Weeds

There was a podcast on Science Friday that originally aired on July 15th of 2011. It was about Weeds and Invasive Species. I listened to it again around the end of December 2011 and put an outline here on my blog, and now am sitting down to complete the entry in May of 2012.

The subject was weeds. This is usually a plant, and sometimes an invasive species. Simply put, it is a species that is in a place you don't want it. By this definition, you might include some animals, although you wouldn't call them weeds. Many people would treat them the same, though. If it's something you don't want, many people try to eradicate them.

The discussion between the two guests, one a Professor of Biology, and the other an author, was interesting and struck a chord with me. I've often been a fan of plants that other people are always trying to kill (animals, too, for that matter). I've had a hard time whenever I tried to explain the virtues of a species to someone who had a deep hatred for whatever it was. I often wondered where they got their idea and how you could ever change their minds.

At the core of my belief is the thought that biodiversity is important. Not just the liberal activist, knee jerk recitation of "biodiversity" as a way of sounding hip and trendy without really thinking about it. I've always thought that life on Earth forms a web, a rich tapestry made of many ingredients. When you start knocking out certain strands of the web or certain patterns or colors of the tapestry, you run the risk of making the structure fall apart and causing it to stop functioning. You never know what other species might be depending on that particular plant or animal, so it's best not to make an arbitrary decision that it's "undesirable" and try to wipe it out. If you find out later that you needed it, it could be too late. Nature evolved in equilibrium with each species as part of the mix, it's insane to think that removing some of them at random won't have an effect on the rest.

Another thing I've always suspected is that there will be value in most species, if studied close enough. This is beyond the way that this species impacts others, or the exact role it plays in nature. I believe that most species have one or two molecular tricks that their DNA perform that we can learn from. It seems that each time we really study a life form in detail, we find something biochemically about it that is unique. We will need all these tricks if we are to survive in a resource starved and overpopulated world. The obvious example of this is the search for medicines and other pharmaceuticals in plants, but what if the thing you find is an adhesive or a natural plastic? It's still valuable.

One of the interesting points the podcast guests made was that many species tend to rapidly colonize and thrive in environments where we have disturbed the soil. There are natural disturbances, volcanic eruptions, landslides, erosion or deposition of soils, and these events all are followed with a series of plant species that come in to perform specific tasks. The first colonizers anchor the soil and provide ground cover and deposit nutrients when they die and decay. Eventually, a series of species take their place in the recovery of a disturbed area, sometimes crowding out the early weedlike species, sometimes living side by side. Ultimately, a dominant species like trees come to take over the area, forming a mature and stable landscape rich with niches for other species to inhabit.

The other interesting aspect of many plants that are considered weeds is that they could have a beneficial function that is not obvious. Some "weeds" condition the soil. I recently discussed this with a friend. He will have to regrade and reseed a recently completed yard because of buried septic and ground source heating systems. I suggested clover to nitrogenate the soil, but he was concerned that he would not be able to wipe it out once it was established. I suggested he let it stay to feed the honeybees, which are having a hard enough time struggling for survival.

We often become dismayed when a nonnative species takes over an ecosystem. I'm not sure we can be certain that this is a bad thing. The Great Lakes were so polluted that they were a tragedy just a few years back. With the invasion and profusion of the tiny zebra muscle, the lakes are now so clear that you can see down for 30 to 40 feet in some places. It just sits there with it's little shell open filtering the water. They determined that cattails remove heavy metals from marshlands. Some people have considered actively using them for remediation of polluted waterways. I saw a road crew spraying some kind of herbicide on roadside cattails just yesterday.

Another point that the guests made is that you might as well find a way to live with unwanted species, as it is virtually impossible to eradicate some. I know most people have heard that dandelions can be used to be in salads, so that is a direct use (which I have often thought would be to my benefit if civilization fell, I'd be able to eat the greens out of my yard). But there are other issues, such as the Asian Carp, an highly invasive species that it spreading in the rivers outside of Chicago. Apparently, these fish could be harvested without limits and would still thrive, and there is supposed to be a huge market for their meat in China. I heard that the Kudzu grass that is taking over in Australia is causing some to consider importing elephants from Africa to come and graze it back down to manageable proportions.

I liked the way the podcast guests described weeds. One quoted Ralph Waldo Emmerson, who said a weed is simply a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. Another noted that a common definition of a weed is a plant in the wrong place. He then asked, "What is the right place? Who makes the decision?" He noted that these answers are entirely subjective. A weed is a plant that gets in the way of your plans. Why not change your plans?

Their discussion of Invasive Species was interesting. They noted that the northern parts of our continent were scoured clear of all life during the ice ages. That means that everything we see is new as of 25,000 years ago. So invasive and non-native classifications beg the question of how do you declare the cutoff date for when such a distinction began. Most people do not know that many state flowers and insects are not native. Vermont has the Purple Clover and the Honeybee as the state flower and insect, when neither were here when the state was colonized by Europeans. For many people non-native species have always been there and are not considered an invader.

One of the guests remarked that all weeds are trying to do is green over empty ground, and for that, we should give them a second chance. A caller in to the program tried to counter that many native species are dangerous, poison ivy, trumpet vine, and the plant responsible for milk sickness. The author remarked that the berries of poison ivy are the most important food of Chickadees. He proposed that we need to take a planet centric view of all species and try to answer how they fit into the whole environment.

There was an interesting discussion of perception. The guest said that we should not embrace the native versus non-native difference, which is exceedingly emotional for some people. People like to dislike certain species. When altruism evolved, along with that was a distrust of people outside your own group. Maybe people were predisposed to have an us versus them viewpoint on the world. We just fall into this trap when it comes to species, we embrace the natives and we love to hate the non-native. It's a natural instinct of humanity, but not necessarily a useful one.

Another more recent podcast that I listened to says that we absorb and hold all kinds of micro RNAs from plants. They speculate that this enables us to make proteins with bigger building blocks and makes for an efficient metabolism, but also that we may have co-evolved with certain plant species whose chemical contribution gave us an edge. It's not just raw building blocks or minerals or other simple chemicals that are part of a good diet, it's part of the unique substance of a particular plant that can be quickly used by our bodies. Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out what there is out there before we arbitrarily wipe it out?

[NOTE: the field of yellow flowers that was thick with bees and butterflies was sprayed with a herbicide shortly after the pictures were taken.]

Stupid Voters

I was listening to Dan Carlin's latest Common Sense episode 203 about "Upgrading the Electorate". He talked about the way most people are ignorant of public affairs and current events and how this makes us very poor voters. We do not feel in the least bit hesitant in voting on subjects that we know absolutely nothing about.

He sited an author in the podcast, Rick Shenkman, who wrote the book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter. He summarized the types of ignorance as follows:

1. Sheer Ignorance - no knowledge of the facts
2. Negligence - disinclination to seek facts
3. Wooden Headedness - people that want to believe only what they already believe
4. Short Sightedness - inability to see long term consequences of current events
5. Bone Headedness - simplicity and gullibility, biases

It's interesting because it runs the gambit from inattention, through people being manipulated or pre-disposed in certain ways, to people actively selecting their own viewpoints despite any outside influence or information. Dan Carlin says he thinks that it's not a matter of people being stupid, as in incapable of learning, as it is that they are not interested. My thought is that there is a portion of those not interested because it's too much work to figure things out. This is the appeal of Talk Radio. People figure things out for you.

I was also watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and he showed a summary of Republican speakers who felt quite comfortable vilifying liberals in one voice and playing themselves off as the victims in the next. It seemed odd to have someone simultaneously bullying and browbeating their enemy while claiming they were being taken advantage of or being treated unfairly. This kind of speech strikes me as strange because is it self apparent that it is inconsistent and cannot be correct, yet this does not stop people from spewing nonsense and expecting everyone to lap it up as the gospel.

Our Founding Fathers believed that the average person should not be allowed to vote, only the educated elite (this was a phrase that was so much more applicable in that era than today, yet you hear it so much today). Back around the time of the American Revolution, being well read was much more common in the upper classes. People of means took great pains to educated their children, most particularly their eldest sons, in order to prepare them to manage estates or take their place in the leadership of society. While the printing press was spreading literacy and information at a much greater rate than in times past throughout history, there were still practical bars to acquiring the reasoning and analytical skills to discern the facts from the sea of raw information. Books were expensive, and newspapers were prone to opinion and exaggeration. Many of the laboring class were illiterate and uninterested in changing that status. Women were considered beneath consideration, too, and not expected to be interested in reading and literature. The Founding Fathers were well-steeped in a Classical Education that included Latin and Greek and the history of the great Roman and Greek civilizations that spawned all higher theories on science and society. The Founding Fathers were concerned, too, that the passions of the crowd could sway the people and move them to enact laws that were not well reasoned for the long term, or select leaders that were not deliberate thinkers, but passionate and poorly directed hot-heads.

The Republican primaries are in full swing now, so the brand of idealism that we see being shared most extensively right now is Conservatism. I am biased on that score, because I am prone to paint conservatives as Religious people that see the science of evolution and geology as an enemy, or greedy people that see the science of climate change as a barrier to making money the old fashion way and not worrying about what the impact on the planet is. Michelle Bachman in particular strikes me as a candidate that is willfully ignorant of a great deal of reality, yet strikes a chord in some people that gives gravitas to her ridiculous statements like the idea that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation because some voter in a meet and greet line told her this (and because she already believed that nasty things happen to people that get vaccines).

It is easy to start thinking that we almost need people to take a test that proves that they are at least paying attention to current events before they vote, and better yet to take a test on basic government functions and U.S. history before they are eligible to vote. I've often wondered how many U.S. citizens would be unable to pass a U.S. citizenship/naturalization test (see http://www.sporcle.com/games/lilchocdonut/uscitz to see if you could pass the test). The reason we don't do this is because our countries laws reflect the belief that everyone is entitled to a vote. Never mind that this was never true in history, all the way back to Greek and Roman times, the Democracies that we were supposed to be emulating. Originally, military service or property ownership was the minimum requirement for voter eligibility. We've been expanding those rights for some time, until now we have universal suffrage and an 18 year old voting age. Tests to qualify voters have a bad history, from post Civil War times when they were used to exclude black voters, so there is justified resistance to such a system. There is also a sense that rich or influential people might mass power in our system, but if we are to be truly democratic, a majority of the voters can assert their rights or displace a powerful usurper.

In any case, it feels as if this inattention of voters is not a good thing. It corrodes democracy by making it easier for elected officials to take over power and make changes to society against the popular will simply because people are not paying attention or not understanding what happens. While I myself have been guilty from time to time of thinking, "people that don't know what is going on should not be allowed to vote!" I think it is more fair to say that I wish more people understood what is going on.

Igneous Rocks

We were in Colorado on vacation, enjoying the mountains and it got me wondering about geology and wishing I knew more. While we were in a small hotel, we were watching Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader. There was a question about rocks formed by extreme heat. The contestant answered that this rock was called lava, which made us laugh, and then admit that we did not know what it should have been, which was igneous.

As soon as I got home, I listened to more of a podcast of a Geology class from the School of Mines in Golden. He explained how these rocks form from flowing lava.

Then him mentioned Ship Rock, which we saw at the tail end of the vacation. It is the remaining core of an old volcano, which when you know that this is how it is formed only enhances the way it looks. The same can be said of Devil's Tower, which we saw on vacation about 4 or 5 years ago. That flow was slower and more laminar, and all the outside of the core is all eroded around. Ships Rock has lots of lateral flows, so it is very spiky and interestingly shaped.

I'm now totally into igneous rocks, particularly the cores of old volcanoes.

Ghost Town Construction

I went to Colorado recently and visited the Animas Forks region to see some ghost towns. Thoughts of how these communities were built and lived in inspired me to consider more deeply if it would be possible to learn how the buildings were actually built.

It's something that I do already, looking at buildings and trying to guess their age based on construction techniques. This is usually buildings or factories in cities, and since they are usually large with complex construction, there are a lot of clues. Large buildings had more of a chance of following standardized building procedures, sometimes building codes.

Buildings and houses in the mountains would be another thing entirely. Throughout most of the mining era, these communities were thrown together in some very harsh environments, far away from normal supply lines, and probably without any kind of code or building inspector. I noticed that some houses and buildings were sound, but others were not so sound. These communities were filled with buildings that are no longer standing. In one place, Capital City just west of Lake City, only one building survives. It was easy for me to visualize that as the mine played out and people started leaving the area, the last ones to stay were probably tearing the other houses down to use as firewood.

One thing I know about building in places other than the mountain is that you normally position the building on a foundation that goes below the freeze line so that it will not be subject to freeze thaw cycles and the instability and thrusting that comes with freezing soil.

The houses in Animas Forks were all built on grade without any basement. The ground they were built on was mostly rocky, either large rocks or solid shelves. This would have been an extreme challenge to anchor a building to. The other thing that I kept thinking about was how deep the snow would get in the winter. One storyboard mentioned that many of the homes were destroyed by avalanches, so how do you protect against that?

The whole line of thought made me think that it would be a great book idea - mining town building construction. You could have a fantastic time searching out the structures: locate them, analyze them, and map them. While it would be fantastic to have access to building records and find actual Bills of Materials, I believe that research would indicate that there are no records left of how things were constructed. It would have to be done by first hand inspection.

I was daydreaming while I was in Animas Forks about what I would do if I could go back in time. I figured their life in a mining camp was pretty harsh, so it would be good to make a bath house and water works. You could probably use solar energy to heat the water. It would not be hard to improve on the available construction materials. So much could be done with just the mining tailings to make sturdy foundations. I looked at the insides of the remaining houses in Animas Forks and saw what I thought at first was wallpaper, but later determined was material covering the walls to keep the cold out. It would not be that hard to construct avalanche splitters uphill from a house, and it would be very useful to use the stone to put the house into the side of a hill so that you would have some protection and heat from the ground. You'd have to lay in an enormous amount of food to stay there year-round. I imagine there comes a time in November or December where the roads close and do not re-open until spring.

I don't think I'm built of the sterner stuff it would take to stay over the winter up in the mountains. I do like the idea of poking around in those old mountain towns throughout a pleasant summer. Now all I need is an advance by a publisher and a winning lottery ticket and I'm there.