Steep Gulch outside Leadville, CO

I started down from Hope Mountain in a light rain -- so light I could still look about normally. The Gentians were closed against the storm, though. The face of a deer caught the corner of my eye, and the recognition became an involuntary turn of the head, in time to see her do the same.

Down, down through the mats and then thickets and then forests of Engelmann spruce, as if dull silver-evergreen tips remember dry copper-containing ore. Where the spruce grow tall they let the mat juniper have the understory. And now mats of strawberries...I noticed a tiny wild strawberry sitting on the lip of the mountain squirrel's burrow; ripening in the sun or dropped from his paws when my oversize shadow darkened his door? Without hesitation I picked it up and ate it in two heavenly bites. No regret.

Two butterflies were fluttering over and on one another, surely engendering piles of caterpillars in the underbrush.

Contingency and Control in the Laboratory

The Comparative Psychology of Learning: the Selective Association Principle and Some Problems with "General" Laws of Learning. Bolles (ed) 1973.

"A rat on a treadmill learns i f it runs when it hears a beep it can avoid an electric shock. The rat can also learn to turn to avoid a shock. But rats cannot learn to rear up on their hind legs to avoid being shocked. The rat's brain cannot learn to avoid danger using a naturally exploratory behavior."

In the same vein, you also can't train animals to get a reward by moving away from a stimulus that predicts reward. Pavlovian conditioning trumps Skinnerian. (personal communication, Dr. Insel) Accepting the full import of this work entails abandoning general intelligence. Without general learning, we can question the adaptability of man to the modern social-technological milieu. It appears we can learn some things, but for others we will continue to make the same mistake over and over again.

...which reminds me of my current philosophy of science, expressed by E.O Wilson:

"Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't the love and pleasure will have been enough."

The idiosyncrasies of evolutionary contingency make controlled experiments difficult to interpret, in the sense that it may be hard to extrapolate "logically" from one model (animal) or trait to another system. The general laws we attempt to find by working in simplified laboratory settings may not even exist, but if we don't "love the organism for itself" we may never know it. This is part of the reason I'm leaving laboratory science. Under this interpretation, contrary to current fashion (and dogma), the profligate wonders of Natural History become the supreme biological science.

Zeitgeist: nobody believes this story

w90a8TYT8)(*#)%(its like somekind of voodoo science fiction

horror story - Weird Circumstances and Religious Visions

too...evolving...raw,fresh,feral, the long drawn out death of

a mountain lion, the dry hills, Backbone of a continent,

pinyon, piece-meal, shattered. Here, too, squat in stone

towers (albeit 1000 A.D.), blasted sinfilled cities, share in

the earthern pizza oven with all the rainbows of biodynamic

generalities. DOING GOOD WORK< SURROUNDED BY DUST up to our

eyebrows, machettes and slingshot, spear, and motorcycle;

running on high-octane raw milk and butter, bjorkian

wonderlusting up the Backbone through the second Eden of

permaculture Santa Fe, Taos, Durango, Montrose, Hotchkiss skip

and jump to Rocky Mountain Nat'l Park.

in the bathrooms the scientists all clasp their hands before

the mirror
in prayer that the autofaucets will turn on
in the cubicicle the woman next to me is selling her

breastmilk
a machine is suckling now

so i quit the frankenstein
Department of Defense
and return to the land:
I'm sleeping in a hammock
the earth owns
a small strawbale casita, in the big pantano cuerca, canelo,

rillito

watermelon pineapple & soy sauce
Hawaiin-brought macadamia nuts
heavy odor of centronella
i kneel and pass fingers through dirt
fingers through dirt
everything made of dirt
made of dirt
I pass fingers through the world

to worship technology but still doubt
understand the mistake in what's
given

i eat these cumquat preserves w/
(local) (raw) honey and butter
i combat global warming
i grow fat while it grows thin

fuck man its total war
HELICOPTERS everywhere, every 5 minutes
La Frontera, The Border
they're strafing villages 100 kilometers from here

awww man we're totally fucked
its so hot here you want to fuck yourself
the 9-to-5ers must be unhappy everywhere
none of them ever stops trying
finding work - playing hot potato

I'm playing bongos on the street
I've cured global warming
the green spreads out from my
huts and tents
the whirlwind
a moon-burn
making good choices
and opening lucky meetings

Breath. Deep. Ecology.

The lights of Tucson turn black sky blue on the horizon,

obliterating the stars there and I think of the numberless salmon who, in their ardor, turned the waters pink,

so thick you could walk across, from bank to bank, on their backs (source: probably apocryphal story believed by Lewis and Clark).

But we embraced progress and prosperity
and built the dams that killed the illimitable salmon,
numberless as the stars.

In my career I see reflected
this history of society embracing technology,
perhaps to prove to ourselves that we can.
I've done genetic engineering and brain surgery,
great endeavors that now seem hollow.

In their stead, I would
Embrace the wild uncertainty of nature....

Is this Permaculture?

Walls, moats, barracades, embedded tiles, ocotillo branches, chicken wire, hog wire, blade-wire, possibly even barbed wire somewhere in there all thrown together ... still doesn't keep the rabbits out. What to do?