Rain Walks

This is a story from Paul Krafel that I think should be more widely known and celebrated.  Thank you, Paul.

Rain Walks

A simple play I’ve made hundreds of times exemplifies “every play is two plays.” High in the drainage, as runoff increases, the rising runoff begins overflowing its shallow channels, spreading out into easily overlooked overflow routes. Sometimes a rock lies in the overflow channel, obstructing how much of the runoff can flow that way. I lift the rock out of the channel so that more of the runoff can flow in this new direction (Play One). I then place that rock in the main channel so that it shunts more of the runoff towards the overflow channel (Play Two). 

This simple moving of the rock is two plays. The broader, slower overflow route receives more runoff because of the removal of the rock, and the deeper main channel receives less because of the new placement of that rock. Though much of the water still flows down the main channel, more is now flowing along the broader, slower overflow route.

Rising water has a distinctive appearance. Surface tension holds the water’s surface against plant stems and rock edges so that this ring of contact lags behind the rising level of the surrounding water. This creates a dimpled surface around each stem and rock sticking up out of the water. These dimpled surfaces sparkle with focused light. I can watch this dance of light advance with the increased flow down the overflow route.

Read more here...

Another interesting article by Paul here.  

Traditional Chinese Medicine

"The logic underlying Chinese medical theory - a logic that assumes that a part can be understood only in its relation to the whole -- can also be called synthetic or dialectical.

The character for Yin originally meant the shady side of a slope.  It is associated with such qualities as cold, rest, responsiveness, passivity, darkness, interior, downward, inward, decrease, satiation, tranquility, and quiescence.  It is the end, completion, and realized fruition.

The original meaning of Yang was the sunny side of a slope.  The term implies brightness, heat, stimulation, movement, activity, excitement, vigor, exterior, upward, outward, and increase.  It is arousal, beginning, and dynamic potential.  

All things have Yin and Yang aspects....and any Yin or Yang aspect can be further divided into Yin and Yang.  

Yin and Yang mutually create, control, and transform one another.  Although Yin and Yang can be distinguished, they cannot be separated.   Yin and Yang are always subtly supporting, repairing, and transforming into one another.  This constant transformation is the source of all change.  Organic transformation can occur harmoniously in the normal course of events or sudden ruptures can occur. If Yin and Yang are unbalanced for prolonged periods of time or in an extreme manner, the resulting transformation can be drastic.  

Lao Tzu says:  

In order to expand, it is necessary to first contract.  In order to stregthen, it is necessary to first weaken.  In order to create, it is necessary to first destroy.  In order to give, it is necessary to first take.

In Chinese thought, events and phenomena unfold through a kind of spontaneous cooperation, an inner dynamic in the nature of things.  The key word is Pattern - people and things behave in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions or impulses, but because their position in the cyclical universe and their endowment with intrinsic natures. 

The Chinese assume that the universe is continuously changing.  The cosmos itself is an integral whole, a web of interrelated things and events.  The desire for knowledge is the desire to understand the interrelationships or patterns within that web, and to become attuned to the unfolding dynamic.

A traditional Chinese landscape painting captures the essence of nature in balance and in flux.  The paiting is like the Taoist symbol, containing Yin and Yang in their proper proportions but constantly interacting and transforming into each other.  

The scene depicts a vast range of elements, from the towering mountain to the little trickling stream.  Nature is shown as a balance of the yielding Yin (foliage, water) and the unyielding Yang (rock, trees).  There are the dynamic (water, people) and the quiescent (mountains, houses); the slow (trees) and the fast (mist); the dark and the light; the solid and the liquid.  All things contain both Yin and Yang.  The water, for instance, is both yielding (Yin) and dynamic (Yang).

The picture is a totality, and each detail takes on meaning only as it participates in the whole.  The mountain is immense by virtue of its smaller foothills; the people are small by virtue of the vastness of nature.  All things are imbued with interactive qualities and dynamics in their relationships to the things around them.

The painting depicts a time and place that through their correspondence with the cosmos become timeless and placeless.  It rediscovers the elemental and continuous course of the cosmic pulsation through the figurative representation of a landscape...The tension created by the correlation between the lines and the washes, the visible and the invisible, fullness and emptiness, endows the landscape with a power to suggest more than the merely visible and open it to the life of the spirit. " 

(from p. 7-17 The Web That Has No Weaver by Ted Kaptchuk)

Xenotopias

We lack –we need—a term for those places where one experiences a transition from a known landscape into new country or another world: somewhere we feel and think significantly differently.

 I have for some time been imagining such transitions as ‘border crossings’. These borders do not correspond to national boundaries, and papers and documents are unrequired at them. Their traverse is generally unbiddable, and no reliable map exists of their routes and outlines. They exist even in familiar landscapes: there where you cross a certain watershed, treeline or snowline, or enter rain, storm, or mist, or pass from boulder clay onto sand, or chalk onto greenstone.

 Such moments are rites of passage that reconfigure local geographies, leaving known places outlandish or quickened, revealing continents within countries.

What might we call such incidents and instances – or, rather, how to describe the lands that are found beyond these frontiers? I suggest the term ‘Xenotopias’, perhaps, meaning ‘foreign places’ or ‘out-of-place places’, a term to complement our ‘utopias’ and our ‘dystopias’.

[A quotation from Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways]

Don't Spike Your Blood Sugar

There have been a number of scientific papers in the last couple years, and now a number of high-profile articles (like last week's Time Magazine article "Ending the War on Fat") that have found no correlation between fat -- even saturated fat -- and Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer, or heart disease. The idea that cholesterol and saturated fat are the cause of heart disease is no longer supported by the best available science.

However, there is still broad consensus among health professionals that we need to avoid processed, sugary, and high-glycemic foods. High-glycemic foods are energizing for an hour or two but then cause sleepiness and craving for more (usually high-glycemic) snack foods. These foods are dangerous because they raise blood sugar, leading to a crash afterwards, a "roller-coaster" blood sugar dynamic that promotes over-eating and a variety of diseases.

Gary Taubes, in Good Caloreis Bad Calories, explains how sugar metabolism makes you fat:

"Glycerol phosphate is produced from glucose when it is used for fuel in the fat calls and the liver, and it, too, can be burned as fuel in the cells. But glycerol phosphate is also an essential component of the process that binds three fatty acids into a triglyceride. It provides the glycerol molecule that links the fatty acids together. In other words, a product of carbohydrate metabolism --i.e. burning glucose for fuel-- is an essential component in the regulation of fat metabolism: storing fat in the fat tissue. In fact, the rate at which fatty acids are assembled into triglycerides, and so the rate at which fat accumulates in the fat tissue, depend primarily on the availability of glycerol phosphate. The more glucose that is transported into the fat cells and used to generate energy, the more glycerol phosphate will be produced. The the more glycerol phosphate produced, the more fatty acids will be assembled into triglycerides. Thus, anything that works to transport more glucose in the fat cells -- insulin, for example or rising blood sugar, will lead to the conversion of more fatty acids into triglycerides, and the storage of more calories as fat."

"So yes, dietary fat is responsible for fat accumulation, but it is carbohydrates that mediate the accumulation, and the energy balance of the body as a whole. Don't spike your blood sugar, and your body will continue burning fat, not storing it."

Scientific Statements Made by a Climate Change Skeptic

A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal concludes that "Climate Science Is Not Settled", contrary to activists' and scientists' claims that there is no longer even a debate.

The article, written by Steven Koonin, includes a number of interesting statements and is worth a read in its entirety. Unfortunately, responses to the article have not addressed many of his factual claims, so I wanted to list a few of them here.

Please feel free to comment or link to research that addresses or refutes these statements:

1) "For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere's natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences."

2) "But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available."

3) "Although the Earth's average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity."

4) "Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century."

5) "[these model discrepancies] are not "minor" issues to be "cleaned up" by further research. Rather, they are deficiencies that erode confidence in the computer projections."

An Important Point about Grazing-based Land Restoration

"Allan Savory's holistic resource management [was described] as a "promising option," even though there is no science to back up claims about intensive grazing schemes.  The truth is that grasslands are relatively arid environments, and livestock don't make the grass grow: rain does.  And rain doesn't follow the hoof."
--Jeff Burgess, reader response in the November/December 2013 Nature Conservancy magazine

Addendum:  read this comprehensive response to Allan Savory's claims, or this recent direct rebuttal:

The Savory Method can not green deserts or reverse climate change, Briske, David D., Bestelmeyer Brandon T., Brown Joel R.,Fuhlendorf Samuel D., and H. Polley Wayne , Rangelands, Volume 35, Issue 5, p.72-74, (2013)

and this follow-up:

Risk Assessment

Nuclear and chemical technologies (except for medicines) have been stigmatized by being perceived as entailing unnaturally great risks.

R. Gregory, J. Flynn, and P. Slovic, ‘‘Technological Stigma,’’ American Scientist 83, 220–223 (1995).

The social problem is compounded by the fact that we tend to manage our risks within an adversarial legal system that pits expert against expert, contradicting each other’s risk assessments and further destroying the public trust. The young science of risk assessment is too fragile, too indirect, to prevail in such a hostile atmosphere. Scientic analysis of risks cannot allay
our fears of low-probability catastrophes or delayed cancers unless we trust the system. In the absence of trust, science (and risk assessment) can only feed public concerns, by uncovering more bad news. A single study demonstrating an association between exposure to chemicals or radiation and some adverse health effect cannot easily be offset by numerous studies failing to and such an association.

Flannery's Theory of Ecosystem Nutrient Cycling

Tim Flannery's exposition of fire- vs herbivore-dominated ecosystems:

"Large herbivores return nutrients to the soil quickly and with a bonus (nitrogen fertilizer). Fire returns nutrients to the soil only after a long period--and then at a considerable loss. As a result, fire and soils act to promote each other. Together, they can produce an ecosystem which is spiraling ever downwards as nutrients become fewer while fires become more important.

The result of this cycle is an accelerated selection for scleromorph plants, which can survive in nutrient-poor soils. A self-reinforcing cycle of soil impoverishment, soil drying and soil exposure is then initiated. Much water is lost through runoff in such situations before it can be returned to the skies through transpiration. This lowers effective rainfall. Degradation can go so far that even if fire can be stopped, the soil is so impoverished that it can no longer support the kinds of plants needed to feed large herbivores. Thus, the change can be made almost irreversible.

A canopy of broad-leaved 'dry' rainforest species, such as survives in tiny fire refuges across the north of Australia today, could, if they were more widespread, enhance rainfall by up to 60 percent and push rainfall much further south. This is because the plants and the soils they protect retard the runoff of water. Through the leaves in their dense canopy they release vast amounts of the trapped water as moisture into the atmosphere. During the wet season, the winds blow in from the coast. As a result, the moisture transpired by the plants is formed into clouds and blown southwards to fall again as rain.

Most of northern Australia is covered with eucalypt woodlands today. After rain, the water rains rapidly away, for the plants and thin soil cannot hold it. The release of moisture to the atmosphere through the narrow eucalypt leaves is insufficient to form significant clouds. As a consequence, the rainfall gradient between the coast and inland is incredibly steep in northern Australia."

The diagram at the beginning shows three types of soil: Mor, Moder, and Mull, which range from slow/intermittent decomposition (Mor-fire) to fast/continuous decomposition (Mull-earthworms).

New Mexico: Wolves, Telescopes, and Antelope

Nuevo Mexico lindo y Querido
Si me llego a morir navegando
Estira tus ala a traeme aqui
New Mexico beautiful and loved
If I should die while traveling

Strech out your wings and bring me back

EF Schumacher on "Progress"

"He called his talk 'The Insufficiency of Liberalism' and it was an exposition of what he termed the “three stages of development”. The first great leap, he said, was made when man moved from stage one of primitive religion to stage two of scientific realism. This was the stage modern man tended to be at. A few move to the third stage in which one can find in the lapses and deficiencies in science and realism, and that there is something beyond fact and science. He called this stage three. The problem, he explained, was that stage one and stage three appear to be exactly the same to people stuck in stage two. Consequently, those in stage three are seen as having had some sort of a relapse into childish nonsense. Only those in stage three, can understand the differences between stage one and stage three."

Homeopathy

"The underpinning of the editorial content of the Lancet as it relates to homeopathy relies on a quaint old idea from the nineteenth century that the ONLY way that the property of water can be affected or changed is by incorporating foreign molecules. This is the Avogadro-limit high-school level chemistry argument. To a materials scientist this notion is absurd, since the fundamental paradigm of materials-science is that the structure-property relationship is the basic determinant of everything. It is a fact that the structure of water and therefore the informational content of water can be altered in infinite ways".

Dr. Rustum Roy

An Island to Oneself

"The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs."
Suvarov, Cook Islands, South Pacific

"Transition"

Transition
Let us now turn to psychological facts. At night all leaping fountains speak with a louder tone; my soul, too is a leaping fountain says Zarathustra. Into the night life seems to be exiled --these are the famous words from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams--into the night life seems to be exiled what once ruled during the day. This sentence contains the entire modern psychology. Its great idea is the stratification of the psyche, the geological principle. The soul has its origin and is built in strata, and what we learned before in the organic field apropos of the construction of the big brain from the anatomic-evolutionary standpoint of banished aeons, is revealed by psychosis as a still-existing reality. We carry the ancient peoples in our souls and when the later acquired reason is relaxed, as in the dream or in drunkenness, they emerge with their rites, their prelogical mentality, and grant us an hour of mystic participation.

When the logical superstructure is loosened, when the scalp, tired of the onslaught of the prelunar states, opens the frontiers of consciousness about which there is always a struggle, then there appears the old, the unconscious, in the magical transmutation and identification of the "I" in the early experience of the everywhere and the eternal. The hereditary partimony of the middle brain lies still deeper and is eager for expression: if the covering is destroyed in the psychosis there emerges, driven upward by the primal instincts, from out the primitive-schizoid substructure, the gigantic archaic instinctive "I" unfolding itself limitlessly through the tattered psychological subject.


Quoted in "Plexus" the 2nd volume of the Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller

Choose Life

"Two paths lie before us. One leads to death, the other to life.

If we choose the first path—then we in effect become the allies of death, and in everything we do our attachment to life will weaken: our vision, blinded to the abyss that has opened at our feet, will dim and grow confused; our will, discouraged by the thought of trying to build on such a precarious foundation, will slacken; and we will sink into stupefaction, as though we were gradually weaning ourselves from life in preparation for the end.

On the other hand, if we reject our doom, and bend our efforts toward survival-then the anesthetic fog will lift: our vision, no longer straining not to see the obvious, will sharpen; our will, finding secure ground to build on, will be restored; and we will take full and clear possession of life again. "


Schell, Jonathan. Fate of the Earth.

Raw Food and Raw Education -- Common Cause

Quote:

Formal education resembles agriculture. Agriculture greatly reduced the diversity of the human diet. Before agriculture, a person might have eaten 80 different foods each week; after agriculture began, far fewer. Agriculture caused a big decline in health because its fundamental assumption – it is okay to eat a small number of foods – is false or at least very hard to reconcile with nutritional requirements. Likewise, formal education (classrooms, lectures, textbooks, etc.) surely reduced the diversity of what was learned, how it was taught, and how learning was measured.

From Diversity in Learning
Seth Roberts in Ideas That Matter Quarterly, a publication honoring the civic and theoretical work of Jane Jacobs.