developed by Swiss chemist  Paul Hermann Müller in 1939, had numerous unhealthful side-effects; it was largely responsible for the near extinction in the 20^th century of the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon, in addition to causing numerous health complaints in humans.  In 1962, Rachel Carson penned Silent Spring,  the seminal environmental work which eventually lead to a ban on DDT in the United States, and was the forerunner to the eventual 2004 Stockholm Convention, which outlawed several persistent organic pollutants. The Convention has been ratified by more than 170 countries and is endorsed by most environmental groups.

The countries in green have agreed to ban persistent poisons in farming;
the ones not in green have not.  Notice the biggest one?

Sadly, the United States, Israel, Malaysia, Italy and Iraq (all significant agricultural producers) are not signatories – while DDT is banned in the United States, and our overall use of agricultural pesticides has dropped slightly in the last decade, the U.S. still used (as of 2007, the latest figures we could find) 1.1 billion pounds of pesticides, comprising 22% of the world’s total.  There are over 20,000 pesticide products marketed in the United States.

And yet… the health effects of a disturbingly large percentage of these products are largely unstudied, especially in longitudinal studies which are, after all, the only way to gather data about the accumulation of these chemicals in our bodies, and the possible long-term conditions caused thereby.  Engineering methods (designed to get “useful” products to market as quickly as possible) disguise themselves as scientific investigations, where a short-term study finds no problems, and Monsanto and Dow get to fire up the production lines.  Engineering ethics, as described by Admiral Rickover, are not a concern – after all, it’s science, right?

Additionally, the effectiveness of these products is debatable.  Both healthfulness and effectiveness are serious questions – most users of pesticides lightly brush aside questions of runoff, yet it is not only inevitable, it is as obvious as the idea that the sun is more visible on a clear day than a cloudy one.  Chemicals on a plant wash off in the rain, or via most forms of irrigation.  They go either into the soil, and then seep into our groundwater, or they drain into creeks and rivers, lakes and oceans.  There is no “away” to which these substances can go – and the fact that those who apply them have to wear protective masks should be our first clue that maybe we should not want them to be used at all.

The World Health Organization and the UN Environment Programme estimate the number of agricultural workers who suffer health effects from pesticide poisoning each year at 3 million.  18,000 agricultural workers die each year from the “marvel” of agriculturally engineered pesticides.

The worst part?  In the long term, these chemical concoctions do not work as well as approaches designed to work withnatural forces instead of against them.  The use of organic pest control solutions is a wide-ranging field, including application of capsaicin-laced concoctions designed to deter rodents and other mammalian foragers, application of symbiotic nematodes and bacteria which work with the plants to deter insects and diseases, companion planting to deter both competing plants (usually erroneously described as “weeds”) and foraging insects, the use of beneficial insects such as ladybugs, the inclusion of bat-houses in agricultural architecture… the list of natural solutions is lengthy… and more importantly, is both healthy and effective.

One of the chief aims of biological pest control, in fact, is the maintenance – and active encouragement – of biodiversity.  Obviously, this approach will not work for large-scale monocropping, which is one of the most important reasons for large-scale monocropping to disappear from the planet.

Biodiversity is important because it drastically reduces predation without opening new ecological niches for either resistant varieties of the existing pest (that is, natural selection causing only those varmints, bugs, pests, etc. who are immune or less-affected by the poison to be the only ones capable of breeding the next generation, who will then be even less likely to be affected, eventually rendering the poison ineffective), or opening up the opportunity for invasive species who more than likely are not targeted by nor affected by the existing poison treatment.

Basically, life finds a way – if your plan is to keep anything from eating your crops at all, well, newsflash, you keep one thing from eating them, something else will take its place.

In a biodiverse agricultural system, however, the goal is not elimination of predation, the goal is to place predation in a more natural, and therefore tolerable, context.  Sure, it requires more work (planting trap crops, for example, like rows of sunflowers or amaranth around your rows of corn, and planting fields of clover between your melons and cucumbers), and harvesting is done more by hand than by machine, but the yields per acre over the long term are much higher.  Why?  Because specific acreage is orders of magnitude less likely to “play out”.

Monocropping systems have certainly increased yield per acre for a specific growing season or year, but over the course of five, ten, twenty, or fifty years, the acres in question become wastelands of infertile ground.  An organic permaculture farm where crop plants are treated with respect as a significant part of a wider ecosystem will continue producing indefinitely.

Which is the difference between intelligence and thintelligence.  The end game is what matters, and if we ever want to get there, we need to stop pretending that new inventions are “discoveries” – they aren’t science, they are engineering.  Impressive, maybe, but only useful if they first do no harm.

Here’s hoping more agriculturalists hop on board the biodiversity train and abandon the chemical-engineering road to perdition.

Happy farming!

A Walk in the Woods

“One day when the sun had come back over the Forest, bringing with it the scent of May, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much.”

Christopher Robin in A. A. Milne's Winnie-The-Pooh

One of the things we most enjoy about permaculture gardening is the feeling we get when we sit comfortably on our back porch under a giant arbor of wild grapes.  It is many things – peaceful, quiet, private, cool… a perfect harbor safe from the tossing storms of everyday life.  We try as much as possible to make the rest of our garden exhibit many of these same qualities, and to a certain degree, we pride ourselves on being fairly successful.

Nothing, however, comes as close to being in nature as you can get from actually being in nature.  And it turns out, the health benefits of doing so are not merely limited to the peace-of-mind one can find from thoughtfulness, mindfulness, and ecological oneness-with-it-all.  Being in nature is quantifiably healthier than being in an office cubicle.

News stories since the 1970s have made note of a variety of health complaints related to being inside an office building – Sick Building Syndrome made its way into the vernacular after a 1984 World Health Organization reported that up to 30% of new and remodeled buildings worldwide were subject to complaints related to poor indoor air quality, volatile organic compounds (VOC), mold, exhaust from office machinery, chemical exposure, design flaws (including some systemically unavoidable contamination issues) with HVAC systems, psychological problems related to changes in brainwave signatures due to fluorescent lighting, and who knows what all else.

Numerous solutions to these problems have been propounded over the years, and we welcome many of them as obvious and proper (non-VOC paint, for example, has become the norm rather than the exception), but one of the most telling is the suggestion to include toxin-absorbing plants in office spaces.  Some of the more common are sansevieria (also known as “Devil’s Tongue”) and various palms, canes and bamboo species, all of which are routinely provided by interiorscaping companies, which since the 1980s have raked in money hand-over-fist by making office spaces greener not just in terms of pollutants, but quite literally greener.

Improving the buildings in which we live and work, though, is only scratching the surface of improvements we can make in our everyday lives which will help us stem the tide of self-inflicted maladies.

We should listen to the evidence screaming so loudly at us from the giant planters tucked into every corner of every lobby in every building in the industrialized world – plants make things better.  Not just because they are prettier than concrete, but because theymake things physically better.

There is a concept in Japan and Korea which, when Americans hear about it (if they ever hear about it at all), our desensitized Western ears translate as “just so much mystical hokum” – maybe relaxing in the same way as a hot bath or massage, but not really important.  And, as is so often the case, our jaded Western sensibilities are pretty much completely wrong.

Forest bathing, called Shinrin-yoku (森林浴) in Japanese and Sanlimyok (산림욕) in Korean, is a brief stroll through the woods.  The original motivation behind the formalizing of this ritual was simple relaxation and stress relief – in fact, in 1982, the Forest Agency of Japan proposed making forest bathing trips a part of everyday Japanese life.  Since that time, Japan has accredited 44 Shinrin-Yoku forests, and numerous studies have been done showing that subjects who regularly walk these paths have clinically significant reductions in stress, anger, anxiety, depression and insomnia.

There is more to the story, though, than the simple fact that those who walk through the forest are enjoying themselves.  Exposure to the natural world does have some psychosomatic benefits, as changes to the nervous system are known to result from numerous other relaxation techniques.  However, in addition to the healthful meditative qualities of Shinrin-yoku, there are measurable biochemical changes, as well. 

When adiponectin levels are low, humans are susceptible to obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorder…. Precisely those conditions, in fact, which have been afflicting Americans in alarming numbers since the 1970s… and as it turns out, the reason for improved adiponectin levels in forest bathers is that the woods themselves are helping out.  Practicing breathing in the presence of a multitude of trees means breathing in everything that the trees are emitting.  We tend to think of trees as static entities, not really doing much… but they are actually quite active.  And one of the things they are doing is emitting volatile substances known as phytoncides (wood essential oils) which are antimicrobial compounds the trees use to protect themselves from bacteria and mold.

Some of these compounds are particularly beneficial to humans, such as the aforementioned adiponectin, or the oh-so-useful α-Pinene, which at low exposure levels such as might be found in a forest, is a bronchodilator, with high bioavailability when taken through the lungs.  It is also anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, and is even an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, meaning it aids in memory.  And as much as you might like the pothos ivy on the corner of your desk… it is not as good at putting out beneficial chemicals as, say, a stand of oak or pine trees.

Russian biochemist Dr. Boris Tokin coined the word “phytoncide” in 1928 while studying the compounds emitted by plants as a defense against rotting or being eaten by various insects or other animals.  Trees are the most powerful emitters, as might be expected given that they are the largest category of phytoncidal plants, but spices, onions, and garlic all use many of the same compounds as defense mechanisms.

The kings of emissions, though, are the tea tree, oaks, cedar, locust, and pine.  Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese and Japanese medicine utilize these naturally occurring pharmaceutical factories aka tree oils, but the Japanese and Koreans have gone one better, and suggested that people go out into nature and take advantage at the source.  The fact that it makes for a very nice exercise in mindful meditation is just one more benefit.

So, the next time someone calls you a tree-hugger, remember.  Hugging trees is not just a metaphor for having a proper respect for nature and our place in it, it is also a prescription for happiness.

Happy farming!