Category Archives: Science

Books Environmental politics History Science

A wise look at “weeds” and their place in our world

May 27, 2012 – 6:46 pm

A shorter version of this review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Arriving in France to a spring garden in which the nettles stand chest-high with the grass-seed heads waving alongside, it seemed the ideal time to pick up Richard Mabey’s Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants. It also turned out to be a book that crossed across many of the environmental news stories of today – as well as being simply a cracking good read. Mabey as a writer really knows how to let an anecdote rip across the page, and his sources and interests are wide and broad though never overwhelming, but he’s also a thinker, and the overview of human interaction with nature – our sheer blazing ignorance and careless destructiveness – come strongly through as a theme of Weeds.

One topical story is that of ragwort – a “weed” that last year got a UK government minister hellbent on its destruction as a “vile” plant into a lot of (entirely deserved) hot water. He quotes the country poet John Clare’s early 19th-century view of it as displaying “beautys manifold” in a “sunburnt & bare” spot on a degraded meadow, contrasting it with 20th-century hysteria about the poisoning of grazing animals, particularly horses. Mabey notes: “Neither wild nor domestic animals will usually eat growing ragwort if other forage is available. The vast majority of poisoning cases are from dried plants which have been cut with hay and, ironically, from wilted and shrunk specimens which have been sprayed with herbicide (the plant is just as toxic when dead, and less easily recognised by animals.)… Clare accepts ragwort as one of the adornments of the summer landscape, even by the side of the ‘waggonways’ used by horses. \the absence from the poem of any reference to local hostility (often mentioned in connection with other species) suggests there was some kind of rapprochement with the plant. It was a weed to be respected, not demonised.)” (p. 123)

Another strong theme now in the news is the overall massive loss of diversity over past centuries, but particularly last decades – highlighted today by news of how “the wholesale ripping up of hedgerows, draining of wetlands and ploughing over of meadows” has led to the loss of 50% of Europe’s farmland birds, and about the farming time-machine needed to try to reintroduce the short-haired bumblebee into Britain.

Mabey travels with a young Finn, Pehr Kalm, who in 1748 visited the farm of the celebrated British improver William Ellis. It was March, before plants had flowered, so the young visitor sorted through dried hay to establish what mix of species grew in the rich pastures. (The same method, Mabey notes, is still used by ecologists today.) There were 29 species, only nine of them grasses, “including several that would be regarded as grassland weeds today – hoary plantain, daisy, yarrow, knapweed, hawkweed” and, predominately what we now see as a lawn weed, bird’s-foot trefoil… which Ellis “praised beyond compare and set before all other grass species in his Modern Husbandman … to be in the highest perfection the most proper hay for feeding saddle-horses, deer, sheep and rabbits, as well as cattle”. (p.129) Mabey notes we now know that many of these despised “weeds” have higher nutritional value than the grasses they are killed with herbicide to make space for.

He also notes how many of the plants we now seek to destroy with noxious chemicals were put to good use – gorse, as a fuel plant, especially for bread ovens, and bracken, used to fuel brick and bread baking, and also as a litter for animals in the farmyard that then became an excellent manure for wheat, pea and corn crops. Mabey explains how on a common near his home, a radical local landowner in 1866 led a campaign of direct action against the enclosure of the common the Finn was describing. “On the day the fences were torn down, the local people flocked up to Berkhamsted Common and picked token sprigs of gorse to celebrate that the place was theirs again. Until the commons were finally sold off in the 1920s, the locals adhered to courteous and frugal codes to ensure the survival of their weed resource. There was a close-season for the gorse and bracken, between 1 June and 1 September. On 31 August the commoners would listen for the chimes of the parish church at midnight, and go up to stake out their claims, like gold prospectors.” (p. 130)

Then there’s the “hot” question of how much we can continue to engage in large-scale monoculture, maybe with genetically modified crops to deal with the multiple problems, an issue that’s being played out in Britain today in a dispute over GM wheat. There’s good cause to be worried about the risks of this controversial trial, but even more cause to be concerned about an attempt to use a simplistic solution to allow the continuation of our destructive broad-scale farming systems. Nature’s a lot smarter and faster than we are, as Mabey illustrates with the example of the rice bred for South-East Asian conditions too “out-smart” weed grasses. “In the rice paddies… there are weed grasses so similar to cultivated rice that farmers are unable to distinguish them before the wild grasses bloom. Plant breeders thought they might be able to trick the weed into showing itself by developing a variety of rice with a purple tinge. Within a matter of years the weed grass had turned purple too. The slight pigment that had enable plant breeders to develop the coloured rice also occurs occasionally in the weed. With each successive harvets it was this strain that … passed into next year’s seed store.” (p. 45)
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Books Environmental politics Science

The latest on the state of world agriculture, and how far we have to go to fix it

December 26, 2011 – 11:53 pm

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

Back in 2006, it was in part concern about world food supplies – and particularly the condition of the soils and water that produce them – that led me to join the Green Party. I did an agricultural science degree, a long time ago, and I never “practiced” as a scientist, but an interest in soils, and comprehension that their complexity is something that is terribly important and terribly poorly understood, has stayed with me. And being an Australian, particularly one who spent some time in the bush, an awareness of water scarcity is part of my DNA.

Since then, I’ve had to ration my reading on the subject. It’s too depressing to confront it too often. But it seemed when I came across The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do To Avoid It by Julian Cribb, from the University of Technology Sydney (ah, I remember its wool science lab well!), published last year, it was time to update with the words of a specialist.

We’re already in a bad place. As Cribb notes, in the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-5, world food prices rose by 78%, while between 2005 and 2008, they rose on average by 80%. (p.3) But in the intervening period, it is very clear, global governments and NGOs took their eye off the ball. They thought food was fixed, sorted, and would keep on getting cheaper. And it is set to get a lot worse:

The challenge facing the world’s 1.8 billion women and men who grow our food is to double their output of food – suing far less water, less land, less energy, and less fertilizer. They must accomplish this on low and uncertain returns, with less new technology available, amid more red tape, economic disincentives, and corrupted markets, and in the teeth of spreading drought.” (p. 13)

On soil loss, Cribb is bigger than others I’ve read on the spread of cities, noting that adding all of the world’s urban areas together they are estimated to occupy 4.75 million square kilometres, about half the size of the US or China (p. 58), and making the, good, point, that not only do they consume land for housing, but also for leisure facilities around them – golf courses, playing fields etc, plus off course in the West anyway commuter belts. Because cities are usually located on the best agricultural land, they’re also pushing farming into more marginal territory, where soil degradation, saliniation etc are likely to be more of a problem.

Cribb follows one of my favourite issues in stressing how much cities once did and could again supply a significant proportion of their own food, but current planning policies actively work to prevent this. (This madness being just a small example.) And he’s big on the need for cities to preserve nutrients (yes, I’m a big fan of composting toilets for this reason) – “humanity is thought to produce around 3 billion tonnes of phosporus in its sewage, so, in theory at least, the world’s cities concentrate around 1.5 billion tonnes- an immense resource that is largely wasted by flushing it into the oceans”. (p. 80) Particularly telling since peak phosphorus (produced from rock) was around 1989 – and “there’ are no substitutes for phosphorus. It is fundamental to the chemistry that supports all forms of life”. (p. 76)

And supplies depend on a narrow range of sources: “The lion’s share of phospate production… comes from China (37%), Morocco and the Western Sahara (32%), South Africa (8%) and the US (7%). Potash [one of the other key nutrients] is obtained by mining potassium salts and comes chiefly from four countries – Canada (53%), Russia (22%), Belarus (9%) and Germany (9%).” (p. 72) Nitrogen, the other key element, is mostly made from synthetic ammonia made using natural gas and is made in more than 60 countries. (Still sounds like a powerful argument for the coplete fertiliser of compost to me!
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Books Environmental politics Science

Trees: into mysticism and beyond to science

April 2, 2011 – 9:06 pm

Article first published on Blogcritics.

I would describe myself as “not the mystical sort”. That means that Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s The Global Forest: 40 Ways Trees Can Save Us is not an obvious book for me. But beyond its mystical side, it also contains a lot of science, and that’s what drew me to it. Particularly, it’s the sort of big picture science that helps you to see the world in new ways.

The author is described in the blurb as “a world expert on how trees connect the effect our environment” and the detailed knowledge and expertise behind the writing is obvious. Yet she puts this into something accessible and highly readable, the inspiration she says in the introduction, the traditional Irish storyteller. So The Global Forest is structured as 40 short essays, which range across key aspects of our global ecosystems, and historical and recent human interactions with them.

The basics are here. This the fact that in the 1950s 30% of global land was covered with forests, and in 2005 that figure was down to something like 5%. This the fact that the demand for paper, almost entirely reliant on trees, has led to exploding demand for pulp of 200 million tonnes a year for the Western world. And the fact that, despite the global garden offering a cornucopia of 80,000 potential food species, we now rely almost exclusively on eight food species. As the author says: “the traditional knowledge of the other 79,992 is rapidly being lost to future generations”.

And so are practical suggestions. One of the chief concerns of the book is the promotion of what she calls to two-tier agriculture, the combination of tree and ground crops in a “Savannah design”. The chief knowledge base is clearly grounded in North America, and she is fascinating on the subject of the nut crops and the nut milk Native Americans made from them. And also the future potential. “All of the hickory family produces particularly dense wood together with a colossal nut crop…. The hickory can sequester carbon out of the atmosphere like no other tree can. They have done this in the past enemy stretches of virgin forest and they can do it again.”

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Books History Science

The human race – our past and future, imagined

August 28, 2009 – 9:49 pm

I don’t know if this genre has an “official” name, but when I describe it you’ll know instantly what I mean: the grand sweep of history novel. Edward Rutherford covered 2,000 years of the British capital in London: The Novel. James A. Michener covered Israel’s even longer history in The Source.

But no one, really, can get a grander sweep than Stephen Baxter does in Evolution, a Novel. For he starts in the age of dinosaurs, with a little rat-like primate ancestor of ours called Purga, who witnesses the collapse of that great ecosystem to a near planet-destroying comet, 65 million years ago, watches as the human race evolves, then imagines our decline, finishing 500 million years into the future when we’re symbiotically dependent on a tree that directs our existence, the last tree it turns out, on a dying earth.

The key trick with this genre is to quickly create characters with whom the reader identifies, since we won’t have a lot of time to get to know them, and this is something at which Baxter excels. Even his more primitive creatures, anthropomorphised of course, quickly grab your sympathy.

And his imagining of the life of Homo erectus, the later hominids, and modern humans – represented by the difficult, troubled and imaginative brain of a woman 60,000 years ago in the Sahara, ancestral Australian Aborigines 52,000 years ago; the last Neanderthals 32,00 years ago in western France; the world’s first city, Catal Huyuk 9,600 years ago; the dying age of Ancient Rome; and the last humans like us, some time tens of thousands of years into the future – deep frozen survivors waking into a different world.

There’s much imagination here – there’s a sense that this is a science fiction novel (which is how Amazon classes it), and the whip-cracking intelligent dinosaurs is, to this reader, one step too far.

But it is also clearly based on a stupendous amount of research into paleontology, archaeology and anthropology, and intelligent thought about how the world might have worked in different eras. There’s also a delightful sly wit; Republican Rome is the pinnacle of our species, which is not how most people today would put it.

Generally, however, this learning is worn pretty lightly (if showing signs of the dinosaur obsessed youngster I bet Baxter once was). For this is an easy-reading, intoxicating novel – the whole history of evolution, and the theories behind it, accessible to any reader at all. You could call it an ideal intelligent airport novel.

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Books History Science

Looking over the evolution of European cave art

May 4, 2009 – 11:09 pm

David S Whitley is clearly a man who has moved at the centre of prehistoric archaeology for decades. In Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit he takes us into that world: roughly half of the book is an account of the archaeological debates, quarrels and missteps that have marked the exploration and attempts at explanation of the cave art of prehistoric Europe and associated genres. On that he’s entertaining, anecdotal, and so far as I can tell a faithful guide. (I’m always inclined to trust someone who immediately declares their interests and prejudices, as Whitley regularly does.)

The other half of the book is more of a presentation of a personal thesis: that religion and “modernity” was born with the brain chemistry that also brought the species what we now call bipolar disorder (it used to be called manic depression).

It is an interesting idea, although I’m not sure how it might ever be proven.
This insider view of the science of archeology makes one thing clear: anyone who believes that science is marked by the singleminded pursuit of truth, unmarred by politics or personal consideration, knows nothing about the realities. Whitley covers the incredibly petty controversy around the discovery of Chauvet Cave – which as

I’ve recorded elsewhere has been magnificently explained by Jean Clottes (with whom Whitley visited the caves).

And he goes at length into the controversy of the open-air Coa petroglyphs in Portugal, threatened by a planned dam and claimed to be Paleololithic by a new, controversial and what was at least to be partially discredited dating technique. Whitley explains the science in detail, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it fascinating – and it is essential if the reader is to grasp the cause of the controversy.

He then moves into a subject clearly close to his awn heart: shamanism, and its links to rock art. He’s earlier explained the evidence for the Paleolithic art being linked to shamanism – in short that human trance states, whether induced by Kalahari San people (“Bushmen”) by clapping and dancing, by chemical means, or perhaps the experience of the deep caves, goes through three phases:
1. Imagery is dominated by geometric light patterns generated within our optical and neural systems
2. Through more normal mental processes of visual pattern recognition, the pattern is interpreted or construed as a meaningful iconic or figurative image.
3. Full-blown iconic hallucations occur in which a sense of participation develops and an individual may imagine becoming the thing he or she hallucinates.
(This is known as the “neurophysical model”. )

Forms of image that appear to clearly correspond to each of these three stages are found in the cave art of prehistoric Europe, Whitley explains.

He then moves on to the issue of Siberian shamanism, a source of long-term fascination for the Western world. He effectively debunks, to my mind anyway, a suggestion that it is an intact relict of Paleolithic practices, saying that records of neighbouring literate people such as the Han Chinese only go back 2,000 years, while archaeological evidence pushes it back about 4,000. He argues that there is some evidence that New World shamanism had cultural influences on the Old World, but that there’s no evidence of a continuous tradition back to the Paleolithic.

Whitley then goes back to looking for the origins of human belief in the supernatural, and the development of religion. He finds the core of the latter in minimally counterintuitive concepts – which are memorable and particularly suspectible to recall, likely to be remembered and repeated. But they can’t be too far from the everyday: a talking dog is fine, a flying, talking tree is too far out. He finds the former in human’s agency detection device, a hypersensitive aspect of human existence that sees agents that aren’t really there – the dark environment of the cave being particularly effective for that.

Whitley is convinced that although they probably didn’t have organized religion, Neanderthals certainly had supernatural beliefs – it must have been built into their brains. So he arrives at an account of the of religion’s arrival: Religion – a shared social practice involving spirit belief and religiosity, but not always transcendence – developed first (insofar as we can tell) in western Europe, at least 35,000 years ago. This occurred when certain individuals with (I believe) specific emotional characteristics ‘captured’ the spirit world. By this act, they “created minimally impossible worlds that solve existential problems” – an evolutionary psychologists’ definition of religion.”

As evidence for the “emotional characteristics” claim, he combs written evidence of shamanistic societies and finds many examples of accounts that appear to match modern accounts of bipolar disorder. He also identifies a strong correlation between artistic creativity and mood disorders – with artists having rates of about 10 times higher than the general population.

And so he says, they invented “modern” human life – which he identifies with the start of religion. On that I part company with Whitley – why this, rather than art itself, or technology, or methods of social organization?
Still, it is an entertaining journey that Whitley provides, across fascinating terrain of human existence. He might not be – he says himself – a “spirit guide”, but he is an entertaining one.

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Books Feminism Science

Women and men and thinking straight about emotions

March 8, 2009 – 2:02 pm

Sometimes irony can be so sharp it is agonising. And so it is with the case of the dichotomy that’s been at the heart of Western thought for around two and a half millennium: man equals rational; woman equals emotional (and no prizes for identifying which was good and which bad). Its a trope that’s battled with Eve and the apple as the primary cause by which to do women down, to oppress and repress them.

The irony comes from our growing knowledge of brain function, and the fact that this dichotomy is entirely false, and, moreover that emotion is the dominant factor in the great majority of decisions that we, human beings, make.

The simplest proof comes from brain injury. People who have lost a tiny section of their brain, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which sits just behind the eyes, as a result of malignancy or injury, can apparently fully recover, score at the same level on IQ tests as before, show no obvious sign of disability. But what they lose is all emotional reaction to anything. And what’s more, they find making decisions about the simplest things – what time to arrange an appointment, what to choose from a restaurant menu – almost impossible to make.

This is reported in Jonah Lehrer’s The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind. This is a decisively, self-consciously, sometimes annoyingly popular science book – the actual science being so heavily interweaved with entertaining anecdote, some illuminating and relevant, some less so, that you’d really like to find a pure science alternative. But still, the science is lucidly explained in the gaps between anecdotes, and the story it tells is compelling.

Lehrer explains that the OFC is “response for integrating visceral emotions into the decisionmaking process. It connects the feelings generated by the ‘primitive’ brain – areas like the brain stem and the amygdala, which is in the limbic system – with the stream of conscious thought”. And it is one of the few cortical regions noticeably bigger in humans than other primates. As Lehrer concludes, Plato and Freud were wrong, “Homo sapiens is the most emotional animal of all”.

How well this can work is illustrated with a case from the Iraq war, when a radar operator on a British destroyer decide to shot down a blip on his radar screen heading for an American battleship. It could have been an Iraqi missile, or an American jet; no rational analysis at that time could determine which, yet something about the blip filled him with cold, dreadful fear, although he couldn’t explain what. It was travelling at 550 miles an hour, and he had 40 seconds to decide what to do. He fired his ship’s missiles, and they brought do the Silkworm just short of the American battleship. He still didn’t know why, and it was only years after that intense analysis showed that the missiles appeared on the radar screen a little later than American jets: the radar man’s emotions knew this, but his conscious mind didn’t.

Lehrer explains how experts develop their expertise by training the emotional system – they practice and practice, which produce learned patterns of dopamine release in a part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Then, if something deviates from the pattern, the ACC sends an immediate signal to the hypothalmus. In serious cases that produces what we know as the fright or flight response – pure “gut feeling” or emotion.

The Decisive Brain goes on to get highly topical, by exploring how the human desire to find patterns has fed into the current financial crisis, and this emotional decisionmaking also has its weaknesses. The stock market is a random system in statistic terms. But when an investor randomly makes some money, instead of being happy, they tend to feel regret, that they hadn’t gambled more money. So they dive in further, as do many of their compatriots. So the market surges, and keeps surging. Until bust point. Then people start to despair, and sell out “because the brain doesn’t want to regret staying in”.

And it looks at other situations where emotional thinking only may produce bad results (such as buying with credit cards, where the normal emotional weighting of the value of the good to you versus the loss of the lightening of your wallet is shortcircuited).

So in the end too this is also a self-help book, concluding with the advice:

“Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making and the kind of thought process that it requires. … The best way to make sure you are using your brain properly is to study your brain at work, to listen to the argument inside your head.”
Further: “The best decisionmakers don’t despair [at mistakes]. Instead, they become students of error, determined to learn from what went wrong. They think about what they could have done differently so that the next time their neurons will know what to do.”

Good advice. Now all we’ve got to do is employ it to abolish all those errors arising from the false “women equals emotional decisionmaking equals bad”.

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