The Trees and Giants in the Earth

I wrote the following in response to a student who reviewed the Arbor Day Foundation which is established in Nebraska.  I appreciate your description of this organization and its founding. One of the things that needs to be explored is our relationship to land and our connection to the landscapes that we grow up with. I am a person of lakes and forest and it is where I want to live even though I love hiking in the desert and the badlands. Home is in the combination of trees and water. For some it is ocean breezes, some need the vast open horizons, some need heat, and some need seasons.

Over the centuries people move and carry with them the ideals of their ancestral home which causes them to go to the green houses and seed stores in an effort to make where they live closer to what is their ideal. Humans are landscape shapers - seldom taking the time as Leopold said to discover the real beauty and sense of place. This has led to the loss of prairie as well as the loss of forest. It has increased invasive species and it has led us to dig up the ridges and hills to fill in the low spots and valleys. People tinker - not satisfied with their "creators" work.

Decades ago I worked for a company that produced filmstrips (a very archaic film style) and we made one that I particularly like about the contrast between two books - The trees by Conrad Richter and Giants of the Earth by Rolvaag. In the trees the woman who is center piece to the trilogy is overwhelmed by the deep dark forest of Pennsylvania and celebrates the cutting of every tree and each new ray of light until at the end of the trilogy one tree is left, fenced in, in the town that has replaced the woods and she is struck by its pathos and the deeds that her people had done.

In Rolvaag's work, the woman that is centerpiece to the epic journey to the Dakotas hates the openness, the lack of limits, the rolling wind across the prairie and the waves in the grass. She needs structure for her eyes, limits to the edges of the world, and an arboreal reference to both size and distance. She is tormented and driven crazy by this and of course wants to plant the prairies in trees.

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson

A small book filled with lots of information as science writer George Johnson tries to describe both the experiments and the context of the experiments.

The ten:

1.      Galileo: The Way Things Really Move – measure movement of falling

2.      William Harvey: Mysteries of the Heart

3.      Isaac Newton: What a color is (prisms and experiments with light)

4.      Antoine-Laurent Laavosier: The Farmer’s Daughter (finding oxygen)

5.      Luigi Galvani: Animal Electricity (the nervous system)

6.      Michael Faraday:  Something Deeply Hidden (connecting light, magnetism, and electricity)

7.      James Joule: How the World Works (light and electromagnetism)

8.      A. A. Michalson: Lost in Space (measuring light)

9.      Ivan Pavlov: Measuring the immeasurable (response and learning)

10.   Robert Millikan: In the Borderland (finding electrons)

My favorite story:

“Midway through the eighteenth century, when electricity was all the rage, an amateur scientist stood before the Royal Society in London and described what might be called Symmer’s law: opposite-colored socks attract while like-colored socks repel.  To keep his feet comfortable in winter, the speaker, a government clerk named Robert Symmer was accustomed to wearing to layers of stockings.  In the morning, he would pull white socks over a black woolen pair.  In the afternoon he would reverse them. During the transition, the two different materials crackled and bristled with opposite charges, and Symmer, who became known as the barefoot philosopher, would sit back in his chair marveling at the results.

“’When this experiment is performed with two black stocking in one hand and two white in the other,’ he reported, ‘it exhibits a very curious spectacle: The repulsion of those of the same colour, and the attraction of those of different colours, throws them into an agitation that is not unentertaining.’”

The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean

What a chemistry book.  I wish this had been my text – I might have gone much further with chemistry.  Sam not only loves chemistry – it is evident, but he also loves spinning stories.  So we learn about gallium, the element that makes a spoon disappear when it turns liquid over 65F degrees. 

This has become the latest of my favorite books of the year.  It had everything I love in a reading – history, stories, humor, science, nature, mystery, and knowledge.  And chemistry was never my favorite subject (although my chemistry set allowed my buddy Tom Smith and I hours of discovery and rotten smelling and weird compounds in my basement).  Gloss over any parts that do not capture you, because there is sure to be something on the next page that does.

There are hucksters and alchemists, astronomers, archaeologists and almost every other scientist flitting around the chapters sharing discoveries and pondering over mysteries.  We meet obscure scientists who should not be so obscure and famous scientists who probably got too much credit.  There are stories about silicon chips and storms on Jupiter.

Learn about the periodic table and while you are at it learn about the solar system.  I love the scientific romp and the image of neon rain on Jupiter.  I love learning about the scientists from Pauling to Curie who achieved world acclaim and the more obscure scientists who made great discoveries, but did not get their own name attached to them.

There is mystery (after all the great poisons are on the table too) and mythology – King Midas was a real person.  But King Midas had zinc in his countries ore and that meant that when his metallurgists made bronze it was brass and very shiny!  You can learn about counterfeiting and nuclear bombs and nuclear energy.   I even learned about titanium as a hip replacement and how it was discovered that it was the only metal that fooled the bones in to grafting with it. 

I am amazed at the history that is captured by the Periodic Table and even more – how few I have even heard of.  These are the basic building blocks of the universe and still I know only a few of them.  Perhaps if chemists had been a little more generous with simple shore names like sulfur, Iodine, Helium, silver, and gold instead of proactinum, brevium, lutetium, europium, and gadolinium we might remember more.

Common Sense, Thomas Paine

After all these years and all the historical documents I have read, I have finally read Common Sense in a small book produced by Fall River Press that is filled with insights and gives me a glimpse of the philosophy and ideas that were the real power of the revolution.

Yet for all Thomas Paine’s acclaim and impact he was alone at death, forgotten in many ways except for a few contingents who still felt his call – his opposition to England in Ireland, and his steady and strong stand against slavery.  Born in poverty in 1737 he immigrated to America and achieved success as a pamphleteer with Common Sense that had more influence than any political writing other than Marx.

Paine’s long stream of pamphlets argued for more lenient divorce laws, justice for women, humane treatment for animals, ending dueling and ending slavery.  I really like this guy!!  He is also responsible for this stirring statement – “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of this country, but he that stands it now, deserves the thanks of man and woman.”

He had to escape England and he was nearly guillotined in France, but he never stopped speaking the truth that he felt.

Even in this century there are many statements that need discussion and thought.  Paine did not have the answers, but he had the ability to raise the questions – “Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by subsequent circumstance; the distinctions of rich and poor, may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh ill sounding names of avarice and oppression.”

Perhaps my favorite line is the following:

“Those men would deserve the gratitude of ages, who should discover a mode of government that contained the greatest sums of individual happiness, with the least national expense.”

Yes it is dated, but the passion and zeal still come through in his written words.

When Elephants Weep, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

“After a promising start over 120 years ago, when Darwin explored the terrain in his book, The expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, very few scientists have acknowledged, researched, or even speculated about animal emotions.”

“Jane Goodall finds the scientific reluctance to accept anecdotal evidence a serious problem, one that colors all of science. “I’ve always collected anecdotes, because I think they’re just terribly, terribly important – whereas most scientists scorn the anecdotal. ‘Oh, that’s merely anecdotal.’  What is anecdotal?  It’s careful description of an unusual event.”  She tells of a research assistant in a laboratory charged with logging the response of male rhesus monkeys to females, some of whom were being treated with hormones or had had their ovaries removed.  “She told me…the most fascinating thing to her was that there was one old female that she observed in all these different states, ending with having her ovaries out, and whatever state she was in, she was the most popular.  But she was one monkey and that was ignored.  There must be literally millions of observations like that that have never crept into the literatures.”  Such observations would provide a rich and suggestive ground for analysis and further investigation, yet there are almost none.  While it is possible and customary to describe such events without using words that connote emotion, such a lean description is not necessarily more accurate.”

Our cultural biases say that would cannot be quantified cannot be studied.  If it is not numerical than it is not science – an issue that affects everyone who wants to become a scientists and there are few who will challenge this orthodoxy.  The problem is that emotions are a range of sensations, feelings, responses, and reactions that vary with each person based on their chemistry and their personal experiences.  Trying to define emotions and create a starting point is one example of the difficulty.

“One psychologist compiled a list of 154 emotion names… Rene Descartes said there were six basic emotions: love, hate, astonishment, desire, joy, and sorrow.  Immanual Kant found five: love, hope, modesty, joy and sorrow.  William James defined four: love, fear grief and rage.  J. B. Watson postulated three basic emotions X, Y, Z (roughly equivalent to fear, anger and love). “

And just as in social Darwinism, science, like religion, can be used to justify existing bias – racism, social elitism…

“It was not so long ago that ethnologists thought that there were some cultures (obviously inferior) where the full range of Western emotions could not be expressed, and were probably not experienced)”

And of course we want to maintain the upper hand.  We thought animals could not use tools, but that has disappeared – species by species.  Then we said that they could not communicate (sure – all that sound in nature is just random) and of course we had Alex the Parrot and Koko the Ape show us that they could even use our contrived letters, computers, etc… So now we hope that they cannot feel because that would, again, allow us to feel superior.

“If feelings can cross cultures, it seems likely they can cross species.”

“Human beings presumably benefit from treating animals the way they do-hurting them, jailing them exploiting their labor, eating their bodies, gaping at them, and even owning them as signs of social status.  Any human being who has a choice does not want to be treated like this.”

“The philosopher Mary Midgley puts it: ‘The fact that some people are silly about animals cannot stop the topic being a serious one.  Animals are not just one of the things with which people amuse themselves, like chewing-gum and water-skis, they are the group to which people belong. We are not just rather like animals; we are animals.’  To act as if humans are a completely different order of beings from other animals ignores the fundamental reality.”

“A park warden reported coming across a herd with a female carrying a small calf [elephant] several days dead, which she placed on the ground whenever she ate or drank: she traveled very slowly and the rest of the elephants waited for her.  This suggests that animals, like people, act on feelings as such, rather than solely for the purpose of survival.”

“Orcas grow up to 23 feet long, weigh up to 9000 pounds, and roam hundreds of miles a day.  No cage and certainly not the swimming pools were they are confined in all oceanariums, could possibly provide satisgaction, let alone joy.  They are believed to have a life expectancy as long as our own.  Yet at Sea World, in San Diego, the oceanarium with the best track record for keeping orcas alive, they last an average of eleven years.”

Reading this book you are constantly amazed as the creativity displayed by the animals in the anecdotes and the range of emotions that are apparent unless you are trying to deny them.  But what is also apparent is the extreme cruelty that humans show in their “experiments”.  This is the same barbarity that has been exhibited throughout human history to slaves, serfs, people of other color and other beliefs.   It is the Nazi, the animal experimentation laboratories and throughout our history.

“Social play is not a valid category of behavior because it is so difficult to define”  so rather than study the complex we deny the emotions and try to shut up the “emotional” people who “anthropomorphize”.  In fact,  the worst act of anthropomorphizing is in the denying to other species the emotions that we arrogantly reserve for only our species (and only those who we deem advanced within our species).

“Alaskan Buffalo have been seen playing on ice.  One at a time starting from a ridge above a frozen lake, the buffalo charged down to the shore and plunged onto the ice, bracing their legs so that they spun across the ice, with their tails in the air.  As each buffalo skidded to a halt, it let out a lout bellow…then awkwardly picked its way back to shore to make another run.”

“In the fifteenth century, when giraffes were known in Europe as camelopards, Cosimo de’ Medici shut a giraffe in a pen with lions, bloodhounds, and fighting bulls to see which species was the most savage.  As Pope Pius II looked on, the lions and dogs dozed, the bulls quietly chewed their cuds, and the giraffe huddled against the fence shaking in fear.  These leaders of men were disappointed at the absence of bloodshed, and wondered why the animals were not more savage.”  So who in this scenario was savage?  Which species deserved to be the saint?  What is the excuse for humans who use their power of conversation and speech to deny emotion to other species?

Joseph Wood Krutch wrote: “Whoever listens to a bird song and says, I do not believe there is any joy in it,” has not proved anything about birds.  But he has revealed a good deal about himself.”

“Treating them [animals] as either machines or people denigrates them.  Acknowledgment of their emotional lives is the first step: understanding that their emotional lives are their own and not outs is second.”  “Human life cannot be understood without emotions.  To leave questions of animal emotion as forever unapproachable and imponderable is arbitrary intellectual helplessness.”

“In the end, when we wonder whether to ascribe an emotion to an animal, the question to ask is not, ‘Can we prove that another being feels this or any emotions?’ but rather, ‘Is there any reason to suppose that this species of animal does not feel this emotion?’”

Over the Edge, Greg Child

This is an intense story of kidnapping and courage, frustration, and international politics that begins with the kidnapping of four American climbers who were forced from their bivouac up a big wall in a famous climbing location in Kyrgyzstan.  It particularly pertinent with the recent release of the American hikers by ransoms (some call it bail) in Iran. 

Four young climbers saw only big cliffs and new routes.  They traveled to the mountains of central Asia in the former Soviet Union and the Yellow Wall in the Kara Su valley.  But Kyrgystan is not Yosemite and the people who wander the nether lands of this mountainous regions are Uzbeks, Tajiks, Afghans, Pakistans.  They are soldiers, innocent peasants, and Islamic terrorists.

They ignored the warnings and put themselves in an unimaginable danger.  Force by gun fire to come down from their ledge shelters on the big wall, the four climbers – 3 men and one woman – were face to face with IMU terrorists and they represented American Dollars.  Not long before the Japanese had paid a huge ransom so the precedent was in place.

Cold nights, rough terrain, and rough people.  They traveled as victims of Kidnap and saw battles and death along the route.  Eventually they escaped, they took action against the principals of two of the group who could not stand any violence and the result was a freedom that got them to the army and eventually home. 

They were left with the stress syndromes of combatives, but without the support system.   Then their story was told and a strange thing happened.  While some reveled in their escape, others decided to attack their story, to discredit the climbers, and somehow make sure that these four did not get additional respect from the world at large.  Jealousy and obsession were in the hearts and computers of their new “enemies” and I can only begin to imagine how disorienting it must be to survive something like this only to have your own climbing associates turn on you.

Wicked River the Mississippi, Lee Sandlin

This is a wonderful account of the river before 1882 when engineers began to reshape the wild river into a shipping canal.  It is about steamboats, river pirates, keelboats, canoes and the wrecks, boiler explosions, and pageantry of the river. 

This begins before the St Anthony Falls were changed in to a steel apron and lock s and dams and recalls floods, fires, and collisions on the water that are dramatic and colorful.  The term wicked river came from the Voyageurs and continued in use throughout the wild days.

Of course wicked became associated with the river side “bad parts of town”  that served the constant flotillas of settlers and commercial boats as well as the growing brothels from New Orleans to floating hostels.

Famous names like Mark Twain, Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and Abraham Lincoln have their place in the river lore and Vicksburg is a key southern city that fell to a prolonged siege that helped finish the civil war.  You can learn about river pirates, notorious gangs of thieves and murderers and the wild tent city revivals that literally drew 10,000 people in to the woods along with brothel tents to help relieve the tension for the converting zealots.

Sandlin does good research and is a good writer – I liked this line in the introduction, “On the maps in my schoolbooks it seemed to cut through the who of the Midwest like the dark central vein in a leaf…”

I learned many new things like New Orleans desire to declare itself a neutral city to maintain its commerce during the civil war – that didn’t work.  How poor Admiral Farragut was (like so many of the original northern generals) and how he could have hastened the end of the war if he had done what his successor did. 

Learn about legends and fill out your river lore.  It was weak on the northern river and the Indian history, but otherwise it was an excellent book.  For an excerpt:  http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307378514&view=excerpt

T is for Trespass

The continuing stories of Kinsey Milhone, private detective begins with the introduction of a new and dangerous person – Solona Rojas.  “During the years when Solana was growing up, her siblings had laid claim to all the obvious family roles: athlete, the soldier, the cut-up, the achiever, the drama queen, the hustler, the saint, and the jack of all trades.  What fell to her lot was to play the ne’er-do-well.”

Solona plays her part in the latest (not really – I am behind in this series that spins out too many books) and we get to spend more time with Kinsey and her life as a real private eye – yup the kind that delivers court orders and evictions rather than chasing down the most wanted. 

It is hard for me to imagine that I have read all the books in this series, but I have.  I loved A – G then there was a letdown until the last three.   We have now entered a phase where the personal life, the repetition of the job, and a few tasty new comers can spin a story that is fun and engrossing.

Let the old neighbor need a private nurse and the old neighborhood is invaded by a sadistic, evil woman who is almost more than Kinsey and friends can deal with.  I wish that had let her escape – she was a perfect Moriarity to her Holmes.  Cold, nasty, and planning ahead at least one more step than the lovable and lucky Millhone.

For those of us who are aging, it has the extra chill of showing our vulnerability within the system (such as it is.).

Under a Green Sky Peter Ward, Ph.D

Peter Ward, a geologist, in Washington is a dramatic writer who loves to take a Hunter Thompson approach to his story telling (he does allude to the gonzo journalist) and as a result he takes his science details and information and surrounds them with a cloak of storytelling that is enjoyable once you catch on to his style and perspective.  

For example: “The last rocky point, made up of several dozen of these couplets, was the most difficult of all to get over, for like the huge stratal sheet with the stairway, it was tilted about 60 degrees from horizontal, too steep to climb, too steep to safely slide down, and here there was no providential stairway built by obliging Basques.  Lowering ourselves hand over hand, the last 10 feet an ignominious slide into a cold tide pool at the bottom of the stratum, a now thoroughly wet duo at last stopped to admire the grandeur of what earlier geologists had aptly named Boundary Bay.  Huge walls on three sides enclosed the large bay with a flat, rocky bench about the size of a basketball court exposed at lowest tide, in the rear of the large box canyon, a strand completely water covered  at high tide.  It was like being in a huge cathedral where the roof and one wall had been taken off, the sheer wall-like cliffs rising a hundred feet or more above the small beach, each wall brightly colored as if painted by some giant.  The rocks to the south were a deep maroon in color, those to the north a brilliant white and pink striping.  And in the center of the back wall of the bay there was a meeting of the two different units, a sudden transition from maroon beds below to pink and white beds above, starting near the sea and then rising upward from the base of this canyon as the tilt of the beds carried this K-T boundary layer, one the year before discovered to be packed with all the hallmarks of the K-T impact itself, all save the diagnostic iridium originally Mexican inhabitants that were now on permanent vacation at this beach (and at all other K-T boundary sites as well as over the entire globe.)

This is a book that traces the causes of Earth’s dramatic extinctions and then expands the text to the threat of global climate change.  It is a compelling story and the connection with the near future is no stretch of the imagination.

I loved the expansion from the Cretaceous/Tertiary border and the asteroid/comet collision with Earth to the multiple other great extinctions.  When the giant craters were discovered and the evidence was in for the KT extinction there was a rush to tie extraterrestrial causes to other extinctions, but as the book takes you around the world to various rock outcrops we soon find the evidence to discount the extraterrestrial causes and find the potential lethal cause within our oceans as the currents and flows changed over time creating toxic seas that could burp poisonous gases like the dramatic Cameroon Lake killing in 1986. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,962228,00.html

In dives in the ocean and dives in the Jellyfish Lakes of Palau the author expands beyond the observations of rocks and fossils.  The jellyfish lakes are a perfect analogy to the potential for our oceans to become toxic and the combination of ocean potential and changes in climate become the cause for the non-KT extinctions and could be the potential for the next one too.

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/6474546http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/6474546

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhpaqFya2pg&feature=related