Category Archives: Nature

Skunk Cabbage

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If you live up in the Northeastern U.S., and get out into the country at all, you may have noticed that the skunk cabbage has begun to leaf out. It’s one of the earliest woodland plants to contribute any serious green, and always looks so bright and fresh this time of year.

Skunk cabbage is as fascinating as it is purty. Damn Interesting has an article up now by Cynthia Wood about how skunk cabbage blossoms exhibit thermogenesis — they are able to generate heat. It’s thought that the heat helps attract insect pollinators.

Here’s another article on the same phenomenon, with more details on other members of the arum family.

And here’s a third article with more general information on skunk cabbage, including a bit about how it has been used as a medicinal herb and, by Native Americans, as a food plant (it needs to be dried to be rendered edible, otherwise it’s so high in calcium oxalate that it would raise blisters in your mouth!)

Trees

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Gorgeous spring day today. I went for a walk with my daughter and nephew through the woodlot behind my parents.’ It’s full of tall ash trees like these, that sway and rattle when the wind blows.

ash trees

On Tulips

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If you’ve ever planted tulip bulbs, you’ve probably noticed that unlike daffodils, tulips tend not to come back stronger year after year.

Constance Casey, writing in Slate, explains why.

She’s talking about hybrid tulips, of course. I have some species tulips planted in my front garden and they’re amazing. I’ll post a photo when they bloom. But of course they are shorter and less showy than the hybrids.

Hyperthymestic syndrome

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There’s only one person known to have it.

Her symptoms? A preternatural memory.

Give her any date, and she can

recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred . . .

[She] remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.

She’s not an idiot savant. She’s a “fully functioning person.”

Now–isn’t this typical!–she’s been kidnapped by scientists and is being held in a lab where they’re preparing to run a series of MRIs . . . ha ha ha, just kidding about the kidnapping part. She’s volunteered to be studied. We guess.

(I wonder if her mother ate a lot of eggs.)

Hyperthymestic syndrome

“Secular sermons”

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In the New Statesman, John Gray critiques both Wolpert (Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast–I blogged about that book yesterday) and Daniel C Dennett, Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon.

From ape to . . . theologist

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At the London Times, John Carey reviews Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert.

Given the growing muscularity of both neuroscience and evolutionary biology, it’s no surprise that some would reduce spirituality to a product of biological evolution. From the article:

Surveys suggest that religious people are happier, more optimistic, less prone to strokes and high blood pressure, more able to cope with life’s problems and less fearful of death than the irreligious. It follows that belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary advantage, and our ability to have such beliefs must, Wolpert deduces, have been partly determined by our genes.

Carey writes that the book has a chicken/egg conundrum; Wolpert fails to clarify which came first: the “causal thinking” that allowed us to become sophisticated tool-makers, or was it tool-making that led to our forebears selecting for causal thinking? Says Carey, “He can be found saying both things in different places . . .”

But there’s a parallel difficulty that Carey doesn’t call out, but is implied in the sentences that follow the excerpt above:

Religious people might rejoice at that, concluding that God has wired us up to believe in him. But for Wolpert, the wiring is no more divine than our guts or toenails, or any other part of our evolved anatomy.

No more divine — or no less?

Food and conscience

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I buy and eat organic almost exclusively, and have been for about 20 years now. I will do without, in other areas, in order to be able to afford it.

I considered getting into organic growing back in the 80s, when organic was just catching on.

My new novel’s protagonist has chucked everything to start over as an organic farmer.

So yeah, I support the organic food paradigm. But it doesn’t surprise me that as a social experiment, it’s gotten a little shady around the edges.

In Slate, the aptly named Field Maloney looks at how Whole Foods plays loose with its “why organic” in-store spin and writes

When the Department of Agriculture established the guidelines for organic food in 1990, it blew a huge opportunity. The USDA—under heavy agribusiness lobbying—adopted an abstract set of restrictions for organic agriculture and left “local” out of the formula. What passes for organic farming today has strayed far from what the shaggy utopians who got the movement going back in the ’60s and ’70s had in mind.

Well I was sitting in the living rooms of those shaggy utopians. Their biggest worry: if they didn’t bring in the feds, agribusiness would hijack the “organic” moniker and corrupt it.

They gambled that federal control would protect their business model, and ceded control.

C’est la vie.

It’s naive to think that attempts to script virtuous outcomes won’t, from time to time, lead to less-than-virtuous results. (For another example, look at the questions raised about Fair Trade coffee in this Reason article).

Yet Maloney’s observations are weak for being overly narrow. In Rochester, for instance, people are banding together in cooperatives for the sole reason of giving direct patronage to local organic growers (email me, btw, if you’re from around here and want to know more). Unless we’re an anomaly, which I doubt, that’s happening all over.

Furthermore, as much fun as it is to decry that “five or six big California farms dominate the whole industry,” that’s still a lot of acreage that isn’t getting pesticides dumped on it regularly.

Not to mention the fact that the organics mindset has dragged even conventional farming partway to the dance, ushering in more responsible use of pesticide (e.g. integrated pest management, where you spray only when you actually observe pest damage, instead of prophylacticly).

Bottom line: we’re still better off with organic growing that without it.