Food, Fruit, and The Botany of Desire

A well-reasoned and well-sourced OpEd in the Times today (Oct 30) by Nicolette Hahn Niman argues that the problem with carnivory in the context of greenhouse emissions is with the industrialization of the meat industry, not with meat-eating per se. She details how meat can be raised for food without excessive greenhouse emissions, which is essentially a case for conscious, local, organic, free range, non-industrialized meat-raising. (NYT OpEd: The Carnivore's Dilemma)

Some further thoughts:
The industrialization of food production occurred not in order to feed the planet's growing population, but rather to create gigantic profit-vehicles for multi-national corporations vying for dominance in the food supply "industry".

It has in fact weakened or destroyed local food production wherever "free trade" has penetrated.

I was thinking about an eating strategy for future humanity when I wrote the earlier post about fruit. It seems to me our best strategy would be to develop partner species which produce for us our food willingly, without us having to kill individual beings on a massive scale. In return we give them warmth and comfort, and a survival alliance for their species.

Ants do that for example. They feed and care  for their aphids, which make the ant's  food.

We humans have fruit. Fruit fits the bill. Fruiting trees compete with each other to be desirable and beneficial to humans, as we are it's primary partner, the seed-spreader. (Though we are no longer leaving the seeds in the forest under a mat of our own natural fertilizer, we fulfill that part of the contract in a different way by offering a survival alliance whereby we humans assure the long-term well-being of the species.)
So far we've only bred fruit trees for such traits as appearance, sweetness, long shelf life. We should get serious about the potential of fruit and select for nutritional targets, so as to replace other sources in our diets as we make the transition. Fruiting plants are happy to comply- one might even say they are happy to be drawn into what for them may be a kind of conversation with us humans, species to species.

And by the way…

This conversation is in a way the theme of Michael Pollan's fascinating book "Botany of Desire", as seen in our relationship with the apple, tulip, potato, and marijuana.
Whether you've read the book or not, you'll enjoy the excellent PBS Special based on it, and especially the smart and attractive show's website, with 'web extras'- like the interview segments with Pollan linked above, and a graphically rich dedicated website to explore further the themes and frames of the book.

PBS show segments and extras online
Botany of Desire- website

Thinking About Fruit

When we were hunter-gatherers, we ate other animals and plants like the rest of creation; and since we were few, our appetite had little impact on the biosphere, we were naturally integrated with the web of life and it's give and take. When we became numerous, we made a kind of pact with nature, to wit: we will eat enormous amounts of certain species, but we will also guarantee their survival as species, domesticating and elevating them in the best of conditions (in principle).

I've been thinking about not eating large animals anymore. Partly because the raising of farm animals alone accounts for an enormous amount of greenhouse gas, soil degradation, habitat destruction, marine pollution, and public health risks. Partly because of the fact that I no longer want to be part of the cause of the suffering and death of these animals, which, if they lived in my garden, I'd rather make friends with than kill and eat. In fact, since I have no doubt that all creatures have some kind of self-awareness and inner life, the more I think about it, the more eating even fish and fowl seems barbaric. After all you can have a pet chicken, or a pet fish. It even seems presumptuous to draw a line at, say, shrimp. I knew a boy once who had a pet huntsman spider, and who was depressed for days when the spider moved on as winter came.
Imagine if we didn't kill and eat- or just kill- the other creatures in our earth family. Imagine if butterflies and birds, deer and squirrel gathered and played with us in our gardens. I'd like that. Maybe we would learn how to communicate.

I happened upon a dog-eared copy of The Secret Life of Plants, in which I was reminded that plants have anxiety attacks when someone starts "harvesting" their garden-mates, or even when this person enters the greenhouse. So how will billions of humans live peaceably on the planet with a natural biosphere flourishing around them... what would they eat, if not everything?

Then I thought of fruit. Not so much apples and pears and the other northern fruits, but the wildly diverse fruits of the tropics from which our species came: mangos and mangosteen, rambutan, salak, durian and papaya... and dozens of others, which surely, in their great variety, might cover most of our nutritional needs. After all, if a giant fruitbat, with a six foot leathery wingspread can fuel it's flight on fruit, I should do fine.

Fruit, alone among all the things we eat, are made for us (primates primarily) to eat. That's why they generally come in lovely colors, smell good, taste sweet and moist, and give us energy; they want us to eat them, so we'll deposit their seeds in a fertilizer envelope at some distance from the tree.. They seduce us to have a taste.*

If we ate only fruit, we wouldn't be chopping up or slaughtering other life forms. Fruit-bearing trees release their ripened fruit all by themselves -a bright and transportable pod of nourishment, essentially saying, "Here, take this, it's ready to eat"; the tree lives happily on for decades. Like a cow gives milk, fruiting trees will continue to produce food for us as long as they live.

I can imagine a world in which fruiting plants have been cultivated for a wide range of nutritional benefits, and most of the growing land on the planet is devoted to our fruiting companions.

*And they may tend to make us more seductive to each other- fruiting trees would select for traits which by some means could over time increase the number of their 'seed-porters', thus securing their future generations. The way to do that, beyond offering essential nutrients and energy, would be to stimulate mating activity on the part of the seed-porting species. Clearly, forage-able vegetables would have no interest in offering such an inducement, lest they be eaten up by rapidly multiplying herbivores.

___________________

Update: Here's a video peek at some of the tropical fruits mentioned in this article...

Indian Summer in Santa Fe

Jellyfish Loop

You've heard intermittent reports of jellyfish invasions here and there in the world over the last years. Sometimes even 'giant jellyfish' invasions. The efflorescence of these animals (I believe they are technically 'animals') is commonly ascribed to the warming of the ocean, and there has been some concern voiced that jellies might take over the seas as they continue to warm.

Here's a new angle though: jellyfish, in their continuous vertical wanderings, are mixing upper and lower layers of ocean water, thus boosting the ocean's absorption of CO2, and this may account for the fact that the ocean has 'sunk' more CO2 than had been expected and predicted.

Interesting! It seems the jellyfish is embodying and performing a Gaian stabilization function, amounting to a natural feedback loop to soak up more CO2 when the sea temperatures rise!

We haven't paid much attention to the jellyfish, but I'm sure we will in the future- and not just as a plentiful potential food, or because they boost the ocean's CO2 sink, but because in one jelly species, there's a gene-set giving it, well, immortality. Specifically, this jellyfish, once it has matured and mated and reproduced, can revert to a juvenile stage and start all over again. I think I might like that! I guess we'd better start colonizing some planets before we implant that gene in ourselves...

Solar: Future Dwellings

We talk alot about local food production, but here in New Mexico, as in much of the world, we have cold winters and hot dry summers; so if we want to move to local food production, we are going to need a lot of greenhouses. So where are they? Greenhouses, after all, are not space-age technology, like photovoltaics, yet they capture sunlight and warmth and retain humidity with great efficiency. Amory Lovins, who spoke in Santa Fe last week, grows bananas at 2200 meters in his Rocky Mountain greenhouse.

Let's imagine the residential dwelling of the future: with a lean-to greenhouse on the southern exposure, and solar photovoltaic energy production. A home that produces energy and food for it's occupants. Why not?

HOME - The Movie

HOME is a beautiful documentary of our planet Earth and the impacts of humanity on it's life systems. The cinematography- by the  renowned Yann Arthus-Bertrand, is gorgeous,  the narrative excellent, the soundtrack very cool. The film is like an offspring of Koyanisqatsi and An Inconvenient Truth, with some edgy Buddha Bar thrown in.  

All the major elements of human depredations and their ramifications are covered, including critical natural  feedback loops. It's a dire appraisal, but an epilogue offers signs of hope that we may rise to the challenge.

Watch this beauty online in high quality full screen format here.

Bailout total 12.8 trillion

Bloomberg today reported the total cost of the bailout so far to be 12.8 trillion dollars. (story)

We are definitely in uncharted territory now! This is a near incomprehensible number. It is, for example, the number of miles travelled by light in 2 years, at 186,000 miles per second.

Or consider this: to give away this much money, you'd have to give away a million dollars a day, every day, for 35,000 years; you'd have to have started when we were hiding in caves from saber-toothed tigers to reach 12.8 trillion.

It's also three times the current value of all the gold in the world.

Who knew we were so rich! We really could have made education first-rate and free, provided universal affordable health-care, and switched to 100% green energy years ago! Who knew?!

Steps toward an energy solution: Redefine Useful Work and Wealth

a thoughtful post by George Mobus over at Question Everything- something we need to think about - SM

"...Suppose we define useful work as that work which allows society to maintain a steady flow of exergy (net energy available to do work) at a level sufficient to maintain a steady-state population at a reasonable level of material comfort with equitable distribution of that material wealth. In other words, work which maintains a stable social environment without growth that robs non-human parts of the Ecos. This does not preclude development of new and better forms of material wealth, increasing the true satisfaction of every human, since that might be achieved through science and technology — doing more with less.

"What it does mean is that the total population of the planet must remain at the carrying capacity, the sustainable number that can live in balance with the rest of nature for as long as we can envision. It means obtaining energy from truly renewable sources rather than fossil fuels (which establishes an upper bound on the size of a sustainable population). And it means identifying the kinds of products and services that sustain human well being rather than self-indulgent hedonism. It means abolishing the notions of rich and poor. It means abolishing the notion of profits and interest as we understand them now. It means recognizing our mental, intellectual, and individual wisdom limits and establishing a form of governance that will prevent those who would succumb to irrational desires (like the desire to get rich!) from doing so. We already have laws that prevent us from doing direct harm to one another. We will need laws that prevent us from doing indirect harm as well.."

Read Dr. Mobus's full article here

Time Out for Play

related:
Cetacea: Mind-Bending Theories About the Planet's “Other” Intelligent Life

Google Earth Views: Greenland and Arctic

Remote Exploration #4

I was poking around the ocean floor with the new Google Earth 5.0 the other day, in the area southeast of the Azores, and I found this strange, what... formation? The horizontal border of the grid near the bottom of the image is over 100 miles long. There's nothing else like it in the region.

Click here to see a larger picture.




Now, I know that some freak geological formations can resemble purposeful structure. This seems to be an extreme case however. And very large, roughly 13,000 square miles according to the Google Earth "ruler".
A discussion has begun already over at the Google Earth forums on this feature, several people have stumbled on it apparently, like me, since the release of Google Earth 5.0 featuring the ocean floors. If you have any thoughts on this, post comments here.


Update Feb 20: This feature is catching a lot of attention... see "Has Atlantis Been Found Off The Coast of Africa?"


What else may await further armchair exploration? As the data sets become more fine-grained, determined explorers are certain to find things of interest. I found some sunken dock structures and ships in an ancient megalithic port, now submerged. (In shallow waters near some coastal areas the imagery is good enough to see these details underwater).

Remember that the imagery used in Google Earth, Mars, and Sky, has not yet necessarily been seen by humans, let alone examined in detail; discoveries are happening already, and many more await... have you looked into the Google Sky deep-field yet?



Related updates:

Dutch schoolteacher finds new class of astronomical object with Galaxy Zoo
Hanny's Blog / Galaxy Zoo blog discussion
GalaxyZoo

Google Earth reveals fish trap made from rocks 1,000 years ago off British coast