What Am I Not Talking About?

Ahhh, finals. The urge to waste valuable study time on random websites is almost irresistible... so I'm not resisting it. Instead, I give you a list of mondegreens from England Dan and John Ford Coley's song "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight".

Original lyrics:
I'm not talkin' 'bout movin' in
and I don't want to change your life.

Misheard as:
I'm not talkin' 'bout:

• forgivin'
• the linen / the linens / my linens (How romantic!)
• aluminum (chemical element #1)
• a live in
• bulimia
• Lavinia
• Malydian (huh?)
• Bolivia
• committing (At least that makes some kind of sense)
• millennia / millennium /millenniums
  
• museum
• religion
• the limit
• 'ma lady' (Is that medieval or ghetto?)
• John Lennon
• Meridian
• molybdenum (chemical element #2)
• Mullet Inn (Come for the haircuts, stay for the fish?)
• a wedding / no wedding
  
• believin'
• iridium (chemical element #3. We're into some really obscure ones now!)
• my Lydia
• my layin' ya (A little too bold for the mood of this song, wouldn't you say?)
• my winnings
• my livin' / the livin'
  
• the women / my women (Again, not really a soft sell, is it?)
• relating
• relentin'
• that idiot (The speaker or somebody else?)
  
• that idiom
• the lily liver (That doesn't even scan!)
  
• the weather (Yes, Virginia, we can get more prosaic than "the linen".)
• Aborigine
• blamin'
• oblivion
• bellinin (Try googling it.)
• merlinin (Is that a little Merlin?)
• mood rhythm
• the Lady in Green (Continuing the "mythology of the British Isles" theme.)
• the Leonids
• the lenient
• the weekend
• more than friends (Sensible but doesn't scan.)
• no Indian (Next line: "And I don't want to join your tribe". Really!)
• Marillion
• but booty is
• relivin'
• melanin (More science!)
• the lady

Wally Schirra: 1923 - 2007

Wally Schirra died today.
I'm playing "Fire in the Sky" and "Hope Eyrie" in his honor.

Silly Article About Mushroom Foraging

A promising-looking article about mushroom hunters in northern California focuses mostly on the "dark side" of the activity -- fines and possible poisonings. While these, particularly the latter, are real threats, people go overboard over them. One spectacularly silly quote, from the director of the Sacramento division of the California poison control system: "If you're going to eat mushrooms, buy them from the store." (Such a kicker sentiment!) Um, how about, "Don't eat anything you haven't positively identified and have an experienced forager accompany you if you're a beginner".

Another paragraph in the article is flat-out dangerous. "Serious hunters eat only what they can identify. Keller said once he learned to identify the distinctive color and sheen of death caps, he noticed them everywhere."

First, it's not just "serious hunters" who eat only the mushrooms they can identify, it's anyone who would rather not be poisoned. Many poisonings occur among immigrants who eat mushrooms that look like edible species from the old country. If you eat wild mushrooms, identify them. To species. And save a sample in case you do get sick.

The second sentence of the above pernicious paragraph is almost as bad as the first. The death caps are members of the genus Amanita and are actually quite easy to identify. In addition to having a fairly distinctive shape and a white spore print, Amanitas have a volva (an underground cup surrounding the stem) and, very often, scales on the cap and a ring around the stem. Maybe some species do have a distinctive sheen, but I wouldn't rely on that for ID.

If you're interested in getting out into the field to study (and eat!) mushrooms, check out the North American Mycological Association.

This Made My Evening

Human solidarity and the power of international connections, both at their best.

LA Koreans Angry at Anti-Jewish Cartoon - Forbes.com: "Korean-American community leaders said they plan to launch a protest against the publisher of a popular South Korean comic book that contains anti-Semitic images."...

Yohngsohk Choe, co-chairman of the Korean American Patriotic Action Movement in the USA, said, "I don't have words to describe the outrage I feel."

The group met Friday with Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish advocacy group. Cooper said he would travel to Seoul on March 15 to raise concerns about the book.

Oekologie Carnival

Hello and welcome to the (slightly delayed) February 15, 2007 edition of oekologie, the carnival of ecology and environmental science. Let's start off by clarifying what ecology actually is. Jeremy Bruno of The Voltage Gate starts off a series of basic ecological concepts by asking "What Is Ecology? ". My favorite definition is one of the oldest -- the study of how organisms interact with each other and with their environment. It is distinct from environmental science, which focuses on humans and, as Jeremy makes clear, it is a very broad field of study.

From here, let's move to posts on the science of ecology. James Millington at Direction not Destination presents a description of Characterizing wildfire regimes in the United States. Johan A. Stenberg of Insect-Plant Ecology presents a post on the open journal PLoS one and a call for less explanatory factors in experimental ecology. If you read ecology papers, you'll probably get behind that second one!

Yours truly has a post on feedbacks between climate and volcanic activity. You might say this is more Earth science than ecology, but I think anything on global self-regulation is ecologically relevant.

Greg Laden presents two evolutionary biology posts, The Evolution of Human Diet and Models of Sexual Selection. I learned quite a bit from these.

Finally, Marcia Bonta presents Grasslands of Central Pennsylvania. This excellent description of Pennsylvania grasslands and the forces that maintain them leads to our next subject area, natural history.

We start off with two posts from GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life. Gyroscopes Tell Moths How to Fly Straight explains, well, how gyroscopes at the base of moth antennae tell them how to fly straight and C'mon Baby, Light my Fire gives us a fascinating look at courtship among fluorescent spiders. Did you know fluorescent spiders existed? Cool! Reigh Belisama at Save The Ribble! has a nice post about a riverside nature walk, Locals Enjoy The Ribble's Winter Wildlife. Finally, Dave at Via Negativa gives us two posts, Bluestem and Forester-think: a brief primer. Both are thought provoking discussions on the relationships between humans and nature, which segues nicely to our third subject area, the environment.

Here, we start off with the ever-controversial subject of exotic species. Mike Bergin at 10,000 Birds, presents What is Wild?, which distinguishes between individual "fugitives" and established populations. On the other hand, Nuthatch at bootstrap analysis gives us shooting mute swans versus mute swans shooting blanks. What has more ethical standing, individuals or ecosystems?

Let's continue the water theme for a while. Don Bosch, The Evangelical Ecologist, presents The Desert Blooms, a piece about the recovery of marshes in Iraq and the establishment of Iraq's Ministry of Environment. Garry Peterson at Resilience Science discusses the role of an obscure fish in coral reef recovery from an algal-dominated state in Hidden Ecological Functions and Ecological Hysteresis. Jennifer Pinkley at The Infinite Sphere gives us Karst geology and water pollution and Sewage treatment plant on karst floodplain??? .

What can we do to protect the environment? Wenchypoo at Wisdom From Wenchypoo's Mental Wastebasket presents an appropriately contrarian post titled Green is Making Me See Red. Meanwhile, Vihar Sheth at green | rising discusses the environmental benefits of vegetarianism in You Are What You Eat.

On the political level, Justin Lowery at blog4brains.com presents America: Pro-Immigration? Then Pro-Oil Dependence!. Vihar Sheth at green | rising presents Wasted Gas, on the use of landfill methane. John Feeney at Growth is Madness! points out that the problem isn't population or consumption, it's both, in An unholy matrimony. And Marcelino Fuentes at Biopolitical brings up the issue of scientific uncertainty at Crichton, Laurance, Lomborg, and their agendas.

We finish up on a light note. Avant News presents Ostrich Charged With Multiple Ostricides posted at Avant News, saying,

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of oekologie using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Climate Affects Volcanoes, Volcanoes Affect Climate...

We know that volcanic eruptions can change the climate. The ash they throw up into the atmosphere blocks sunlight, cooling Earth. (The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused the "Year Without a Summer" in Europe and North America -- and led to the writing of Frankenstein.) But can climate affect volcanic activity? Several discoveries reported in 2006 say yes.

The first discovery concerns isostatic rebound after glaciation. The rock continents are made of is less dense than the molten rock of the mantle, so continents float on the mantle like a rubber duck floats in your bathtub. Push down on the rubber duckie, or put an ice sheet on top of the continent, and they sink a little bit. When the ice sheet melts, the continent slowly rebounds to its former height. Patrick Wu of the University of Calgary have found links between isostatic rebound and seismic activity. Wu's research indicates that melting ice makes earthquakes, and maybe even volcanic eruptions, more likely as the crust rises to its new equilibrium height.

The work of Allen Glazner, of the University of North Carolina, is even more dramatic, finding a possible link between the dry climate of interglacial periods and supervolcanoes. Essentially, rainfall and groundwater can cool a volcano's magma chamber, making it less likely to build up the amounts of magma needed for a supereruption.

Let's look at this a bit more closely. Interglacial periods are warm and dry, which, according to this new work, makes volcano eruptions more likely. Volcanoes produce both suspended particles, which cool the Earth, and carbon dioxide, which warms it. Depending on which effect is more important in the long run, we may have a climate-stabilizing or destabilizing feedback loop. Either way, the connections are intricate and interesting. I look forward to learning more about this topic.

The Real Reason for "Happy Holidays"

Thank you, Bill O'Reilly. For the last two years, the normally pleasant holiday season has been polluted by heated arguments over a purported "War on Christmas". The allegation, for those of you living under rocks, is that political correctness is forcing Christmas out of the public sphere and "Merry Christmas" is being replaced by the generic "Happy Holidays".

Never mind that New Year comes just a week after Christmas and "Happy Holidays" can easily be understood to mean "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year". Christians who see themselves as victims of the "Happy Holidays" phenomenon insist that its purpose is to avoid offending folks who don't celebrate Christmas by avoiding explicit mention of it.

But is that really what's going on? I grew up in a secular Jewish family and was never offended by people wishing me a merry Christmas. Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log points out that neither are most people who don't observe the holiday. But there is more to saying "Happy Holidays" than just avoiding reference to a particular one.

Think back to the brouhaha over the removal of Christmas trees from Seattle-Tacoma Airport. (BTW, folks, a Christmas tree is not a Christian symbol. It's an adopted pagan custom, like Easter eggs.) That unfortunate decision was triggered by an Orthodox Jewish rabbi's request that the airport display a menorah along with its Christmas trees. The rabbi never asked for the removal of the trees. He simply wanted another holiday included.

The key word here is "included". Yes, very few non-Christians will be offended at hearing, "Merry Christmas" or seeing a Christmas tree. But it is nice to hear a greeting that you can interpret as including your holiday, whether that's Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali or Eid al-Adha. In the same vein, I have no objection to public holiday displays, as long as they include symbols of many of the religions practiced in a community and secular holidays like New Year and Winter Solstice.

With this shift in viewpoint, I hope we can call a truce in the Christmas Wars. Now, can someone please explain "Season's Greetings" to me?

Tribute to Carl Sagan

Today is the ten-year anniversary of Carl Sagan's death and he is being memorialized in the blogosphere. Here is my own little contribution:

Sometime in the eleventh grade, I was browsing the shelves of my local public library and came upon a copy of Pale Blue Dot. That was not my first encounter with Carl Sagan's work -- I had read The Dragons of Eden a couple of years earlier -- but it was the one that took. I read Pale Blue Dot, renewed it and reread it. Reaching the renewal limit, I brought the book back -- and checked it out again on my very next library trip. (Of course, I was reading Sagan's other books at the same time.) I eventually bought a softcover copy of Pale Blue Dot, wore it out in a couple of years and finally invested in a hardcover edition.

What about that book captured my attention so durably? It wasn't just the fascinating descriptions of the Solar System or the luminous visions of future space exploration. What touched me the most was Sagan's sense of the unity of humankind. We occupied a tiny mote of dust in a vast Cosmos, and the way we treated each other had to reflect that. Against the backdrop of space, all the subgroups of Homo sapiens are essentially one. Sagan wrote:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

If you have a high-bandwidth connection, please watch the YouTube video below. Quite honestly, it gave me goosebumps.

Imagining the Future We Want

Chris Clarke of Creek Running North asked readers to describe what the world would look like "if our side won". We're not talking about getting out of Iraq or implementing Kyoto but about having a vision. What kind of world do we really want to live in?

Several years ago, I ran a few Future History Project workshops in which participants imagined the world they wanted to exist in a hundred years and then outlined its history. The article below describes one such experience. (WFA is the World Federalist Association, which has since transmogrified itself into the much less visionary Citizens for Global Solutions.)

---

Conversations for a Century
by Jane Shevtsov

What happens when we set aside the problems of the present and give ourselves permission to dream?

  "It is now the year 2102. What are your favorite things about the world right now?" I ask this question at the beginning of the Future History Project workshop Tad Daley and I are conducting at WFA's October 2002 assembly in Denver. The thirty or forty people attending spend the next five minutes writing about a time when the troubled years of the early 21st century are safely in the history books.
  Why are we indulging in these flights of fancy when there are so many pressing issues right here and now? When the president seems hell-bent on bombing an already suffering nation, when the global climate is changing unpredictably and the rate of extinction is higher than at any point in the past 65 million years, when tens of thousands of children die every day from fully preventable causes, what is the use of speculation about a better world a century hence?
  The very existence of these problems makes it important to dream of a world without them. Once we envision a world in which problems like these do not exist, we can see why they do not exist. And the Future History Project goes more deeply into this than most other visioning processes because Future History participants develop the history of that happy world of 2102. They draw a road map from here to utopia.

  Such grandiose plans can be difficult to get into. So right after brainstorming, I ask participants a simple question. I ask them what their community is like.
  My co-facilitator corrects me immediately. What do I mean by community?
  It is a good question, since even now, virtual communities are important and growing exponentially. So I define community as both physical neighborhood and any virtual communities to which you belong.
  After a few questions, the discussion takes on a life of its own. Occasionally Tad and I remind people of the ground rules -- if it's desirable and doesn't break the laws of physics, then it's possible; no miracles or aliens, "now" is 2102 -- but mostly we're just along for the ride, keeping order and taking notes but letting ideas flow.
  People speak of social contracts and sustainable architecture, of food and livelihood. This being WFA, government, particularly global government, gets much attention. (At a Future History Project, sometimes a person who has no idea world federalists even exist will be the first to bring up global government.) We discuss schools, families and values -- especially values. People seem eager to discuss a shift to more inclusive, communitarian values.

  After about 45 minutes, we shift gears. It is time for the hard part -- inventing the history of 2102. A timeline hangs on the wall and we try to fill it in, going backwards from 2102 to 2002. As co-facilitator, I try to get people to think in terms of logical steps -- A had to happen before B could occur -- but mostly people just want to fill in that blank sheet.
  And fill it in they do. We go to Mars in 2012. In 2032, a reformed UN General Assembly becomes a world government. By 2042, everyone uses renewable energy. And so on.

  It's over too soon. Ten minutes of written and shared reflection and we go our separate ways. But people leave inspired. Utopia is not impossible -- it's just very, very improbable. And the improbable happens.

The Creek is Running Again!

Creek Running North is back up after dealing with anonymous threats. What does the writer's dog have to say about it?

"When I brush Chris’ cactus plants
I sometimes wince or cry aloud,
But for an online thug? Fat chance.
My leg is lifted, and bow-wowed."

Threats Against a Blogger

Creek Running North, to which I have linked several times, is down. Its owner, Chris Clarke, who is an environmentalist and progressive activist, has had his dog threatened. From prior experience, Chris does not expect the police will be of any help. In a comment on Pharyngula (you'll have to scroll down), he writes:

"My blog is one of the least important things I do. Becky and Zeke are up top, and quite honestly Zeke's impending demise makes him edge Becky out, as he's edged me out in Becky's priorities. In descending order after that: a few good friends, my longer-term writing projects, political activism, my day job, hiking, my blog. I appreciate the fact that my blog has fans. But really now. My effective speech takes place at my day job and doing politics. I am not one of those people who has confused writing a blog post with political activism."

About the only thing I disagree with in that is the last sentence. If you have an audience, blogging can indeed be political activism. Although it probably won't influence decision-makers directly, it may well help awaken your fellow citizens. Chris' blogging has done this to me more than once.

This whole situation has made me think about threats to bloggers, particularly in repressive societies. The Committee to Protect Bloggers has shut down, although the people behind it are doing related work. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some information on bloggers' rights, but it appears to be mostly written for US readers and toward avoiding civil lawsuits and other relatively mild consequences. Is there anything else out there, in the US or elsewhere?

Good luck, Chris, and I hope the creek starts running again soon.

Rediscovering a Favorite Song

I have a confession to make: I don't like Charlotte's Web. At least, I didn't care for it in the third grade, when my class read it. (I disliked all fantasy and fairy tales at the time.) However, seeing the movie was completely different and one song from the film has stayed with me to this day. And a couple of days ago, I finally got around to looking it up.

The song is called "How Very Special are We" and is a gentle, poetic lyric about the seasons and the cycle of life. There doesn't seem to be a formal site of Charlotte's Web soundtrack lyrics, but a user going by TherealRNO has posted the words to "How Very Special are We" in an Amazon.com review. There's also a short clip of the song at reelclassics.com.

Here are the words:

How very special are we
For just a moment to be
Part of life's eternal rhyme
How very special are we
To have on our family tree
Mother Earth and Father Time

The summer larks return to sing
Oh, what a gift they give
The autumn days grow short and cold
Oh, what a joy to live

He turns the seasons around and so she changes her gown
But they always look in their prime
They go on dancing their dance of ever-lasting romance
Mother Earth and Father Time

How very special are we
For just a moment to be
Part of life's eternal rhyme
How very special are we
To have on our family tree
Mother Earth and Father Time...

The autumn days grow short and cold
It's Christmastime again
The snows of winter slowly melt
The days grow long
And then

He turns the seasons around and so she changes her gown
Mother Earth and Father Time
How very special are we
For just a moment to be
Part of life's eternal rhyme

Friday Random Ten

• Emerald Rose, "Penny in the Well". A warm song about searching for fulfillment.
• Tim McGraw, "Tiny Dancer". I like this version of the song.
• Alabama, "Fiddle in the Band". Can you listen to this and not tap your toes?
• John Denver, "Islands"
• Jackson Browne, "Running on Empty". A very LA song about growing up.
• Bruce Cockburn, "All the Diamonds in the World". Gentle and lyrical.
• Vladimir Vysotsky, "Vyet Eto Nashi Gory (These are Our Mountains)". Russian song that tells of a WWII battle in which Soviet alpine fighters faced German soldiers they themselves had trained. Has anybody tried to translate Vysotsky into English?
• John Denver, "Rhymes and Reasons". The first John Denver song I ever heard and still one of my favorites. Hopeful and comforting.
• Trisha Yearwood, "Real Live Woman". An honest, solid song that matches Yearwood's style perfectly.
• The Highwaymen, "Against the Wind". Good song, but I like Bob Seger's version better.

Now I'm off to the Smokies!

What Does It Feel Like to be On Top of a Nuclear Test?

Since North Korea claimed to have tested a nuclear weapon on Monday, geologists and policy wonks have been wondering why the tremor the detonation caused was so small. Was the bomb small, not very good, or fake -- simply a pile of regular explosives? While the authorities study and debate, I am struck by the surrealness of the situation. Human beings have weapons that imitate tectonic plate movements!

I grew up in southern California and have been through several earthquakes, including the magnitude 6.6 Northridge Earthquake in 1994. When I read about the North Korean nuclear-seismological debate, I wondered what it would feel like to be on top of an underground nuclear test.

To find out, I combined a Wikipedia chart of the Richter scale magnitudes of various earthquakes and explosions with a chart giving rough conversions between earthquake magnitudes on the Richter scale and their felt intensities on the Modified Mercali Scale. Here is the result.

Event	Richter magnitude	TNT Equivalent	Intensity
WWII conventional bombs	1.5	178 kg (392 lb)	Detected only by seismographs
late WWII conventional bombs	2.0	1 metric ton	Detected only by seismographs
WWII blockbuster bomb	2.5	5.6 metric tons	Detected only by seismographs
Small atomic bomb	4.0	1 kiloton	Resembling vibrations caused by heavy traffic.
Nagasaki atomic bomb	5.0	32 kiloton	Sleepers awakened and bells ring.
Little Skull Mtn, NV Quake, 1992	5.5	178 kilotons	Trees sway, some damage from overturning and falling objects.
Double Spring Flat, NV Quake, 1994	6.0	1 megaton	General alarm, cracking of walls.
Northridge quake, 1994	6.5	5.6 megatons	Chimneys fall and there is some damage to buildings.
Tsar Bomba, largest thermonuclear weapon ever tested	~7.0	50 megatons	Ground badly cracked and many buildings are destroyed. There are some landslides.
Landers, CA Quake, 1992	7.5	178 megatons	Ground badly cracked and many buildings are destroyed. There are some landslides.

Friday Random Ten

• Jackson Browne, "Doctor My Eyes". "Doctor, my eyes cannot see the sky. Is this the price for having learned how not to cry?" A classic.
• Aladdin soundtrack, "A Whole New World". We learned to sing and sign this one in fifth grade!
• Peter, Paul and Mary, "Oh, Rock My Soul"
• Kathy Mar, "Child's Song". A melancholy song about leaving home.
• John Lennon, "Imagine". Music just doesn't get much better than this. Certainly a song we need to hear.
• Jackson Browne, "For a Dancer". "Keep a fire for the human race."
• Gaia Consort, "Falling". Walking is falling and catching yourself.
• Johnny Cash, "The One on the Left is on the Right". No, it's not about Congress, but it is a very funny song about a folk group torn apart by political differences.
• Kathy Mar, "Flowering Green". Talk about getting what you deserve!
• Wishing Chair, "Three Doors". A song about Ellis Island.

Home and the Big Here

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I'm a fan of WorldChanging, and a couple of weeks ago, they posted an essay that I've been meaning to comment on. The question raised in the essay is, "Where is home?".

"Home is a fiercely individual concept: it's hard to articulate all the elements that make a 'home'; our location, and notion, of home may change over time; we may not be able to live at home for various reasons; and how we are comfortable with our environment and the people around us are all, I think, wrapped up in this notion of 'home.'"

I lived in Los Angeles for 16 years but don't think it was ever home to me. Some parts of it felt comfortable and I developed emotional attachments to my high school and the LA Eco-Village, but the city itself was simply there. Furthermore, I did not particularly like the there. When I think of good things about LA, I think of people, not places.

Where is home, then? For most of my life, I've had a deep emotional connection to temperate deciduous forests. I don't know what it is about the forest landscape that makes me feel peaceful and comfortable, but it's powerful. Two years ago, I got to spend a summer at Cranberry Lake Biological Station in the Adirondacks and upon arrival, I immediately felt it to be home. It was there that I hit upon the phrase, "Home is where what is inside you matches what is outside you".

What about now? I'm living in Athens, GA, which has the forests I so love, although many areas are still dominated by pine. There are many things -- and people -- I like here, but the city does have problems. (The public transportation system sucks!) Will Athens become home? I don't know yet.

In connection with this, I will start doing Kevin Kelly's "Big Here" quiz, which provides a structure for exploring the place where you live. Stay tuned for question 1!

Fungal Blogging

The new Festival of the Trees is up and seems to have an unusual number of fungal posts. There's a post about a huge artist's conk (Ganoderma applanatum) and one with pictures of several fungi, most likely wood-rotters, growing on trees. But the close-up mushroom photos on Riverside Rambles take the cake!

Is There Really a Connection between E. coli and Farming Methods?

Last Saturday, I linked to a WorldChanging post that said that E. coli O157 is linked to factory farming because it prefers to grow in grain-fed cows. I have just become aware that Tara Smith at Aetiology has written on this topic and the issue is not really clear-cut. There may indeed be a connection between grain-feeding and pathogenic E. coli, but the evidence is hardly unequivocal. Tara mentions a study that found

that when a long-term diet of hay was fed (greater than a month), the cattle still shed O157 (Appl Environ Microbiol. 2005 71:7974-9.) Another one found diet had no effect on O157 (J Anim Sci. 2006 84:2523-32). If anything's clear, it's that the link between diet and shedding of O157 *isn't* clear, despite what Plank claims.

Of course, knowing where our food comes from is important for many reasons and some links between factory farming and disease, like the evolution of antibiotic-resistance bacteria, are widely accepted. However, it is important that we base our decisions on the best science available and learn to tolerate some uncertainty.

Friday Random Ten

An unusual amount of very good stuff came up today. I guess it's my lucky music day!

• Bruce Cockburn, "All the Diamonds in the World". Cockburn's usual lyrical imagery, spirituality and perfect guitar. Good stuff!
• Kathy Mar, "Flowering Green". A fairy tale for the modern world.
• Kathy Mar, "Everybody's Moon". Thoughful but light folky song.
• Jackson Browne, "For Everyman". Life will be good for all of us or none of us.
• Echo's Children, "O, Sumer!". An allegory describing the sacking of ancient Sumer.
• Jackson Browne, "Tender is the Night". Searching for that right person.
• Julia Ecklar, "Burnish Me Bright". The story of a mute child who learns to communicate through mime.
• Gaia Consort, "Moon in Your Teeth". Spare and mystical.
• Collin Raye, "It Could Be That Easy"
• Peter, Paul and Mary, "The Times They are a' Changin'". Wrong generation? Maybe not...

What Does It Mean to Respect Nature?

I've never watched Steve Irwin, but I'm a member of the ECOLOG mailing list and lately my inbox has been filling up with ecologists' commentary on his approach to education and entertainment. Commenters seem to fall into two categories: those who admired Irwin and those who thought he wasn't serious enough, that his wildlife-based entertainment had little value.

I can't comment on Irwin specifically, but two assumptions came up often enough in the writings of the second group that I feel they must be discussed. The first is that respecting nature means taking a hands-off approach as much as possible. The second is that scientific research is intrinisically more valuable than, say, entertainment.

The title of the Charles Jonkel article linked to above, "Save a Grizzly, Visit a Library", exemplifies the first assumption. To a certain extent, I share it. Humans certainly are capable of harming nature and animals while enjoying them. But must I be a pair of eyes on a stick? While some of Steve Irwin's actions may certainly have been questionable, is there anything seriously wrong with my herpetology professor's lizard-catching or my munching on various woodland edibles? Promoters of the "hands-off" attitude often decry the fact that many modern kids learn more about nature from TV and computers than first-hand experience, but isn't this perfectly consistent with the "do not disturb" ethic? Under what circumstances may we participate in nature, and doesn't even posing the question separate us from the rest of the natural world?

Several list members have commented that handling, marking and sometimes even killing wild animals is justified only if it is for scientific purposes. Entertainment, even if educational, just isn't good enough. This claim is frequently followed by the assertion that the use of wild animals in research is acceptable because it helps with conservation or management. However, most zoological research has essentially nothing to do with conservation or management! While I agree that animal welfare is extremely important, I would argue that mist-netting 100 birds to band them is more problematic than capturing one or two such birds to show off on television. Furthermore, many (if not most) biologists chose their careers because they love nature and the outdoors. Biologists generally enjoy their work and this enjoyment is the primary motivation for the work. However, it is hard to argue that the satisfaction of a scientist's curiousity is inherently more worthwhile than the satisfaction of another person's desire for entertainment.

When animals are used in either science or entertainment, the animal's well-being must be paramount. Beyond that, it is hard to criticize Steve Irwin.

Kudzu, Hurricanes and Soybean Rust

I may be a fungus freak, but learning life cycles is, well, a necessary evil. Rusts, plant pathogens with up to five types of spores, are a particular pain. So today's lecture on rusts in my mycology class was a bit less than exciting -- that is, until we got to soybean rust. The organism is not particularly fascinating, but the story of how it got to the United States is worth telling.

Like soybeans, soybean rust is native to East Asia. As soybean cultivation spread worldwide, so did the rust. In the 1950s and 1960s, it spread through South Asia and Australia. In 1994, it reached Hawaii, but the continental US was protected by long distances and careful inspection of imported plants.

The beginning of the end of this isolation came in 1997, when a cyclone carried the fungus from India to central Africa. In a few years, it reached both South Africa and the Atlantic coast. Then, transported by either wind or airplanes, the rust showed up in Paraguay in 2002. From Paraguay, the fungus' highly mobile spores dispersed to Venezuela and Brazil. After that, it was only a matter of time before soybean rust showed up in the continental US.

It didn't take long. In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan blew spores from South America to the American South, introducing the rust to Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida. Farmers are now trying to control the pathogen, which attacks a wide range of legumes. So far, damage has not been serious.

So what's up with kudzu? It turns out that this vine, a Japanese import ubiquitous in the South, is one of the hosts of soybean rust. This means it can become a reservoir for the disease -- unfortunately, without sustaining much damage itself. You gotta love ecology!

Cool Space Blogging

Have you heard of Anousheh Ansari? She's a space tourist, the fourth one in history and the first woman, and she has a blog that gets updated several times a day. (She can't blog live because of Internet connection outages during orbit; instead, she sends down emails that her friends post on the web.)

Only the very wealthy can afford space travel right now, but what will happen in 15 or 20 years? Will the merely well-off be able to go up? Will there be private space stations catering to the ultimate in tourism? And what would happen if many people experienced a view of Earth from space? That could be one of the drivers of Homo sapiens' maturation.

On a related note, Thomas P.M. Barnett notes a New York Times article about Mike Griffin, the director of NASA, visiting China. I hope we do start to cooperate in space.

Two Tales of Missing Tails

A lizard and a dolphin.