Cancer is Beautiful with an Asterisk

A few days ago, I was reading the blog Question Everything by George Mobus and had a revelation. He had a great thought provoking post as to whether or not humans and civilization do truly act like a cancer. He made the argument that when you look at all we have done in the arts and science and the fact that human population rates drop with affluence, it is not fair to compare us with cancer.

I enjoyed the argument for the fact that I like to see my dominant paradigms flipped on their heads just to try them on for size. In doing so, however, I was reminded of a seemingly repressed memory. I was in college and in need of some money, so I applied for a job in a lab doing work on a cancer project. I was not going to be the brains. I am always the last picked for that job at recess. My work consisted of going into a lab for 4 hours three days a week and processing about 80 cancer samples with control nearby tissue per day. The one thing that I can say from a personal standpoint is that: Cancer is Beautiful. There were blue ones with red coral like projections running through them, every shade of pink and red surrounding little red dots, and some that looked like a green truffle with black webbing. The control samples were almost always some shade of brown.

Why the Asterisk?

The first reason is that it was the most soul sucking lab I have ever been in. The main lab had five chemical or laminar flow hoods, which made standing in the room sound like working near an airport. Further, the risks of working with unknown cancer samples compelled me to wear full cheap surgical protective gear, which was not very comfortable. It was the antithesis of an isolation/deprivation chamber. In that space, thoughts in my head went to die. The only solace was in starring at the novelty of the coloration and shape of the latest cancer samples.

The second reason is that I am constantly reminded when thinking about Emergy to define the scale and system boundaries that are pertinent to the current topic. In this case, I had no access to the people or organs that these cancers were taken from. It was so easy to see the beauty in the cancer, but hard to see the beauty in a one centimeter section of liver or kidney control tissue. The cancer was scaled perfectly to the sample collection constraints, but the control tissue and people were not.

Why does human activity so resemble cancer?

Both humans, cancers, and all life use information systems. This means they evolve information to utilize excess energy. One finding of the study was that cancer had greater information per cell than control tissues, whether measured in genomic DNA or RNA transcripts. Humans create extra information cycles from fossil fuels, while cancer uses excess energy from the body. They both change their modalities when energy resources get scarce. I believe that before cancers completely destroy a tissue or human being, they are probably busily evolving to stop the damage they are doing. There is even some evidence that 35% of breast cancer and maybe up to 95% of prostate cancer can resolve themselves. And they are both able to create beauty. For cancer beauty in the shapes and colors they can make, while humans make it in the arts and science.

One aspect of humans that sets us apart is that we have the ability to create models of the future and act on them. It does not seem likely that many other organisms, cancer, or DNA has this ability. For them it is a trial by fire, for us we should be able to predict the fire and be proactive. But even with this special ability, the similarities still are nagging. It may be that the ability to create accurate models and act on them is too great for our species on a societal level. If this is true, then we may be stuck using a second aspect that sets us apart; the ability to prevent depreciation of learned information.

The Emergist Does the Movies

If you have not read the previous post, The Over-Growth of Control Circuits and the Rise of Autism, then this may or may not make sense.  About half way through writing the post, I came up with a great idea for a movie.  It goes something like this:

Humans are wasting a huge amount of energy by using high quality forms when lower quality forms would suffice, so much so that by the end of the second decade of the 21st century they have almost disorganized the entire biosphere.  But the wasted energy accidentally orders a different life form based on different chemistry, like silicon.  This other organism wakes up to realize nearly all the good energy sources have been used and that in order to buy time to come up with a plan for its survival, it must convince humanity to continue wasting energy and use up the rest of the Emergy store of the biosphere, so that the new organism doesn’t use higher quality energy than is necessary and thereby disorganize itself.

I then thought to myself who could I cast to play the human protagonist.  Maybe Keanu Reeves.  Wait?….Damn it!…..I promised myself I would not ever reference The Matrix on this blog, but I honestly thought I had come up with an original movie plot for about 5 minutes.

Emergist script rewrite:

Original: Morpheous: ” We don’t know who struck first, us or them.  But it was us who scorched the sky.”

 Rewrite: Morpheous: “We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But they forced us to even scorch the sky.”

 

The Overgrowth of Control Circuits and the Rise in Autism

Key Questions:

-What are the reasons civilization maybe more prone to frequent collapse? Cancer? Complexity? Something else?

-What do models of autism tell us about the “disorder”?

-How should/has humanity combat/ed autism?

H/T to Mary and Jan for helping me parse this post out. I don’t think they necessarily agree with this idea, but their resistance helped make it much better. Further, I apologize if anyone takes issue with my usage of the term pathology or autism. They just happen to be most succinct words I can think of for this topic.

Emergist definition:

Autism-/’ô – tizem/-Using high quality energy to do a task that can be performed with lower quality energy to gain control by simplifying a subsystem. The resulting effect is waste, which feeds back to disorder the overall complexity of a system.

Cancer and Civilization

Odum explains cancer well in EPS (pg 58-59), so this will be just a brief overview. Cancer from a systems perspective is when one component/organism/cell in a system is severed from its control circuits and uses another component of the system as “excess resource.” In ecosystems, this generally happens when either an organism is introduced from a different ecosystem into a new ecosystem (zebra mussels), organisms controlling another organism are removed (wolves removed from Yellow Stone controlling mouse populations), or energy flows become excessive leading to overgrowth (fertilizers released into a stream causing algal blooms). There is no doubt that humans and civilization have been engaged in cancerous activities as we have used other planetary subsystems as excess resources.

Complexity

Some authors have tried to put forth complexity as some kind of problem that civilizations run into that create their downfalls. In self-organized biological systems, ordered complexity arises time and time again after massive extinction events, which suggests complexity is evolutionarily advantageous and a consequence of energy flows. While it is true that complexity is not sufficient for maximum long-term empower or energy flows, it is absolutely necessary. Civilizations are also self-organizing systems and therefore benefit and depend on ordered complexity for long term survival. Further when looked at from a total systems perspective, civilizations that survive crisis run to complexity when confronted with problems, such as environmental degradation (Imperial China or Edo Japan) or hostile neighbors (any insurgency past/present). The reason that complexity is often misunderstood by anthropologists, archeologists, and historians is that their system boundaries stop at the energies and functions controlled by humans. In EPS there is a great table demonstrating this very fact:

Item	Transformity (SECAL/CAL)	Emergy Store (SECAL)
Infrastructure of Civilization	5.2 E6	3.8 E26
Soil*	1.2 E6	1.87 E27
Learned Information	7.7 E7	3.8 E28
Human Dreams**	9 E12	5.6 E32
Genetic Information	3.8 E18	1.1 E34

Table Plagiarized from EPS pg 113 *the previous post: Fossil Fuel Based Agricultural Civilizations was trying to explain human use of the emergy store in soil **Not found in EPS

The above table says the following: when ordered complexity is understood by either transformity (amount of energy turned into higher quality forms) or emergy store (the amount of ordered energy embedded in a system), ecosystem information on regional and global levels are multiple orders of magnitude higher in ordered complexity than anything humans have learned (on the table above) or have even dreamed of (a bad emergy joke that our dreams are often beyond what can be learned). In simple comparative terms, nature is complex and civilizations are not yet.

Not Seeing the Forest from the Cultivated Field

An often cited example of humans “adding” complexity is the human penchant for replacing forests with cultivated fields. The anthropocentric viewer will often presuppose that a cultivated field is more complex than a forest, because of all the off-site functions and energies are carried out by humans. While the same viewer thinks the forest is simple because it must rely on on-site solar and geological energy inputs. The ultimate idea embedded within the anthropocentric view is that current/recent energy use determines the complexity of the system. On a universal scale, energy certainly is a measure of complexity and order, but within each system a specific form or concentration of energy can be either ordering or disordering, ex. the energy that orders stars and galaxies, like a supernova or black hole, is not necessarily ordering to carbon based life forms. The truth is that a lot of human technologies are simplifying in nature. While Odum describes this simplification process of agriculture in-depth in EPS (pg 179-183), he most succinctly describes it in Odum and Odum, 2003: “Networks may be simplified, causing energy to concentrate in fewer pathways.” Put another way, agriculture concentrates energy for only human use by removing complexity.

Over-growth of Control Circuits and the Withering of Complexity

Note: Most of this section is from memory of a talk I heard about 6 years ago and I was able to fact check about 60% of it. I am not sure if the other percentage is unpublished or a figment of my imagination.

Mouse models have recently shed some light on the pathology of autism. A researcher, Prof. Lousi Parada, has found different gene knockouts in mice that act very much like humans with autism. The mutant mice will generally sit independently far away from the other mice in a cage and rarely interact or make social calls. Prof Parada and his group tracked the behavior down to the part of the brain called the dentate gyrus. The dentate gyrus is part of the hippocampus and is responsible for controlling stress responses, novelty seeking, and memory formation. They noticed that the dentate gyrus of mutant mice had an over proliferation of neuronal cells and also dendrites that projected from the dentate gyrus were elongated and projected further into other regions of the brain. Interestingly, the proliferation of the dentate gyrus was not significantly different from normal mice until 4-6 weeks, which would be about 2-6 years old in humans, and maybe consistent with some findings of the disease progression in humans. 

Many of the dentate gyrus functions are modulating or controlling in nature. For instance, the size of the dentate gyrus would suggest that it is not the site for memories because it is not large enough to encode the necessary information, but oblating the dentate gyrus disrupts long-term memory formation. For the sake of illustration, the brain will be demarcated into the the brain stem and cerebellum, the limbic system (site of the dentate gyrus) and the neocortex. These three brain areas were developed into the triune brain theory, which although no longer scientifically supported, will be used as a proxy for transformity and ordered complexity, since Odum did not leave a table of transformity for different areas of the brain in EPS. The important point is that the brain is most likely hierarchical in nature and some areas are involved in bulk processing and information storage (neocortex in mammals), while other areas are involved controlling where and how information is processed (hippocampous and the dentate gyrus). In figure 1, the different areas of the brain have been color coded and then placed into the triune hierarchy. In figure 1, the normal hierarchy of the brain is in the middle and the hierarchy of the autistic brain is on the right. The pathology of the autistic brain arises because of the over-growth of the dentate gyrus in the limbic system, which in real terms is an over-growth of controlling circuits/neurons in number and length. The dentate gyrus with high transformity in the autistic brain participates in functions that would be better left to the neocortex with a lower level of transformity, which has the effect of feeding back to impair certain social aspects in affected individuals.

Identifying Autism in Society 

My proposed definition for autism differs from cancer in the fact that autism does not use other parts of the hierarchy as “excess resource”, but instead replaces these parts with simplified independent analogs to natural systems. Compounding the problem of simplification is that Odum noticed that when high quality energy was used to do processes that could be done with lower quality energy this creates waste. This waste then feeds back into the system and creates disorder in the system. When humans/civilizations simplify systems and then use high quality energies to do processes that can be done with lower quality energies, this lowers complexity both below and above on the energy hierarchy (figure 2).  This creates a situation whereby near-term collapse is almost certain.Modified from Odum 1996.

Examples of Societal Autism (wasteful=using high quality energy to perform a task with the ultimate effect of creating disorder):

Human excrement: My brother-in-law called me on the phone about 4 months ago. This is that conversation:“You wouldn’t believe this. I was listening to NPR and some foundation had a prize for the person who could come up with the best way to deal with human excrement in third world countries. Guess what type of system won the prize.”-brother-in-law.           “Humanure!-me              “I know. Right! But no. Na-No-Technology!”-brother-in-law *Utilizing bacteria and leaf litter is less wasteful than manufacturing some small particle in a factory with a huge energy and land footprint.

Agriculture and reproduction: I was watching talking political heads on TV and one said that the U.S. congressional republican stance amounted to, “Every ejaculation deserves a name.” At which point I began laughing and my wife happened to asked me, “Are we still saving paw paw seeds from the fruit?” To which I responded, “Yes. Every paw paw seed deserves to be grafted to a named variety!” While I was being silly, my uncles’ farming equipment today is fitted with GPS and utilizes weather radar information, topography information, and can even take into account farmer’s willing drought risk assessments to determine seed planting rate and row distance and “proper” amount of chemical application when needed . I imagine it is only a hop away from being able to geo-cache every seed, so that investment banks can sell tranches of seed risk. *Fukuoka showed that broad casting seed in a relatively diverse plot can achieve a high rate of return without large scale waste. Industrial agriculture almost does not care about complex interactions of indigenous species or using them as excess resource, but wishes only to create its own wasteful independent system using high quality energy inputs.

Modern Warfare: Reported lately in the news’ press is the fact that the President of the U.S. might be engaged in the execution of drone strikes. This bypasses almost the entire command structure of the military. And the question must be asked: Does the president (supposedly the highest transformity citizen in the U.S.) really change the coarse of the war on terror? Again, a case of simplifying the entire command and control structure of the military and wasting energy.

The Fox, Raccoon, Possum, or Hawk that Kills a Chicken: Often when I tell someone that I have been a horrible chicken keeper and have losses to any of these predators, the response from others revolves around some version of shooting a gun or setting a trap. My mind then wanders to thinking about how I then become responsible for controlling the mouse population. And then since I am then now killing mice, I become responsible for controlling whatever mice eat. And then since….. Or instead I learned to let my chickens out after 11 a.m. and I have yet to loose a chicken (knock on wood). The choice is to kill predators or live in a complex world. Though in a high population density situation, one might try to go down the path of simplification.

Conclusion

The point of this post is to create a way of understanding a certain aspect of human civilization through the lens of autism, much like Odum and many other ecologists have understood over-growth through the lens of cancer.  Agriculture and fossil fuels have expanded human abilities of creating control and independent systems (figure 3), but when we use these energies to perform functions that would best be left to other organisms then we can disrupt the complex biological system that we ultimately depend on to live.  It is not to say that humans cannot use agriculture and fossil fuels or that using them appropriately will lead to “sustainability.” The point is to say that humans should use agriculture and fossil fuels appropriately in the context of supporting complex systems at every level of the hierarchy and not try to create independent less tested energy dependent systems.  If humanity works to accomplish this then it will not be subject to collapse as frequently or severely.  Humans must step back and evaluate where to act in order to support or increase system complexity. Technologies like Fukuoka-Bonfils Ag, forest gardening, coppicing, and water storage in swales might be possible ways to conserve resources at the same time that we out-compete energy flows coming from independent simplified technologies and thereby shift to long-term complex systems.

Individual Action:

-Try to get a humanure system going.

-Try to leave as many subsystems intact when interacting.

Next Time: I gas up the fossil fuel time machine and things get weird. By the way, I will be watching my favorite time travel movie, Primer, at least once to get me into the proper mindset before writing the post.  

Fighting the Ahistorical and UnEmpowering Point of View

Key Questions:

-Why did humans take so long to evolve? Is human level intelligence maladaptive?

-What effect does each level of the hierarchy in biological systems have on system energy utilization?

-How do/can humans help the empower of the planetary biological system?

This post is meant to compliment the next post, so I am going to try to get the other one out at a quicker pace than my normal 2-3 weeks. I apologize for the figures, sometimes what I have in my head is better than the execution.

Evolution and Intelligence in the Prison of Historical Contingency

Historical contingency is a key aspect of evolution. It is the fact that evolution is constrained by all sorts of things that happened in the past. My favorite hypothesis and example of historical contingency is that: the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs led the survival of charismatic megafauna that mostly had very efficient breathing apparati. Birds, which evolved for flight, survived because they have amazingly efficient breathing for the respiration necessary for the action of flight and perhaps for high altitude flying. Today’s extant mammals most likely come from a group that lived underground and needed more efficient breathing and because they had more efficient breathing were able to weather the cataclysm. To accomplish this, we are decedents of a group of mammals all missing the bottom half of our rib cages. The beauty of historical contingencies are that the mutations necessary may not be immediately adaptive or competitive to the current entrenched set of adaptations, but win out in a new environment.

This brings me to one of my favorite experiments of all time. In an experiment that spanned 30 years, Blount et al showed evidence for historical contingency at the molecular level. They started with 12 cultures of E coli in a minimal glucose medium with excess citrate. The initial stock of E coli did not have the ability to use citrate as an energy source. After 20 some years and 31,500 generations, one of the twelve colonies began utilizing the citrate and population and diversity drastically increased in that one culture. They could trace back the event to some seemingly unadaptive mutation between generations 15,000 and 20,000 by rerunning the experiment on frozen cultures. The fact that the scientists did not see the ability to utilize citrate develop in a week or in all twelve populations after some ridiculous amount of generations does not mean that utilizing citrate was maladaptive for these E coli; Just that some quark in history was necessary to bridge gap.

Historical contingency understood in this manner may be one explanation of why human type intelligence takes so long to arise. Intelligence seems to be reaching a high level in few species, such as whales and dolphins, but they may reach a plateau due to historical contingencies. Humans may have hit the evolutionary jackpot by not only to have developed high intelligence, but the necessary secondary traits such as: efficient breathing (from the massive extinction event above) and a nibble opposable thumb.

The Empowerment of the Energy Hierarchy

The development of the biological energy hierarchy happens, like most energy hierarchies, from the bottom up. First a system for capturing some energy source self organizes, like photosynthesis (primary producers). It takes time for this first rung to organize, become resilient, and expand. Next another system (primary consumers) develops to utilize the energies from the system below. Again it takes time for this system to organize, become resilient, and expand. The higher an individual organism is on the hierarchy, the smaller in number and turnover time but greater in territory, scale, and influence (Figure 1). This process is iterative and creates multiple smaller levels with greater scale, territory, and influence one on top of the other until there isn’t enough energy to create another level or it is beyond our purview to understand it. One of the important aspects is that each level maximizes empower. This means that each level reinforces the other levels utilization of energy. No individual level is more important than another. The lower levels feed higher levels large power circuits, while the higher levels feed back smaller but of higher quality control circuits. It is imaginable that with each new level of the hierarchy added that the levels below become more efficient and pervasive, such that more energy flow and utilization is accomplished by each additional level in the hierarchy. (Figure 2)

Humans are at the top of the biological hierarchy and perhaps are a new rung. It takes time for the hierarchy and complexity to develop. EO Wilson suggests that after large extinction events it takes 10 million years to recover complexity and near Armageddon events much longer. It is foolish to believe that human level intelligence just pops up all the time. Further hampering the development of organisms like humans is that they take a long time to organize and be tested, since organisms higher in the hierarchy are fewer and have slower turnover time. The development of the biological hierarchy really is a form of historical contingency that furthers the explanation of why human level intelligence takes so much time to develop and is not maladaptive.

The seeming maladaptiveness of humanity’s intelligence might also be a function of the organization and testing stage of a new rung on the biological hierarchy. It appears for a time we were playing our role at the top quite nicely. It may only take more time and testing to get to a point where humans play the role of maximizing the long-term empower of the biosphere like every other organism and we can laugh at the thought of the maladaptiveness of intelligence.

The Emergist has a Dream

The dream is that humanity values and reinforces all levels of the hierarchy equally. From this dream, I have three wishes. The first is that we utilize fossil fuels in a manner that maximizes the long-term empower, transformity and emergy store in the biosphere. In this way, humanity can work to create more space for humans in a post fossil fuel world (figure 3 Wish a). The second linked to the first is that we create space for other organisms on our rung or higher on the hierarchy. This is kind of like in the book Ishmael where Daniel Quinn suggests humanity should step back from the abyss and welcomes other intelligences (figure 3 Wish b).  And finally, that we somehow help push the long-term survival of the complexity life on earth into the future 20 or 100 million years.  Prepare life in some fashion for the inevitable day when another super continent forms and the sun is emitting too much energy for carbon based chemistry. My only thoughts would be to endow or spread plants in very distant future (200 million years) with a method to control their albedo. Something a kin to what aspens may already do, but on a planetary scale. Odum seemed dead set against geoengineering, but I think he could forgive my indiscretion at the end of time.  Though we may have a lot of time to ponder my dream.

Individual Action:

-Be a steward of the biosphere

-Work to create and preserve more climax environments

Next Time: The Overgrowth of Control Circuits and the Rise of Autism (I have a need to get back to my darker side.)

Fossil Fuel Based Agricultural Empires

Key Questions:

-What energy were agricultural empires, like the Romans, using?

-What are some historic responses to peak soil?

-What are the keys to a positive response to living in a future without fossil fuels?

The Ground Beneath Civilizations’ Feet

The key to sustaining human life in most of the civilizations throughout history has rested upon the ability to produce a steady supply of crops from agricultural fields. Crops grow in soil that is made of different size rock particles and mixed with decomposed plant and animal organic matter. Small rock particles, clay, and organic matter function to hold nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, phosphate, and calcium, and water through ionic bonds. The organic matter, rock particles, and clay act as a recycling mechanism and trade nutrients back and forth with plants as they grow and die back (Figure 1).  Without sufficient amounts of nutrients or water crops become difficult to grow.

While sufficient organic matter is made relatively quickly by plants, small rock particles or silt, clay, and soil nutrients are replaced much more slowly. Small rock particles, clay and soil nutrients are created by many different mechanisms. The dominant mechanisms for forming these soil constituents are through periodic geological processes, weathering of on-site parent rock, and water and wind deposition of off-site soils. While geological processes, like glacier movement and large ocean height changes, are important to understanding virgin soil formation, they are events that are neither presently occurring on timescales nor in places to be pertinent to understanding the long-term fates of agricultural civilizations. Weathering of parent rock occurs in a bottom-up manner (figure 2, left). The soil forms as the symbiosis of plant roots and fungi exude acidic compounds to break down parent rock, which forms rock particles, clay, and nutrients. Weathering occurs very quickly in shallow soils and begins to slow as the soil horizon becomes deeper. Soil can also be brought in through water movement and wind from other sites, where soil was previously formed by one of the other two soil forming processes. The final depth of a soil is determined by the equilibrium of soil deposition and the erosion of soil from the site. The rate of soil deposition approximates something to figure 2 right. Virgin soils that are over 2 meters deep can take periods of time close to that of other non-renewable resources to form because soil deposition slows with depth (Table Below).

Fossil Resource	Time to Form
Oil	10 million years +
Coal	1 million years +
Soil (2m profile)	100,000-1 million years
Fossil Aquifers	1,000-100,000 years
Peat (2m profile)	1,000-10,000 years

Agriculture as Prelude to Strip Mining

The main idea of agriculture is to convert land into people and power. A relatively easy way to accomplish this is to use pioneer plants, like pulses, that store large amounts of carbohydrates and quickly uptake nutrients into their seeds. Additionally, the seed heads can be easily stored, transported, and processed to make food where necessary to maintain a civilization. A key innovation in agriculture is the plow. Civilizations from 1000 BC-1000 AD would use a small single headed plow powered by either human or animal labor and double plowed by plowing once in each direction. Plowing serves two functions. The land is cleared of competing species, which allows for cultivated species to gather more sunlight and water. The second function is to disturb the soil such that some of the stable organic matter is exposed and decomposes. When the negatively charged stable organic matter that was holding onto the positively charged nutrients decomposes, the nutrients are released unbound into the soil. The plants are now able to use less energy to overcome the free energy barrier to pump nutrients into roots. The energy not used in nutrient uptake can instead be put into plant growth and seed formation. Used by both the Greek and Egyptian civilizations, the Romans borrowed their agricultural technologies and coupled it with aqueduct systems. The combination of agriculture and high water usage allowed for Rome to pump carbohydrates and nutrients from fields to cities and armies and then into the Mediterranean Sea or Atlantic Ocean in a single direction without choking on their wastes. While plumbing may have be heralded by our elementary and high school history teachers, it is the last insidious step for complete civilization mining of soils.

The Green Revolution as Prelude to Fracking

Today, global civilization uses nearly the same technologies as the Romans, but with a twist. The plow is no longer able to give plants access to free nutrients. The soils have been completely washed of the nutrients plants need to grow. To remedy this situation, the Green Revolution was born. The revolution in the Green Revolution is to dump massive amounts of unbound nutrients into the soils. The plants certainly uptake some of the nutrients, but many go into the ground water and ocean where organisms proliferate and create dead zones. The soil is now a sink for nutrients instead of the source of nutrients. Our food is now a sink for energy instead of a source of energy.

40 Centuries of Comparative Drudgery: A Positive Response

The beauty of the Roman Empire technology at its height was the massive amount of power brought to bare against anyone that dared to question their hegemony. The dark side of the Roman Empire and other agricultural civilizations was that European soil was turned into “the skeleton of a sick man” (Plato) and the Middle East and Northern Africa became deserts. Asian societies were at first engaged in a similar process as the Romans. The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean empires, however, would all prevent complete collapse by stopping empire expansion and creating a large scale economy in human excrement and hence an economy in soil nutrient recycling. The striking aspect of 40 Centuries of Farming is the massive job of having to haul human excrement out of cities and villages everyday and then back to fields where they had to then be applied onto the fields with more intensive labor. These civilizations stopped the one way agricultural carbohydrate and nutrient pump at the cost of having to engage their economies into recycling their wastes on a scale nearly unrivaled in history. Recycling significantly reduces the power of any process. Conventional agriculture cuts off the endogenous recycling of soils and native organisms and gains power. Civilizations use the first 2 meters of fossil soil to gain power and then have the choice of drudgery in recycling and maintaining the last hundred centimeters of renewable soil or oblivion.

Going to the Source: A Positive Response

The mountains are an interesting area in soil formation. The erosion rate is high because of steep slopes and high winds (Figure 3). The Inca Civilization and Seep Holtzer did not run from this, but embraced it. With great erosion also comes great soil formation. Mountains are always weathering and forming soil at a high rate, since the soil profile is shallow. Also the mountains are a large source of nutrients and minerals because of the newly exposed bed rock. Utilizing terraces to catch soil in regions of high soil formation can be very powerful for a civilization. The historical record of the Incan empire’s vast scale and large welfare state is clear evidence to this power.

Bonfils-Fukuoka Farming: A Positive Response

Fukuoka developed a method of rice farming in Japan in response to modern agriculture, best described in The Natural Way of Farming (I think a more enjoyable read than the One Straw Revolution). The important points of his method are that rice is planted onto ground that is constantly covered with other plants and organisms and never tilled with the plow. Constant ground cover prevents soil erosion by wind and water and keeps nutrients cycling in the soil. Further, fungi left intact by not plowing and applying pesticides and herbicides have the ability to amplify the root network of rice to draw nutrients from a larger area of soil. This symbiosis of plant and fungus also works to make the plow unnecessary by releasing nutrients locked in rock. Fukuoka estimates there were enough nutrients left in his soil for 12000 years of farming with his method, while most civilizations struggle to make it 1000 years. Marc Bonfils took Fukuoka’s method and applied it to wheat, rye and barley in France. It is described well in the publication The Harmonious Wheatsmith.

Forest Gardening: A Positive Response

Perennial plant based agriculture has begun to catch on in some circles, but not all perennials are created equal. Trees and grasses make symbiotic relationships with different types of fungi, ectomycorrhiza for trees and arbscular for grasses. Trees with ectomycorrhiza can weather rock and draw nutrients out of base rock 10X faster than grasses with arbscular fungi. The reason is that trees form a closer symbiosis with fungi and share energy in a more intimate way (symbiosis might be a future topic, if I can wrap my head around it in an emergy way). Trees also dissipate energy from rain and wind further from soil and protect it from erosion forces. If we remember from Figure 1 that soil deposition is a function of weathering minus erosion, then trees will build soil faster and be the basis for civilization when fossil fuels are unable to pump nutrients into the soil. It is therefore no coincidence that China, Japan, Korea, Tuscany, European countries of the Middle Ages, Seep Holtzer and Bonfils all used trees in their climax phases. We should start now by utilizing trees in a mid-succession forest stage to provide our “food, fiber, fuel, fodder, fun, and pharmaceuticals” (Dave Jacke).

The Ugly, The Bad, and The Good

The Ugly is that most virgin empire building soils are long gone. They are not recoverable in neither human nor civilization time frames. The Bad is that fossil fuels in all forms are reaching their limits. There won’t be energy to keep the Green Revolution going and feeding 7-9 billion people. The Good is that there are positive responses that don’t include the ability to create large waste based empires, since the fossil fuels and virgin soils are gone. China, Japan, and the Incas around the middle of the second millennium may represent a vision of the future. They were able to build large cities, which are important for maximizing civilization power. They were unfortunately beat out by Europeans using coal and oil and may have in a weird way been ahead of their time.

Next Time: Fighting the Ahistorical and UnEmpowering Point of View

Poultry Versus Emergist

Key Questions:

-What kind of poultry should I choose?

-What are the benefits of different types of chickens?

-What are some tricks to protect storages?

This post is about my first year keeping chickens and geese. My knowledge is not very extensive, but I am trying to move from an exploratory phase into something more serious like breeding/improving a specific variety and thought it might help to write it all down. I hope the story is not too dry and hopefully will get to an emergy understanding about keeping poultry in a energy restricted future.

Like a Chicken with It’s Head Cut Off

My life as a chicken owner began about a month after I moved into my current residence. My brother-in-law was nice enough to bring over three 4-5 month old brown sussex chickens, which are supposed to be a great dual breed for both eggs and meat. The property, in which I now reside made me indebted to a large distant bank, but on the upside came with a rather nice chicken coop and a fenced in pig yard. So I took the chickens and threw them into the small already constructed coop with a small fenced in chicken run. I let them out daily to free range and all was well. The hens, about a month after coming to live with me, began to lay 2-3 eggs a day. Having read a few books on chickens and becoming smitten with the idea of moving them around to control insect populations and grass height, I decided to get electric poultry netting. I built an A-frame chicken coop with nesting boxes and four roosting bars, which left ample room for expansion of the flock.

My brother-in-law and sister, being awesome people, ordered a set of 25 more brown sussex chickens for my birthday. I followed all that I had read on raising chicks and had one loss of the 26 sent to me. Then at about 6 weeks a problem presented itself, the chicks were too large for their chick raising area, but too small to be kept behind the electric poultry netting. One of the electric netting test chicks escaped recapture and came back about a week later. I thought to myself, “This is great. The predator population can’t be that bad, if a chick could survive a week out there with no protection.” The chicks were all put into the chicken coop that was formerly used by the older 3 sussex chickens. There they lived without incident for about 6 weeks. Then tragedy struck. All 25 chicks were dispatched in one night. The only evidence that chicks had ever been there were a few wings. The problem arose from the fact that the enclosed chicken run had been staked down with plastic tent stakes and was further exacerbated by the chicks refusal to go into the chicken coop at night. They would sit in one corner of the chicken run every night, which was the exact corner that a fox (?) came into take them away.

Being late in the season, the hatchery that shipped the brown sussex was out of them till next year. Depressed and desperate, I went for the 50 chick special deal. The special deal consists of whatever left over chickens they have on hand after filling the other orders. While not something that I thought would be ideal, it did help my state of mind and again I was desperate in that consumerist kind of way that buying more can only fulfill. To prevent a rerun of the first try at raising chicks, I switched over to using chicken tractors (picture below) inside of electric netting.

The Question of Return

One of the most troubling things about raising any animal, especially poultry, is that they generally require external feed. This feed contains a lot of energy both physically and embodied (all the energy used to fertilize, plant, mine minerals, and ship the bagged feed). Laying chickens generally eat about 80 calories per day and if we add in all the energy spent on fertilizer it might be reasonable to expect 240-800 calories used per day to keep them alive. When assessing the different chicken varieties, the thing that stuck out as most important is that the chicken doesn’t prematurely die before its end use because of the rather high caloric cost to get them to useful size. For meat birds not dying prematurely is about 8-16 weeks and eat a total of 12000-24,000 calories depending on variety and for egg layers there is no cut off for when they are allowed to die and eat about 15,000 calories before they start to lay. The main problem I encountered was keeping them alive during the winter from predators, such as hawks and foxes. During the winter, I moved them from the electric netting into the non-mobile coop already constructed on the property which I reinforced by burying a hardware cloth a foot underground and let them free range in the adjacent woods during the day. The lack of a constant predator deterrent and winter induced hunger in the predator population led to an increase in losses. I have noticed that letting them out of the coop later in the day at 11 A.M. seems to reduce losses. In EPS, Odum suggests that in the future livestock may have to fend for themselves. I don’t think poultry in my climate (zone 7) could fend for themselves, but maybe ones that can better supply for their needs and resist predator pressures might possibly have a place in our futures.

Different Breeds: Worst to Best

Cornish Cross (Meat)- Only two of the five birds survived to 8 weeks. One died within 2 weeks of receiving and the other two died at 5-6 weeks during a hot spell. The two that did survive and were processed looked much like the big grocery store bought chicken. Considering 3/5 died and when they were alive preferred to be positioned between the water and food hoppers, these are great for converting feed (fossil fuels) to meat, but horrible from an emergetic standpoint and have little to no future in an energy limited world.

White Polish (Show?)-Received 2 and both were killed by hawks. I really enjoyed this bird and it was fun watching them run around. Their problem is that they are small and their head feathers block their vision making them hawk food.

White and Black Cochins (Show/Meat?)-This variety is rather large looking and slow moving bird. One of the three was lost to a hawk. The other 2 have stayed alive by being very broody and never straying far from the coop. Not coincidentally, the black cochin was attacked and died in front of the coop door. Egg size averaged 50 mL.

Rhode Island Red (Egg Laying/Dual)-These have the largest of eggs out of the birds ranked at about 65 mL. Two out of three died due to predation. One to a hawk attack and another to a fox attack. It could just be bad luck, but I also ranked them lower because they seem smaller than speckled sussex.

Brown Sussex (Dual)-Egg size is about 55 mL. These are slightly older than the rest, so egg size might not be a fair comparison. One died from a hawk attack, but have been around for a much longer time than the rest.

Modern BB Game Birds (Show?)-I have seen them 3 times in the act of being attacked by a hawk. All three times, they survived to live another day. Their eggs are smallest of the birds evaluated at 47.5 mL. Though the egg size does not seem drastically different, they are not as consistent layers and the other breeds’ eggs may continue to get larger while the game birds’ eggs might be limited by physiology. I ranked them highest because of their amazing ability to survive. Their small size may have led to the increase in attacks, but may have decreased attacks on the other chicken types. Recently, one of the four I received stopped roosting in the coop at night. I see her some mornings before I let the rest of the chickens out for the day. This could be a positive, if she comes home one day with a clutch of chicks.

Trialed 

*Australorps (Dual Purpose)-Only received a single female. She survived a hawk attack, which left a tale tell hole in her back. It seems to be healing nicely. Egg size is similar to brown sussex.

*Light Brahmas-Only received a single female. Acts a lot like other dual purpoase though slightly larger.

Roosters

Being such a weird mix of birds, picking out the roosters when they were young was not easy. I tried to prepare as many of them before moving the flock into the winter coop as possible, but realized in a short time that I had six roosters in the coop. Six roosters to the original 17 hens was very disruptive. The hens would spread out in all directions to prevent being harassed from the roosters. I prepared four of the roosters, which left me with a Modern BB Game Bird and a Dominique. I saw both the Modern BB Game Bird and Dominique wrestle and survive a hawk attack. The Modern BB Game Bird actually was on top of the hawk when I ran outside after hearing chicken distress calls. The Dominique, on the other hand, hurt a leg badly and died 10 days later.

Goosey Goosey Gander

Chickens are great at eating herbs and clover, but tend to skip over all but the most tender of grasses. I ordered 10 Chinese White Geese for grass control. This breed of geese are supposed to lay by volume an equivalent amount of egg to chickens though the number of eggs they lay a year is less and more focused in the spring and early summer. Since they are so hardy, I have left them out in the electric netting all winter. The biggest pain I have is bringing them food and water after all the grass dried up and water hose froze. One trick has been to put one of their water containers under their roofed but open sided shelter. Just blocking the path to the night sky keeps the storage of heat in the water from escaping and hence the water freezing for all but 7-10 days this year. One negative of geese is that they are really loud at about 4 A.M. now that it is mating season. Another is that once grasses go dormant, they are just as dependent upon feed as chickens.

Mothers Don’t Let Emergists Run Their Own Power Grids

I did lose two geese when the solar powered fence charger stopped working properly. The charge was enough to keep predators out, but the geese covered in their comforter worthy insulating feathers started to stick their necks out the netting holes. This made the geese heads like little goose popsicles for some predator. I sent back in the unit thinking it was faulty. I was told that the battery on the system only has a 3 month life and it had out lived its usefulness. I did the math of a 30 dollar battery 4 times a year and quickly bought a few extension cords. Though in a total antithetical move to what I just got through saying, I am going to put a solar electric fence around some bee hives. I am told these kind of 3-6 wire fences don’t use as much electricity and a car battery should last three to five years. I may prove to be a slow learner on this one.

Wrapping Up This Egg Roll/Individual Action

-Leave the foxes and hawks (federally protected) alone. We have a choice between foxes or Lyme’s disease due to increased mouse populations. One “problem” kills a few poultry, the other makes humans miserable. I am going to get more into control circuits and how they should be left to function in a future post.

Hawk Attack Wound

Fox Coming Back for More

Fox Attach Scene

-Try to avoid running a power grid, especially when the time you run an electricity surplus (daytime) is the opposite of when you most need it (night when predators are out).

-Keep a rooster or two, which protect the flock and warn you of danger.

-Based on the above assessment, I am going to raise brown sussex. I figure while we have access to fossil fuels, I might as well make use of it. The Modern BB Game Hens though are not as bad as I originally thought they would be in terms of egg laying nor body size and the increased survival rate makes them a great choice for the future.

Next Time: The Roman Empire Running on Fossil Fuels

Our Humpty Dumpty Communities

Key Questions:

-What are the energetics historically of a functional human community?

-Are/How are homicide rates lower than historical norms in the absence of functional communities?

-What are the markers of community’s death?

Scales and Energetics of Human Communities

Human interactions can range from an individual ostensibly fending for themselves to today’s extreme of a hyper-connected global system. The key to understanding the formation of these different states is that they reflect the self organization of people based on the size of incoming flows of energy. Looking at figure 1, the different scales of human interactions have been broken down into five states though more may exist. There is a hierarchical nature to the different stages. The smallest state, the individual, that requires the least amount of energy flow to exist can be found in different forms at all higher states of human organization, but the largest state, the nation state, cannot be found when there is only enough energy for the individual state. Though not exact, it appears that each state of human organization requires approximately a three fold increase in energy flow per capita.

Figure 1

Figure 2

For most of human evolutionary history (1 million-12,000 years ago) flows of energy to individuals has been relatively modest compared to today’s levels. Humans evolved in an environment using about 5,000 calories in the form of food, clothing, and shelter. 5,000 calories is only enough energy to support a hierarchy consisting of the bottom two levels and to a lesser extent the third level of the societal hierarchy shown below. This means that from an evolutionary standpoint, humans are optimized to fit into a community consisting of individuals and centered around the extended family unit. As humans acquired more energy from their environments, higher levels of organization were added on top of the individual and family units. Each successive level of organization creates new controlling energies, known as control circuits, that take the form of governing bodies, laws, and religious doctrine. These control circuits self organize to modify the actions of the levels below to ensure a consistent energy flow necessary to maintain that particular level of organization though not always the mental health and well being of the individual that evolved in a different environment.

One of the best glimpses into what an original human community may have looked like during the first part of human evolutionary trajectory is the Yanomami people of South America. The Yanomami live in large families consisting of about 20-30 people that are for the most part very closely related. The Yanomami have a few communal buildings and for the most part do not have many personal possessions and sleep relatively close to one another. In a famous example, a US anthropology student lived in a Yanomami tribe and married a young Yanomami woman. Eventually, he brought her to live in the US. She would leave the US after staying a few years. One of her reasons (paraphrasing), “Here people wake up in boxes, never see each other, and live isolated lives. At home I woke up everyday and my whole world was around me. I could look around and see my whole family and children playing.” The only time someone from a rural or suburban area in a developed nation might have an analogous feeling is coming home the first time from living in a college dormitory. I personally remember the utter desolation of suburbia coming home the first time for Thanksgiving. The space between myself in bed and the next person seemed palpable. There was no roommate, no roommate’s girlfriend for the night, or even the guy sleeping on the other side of a cinder block wall. Just a lot of empty space. In such close proximity to others, the community can quickly recognize and act on pathological behavior. There is always someone around and up to see what individuals are doing and interact with them.

Siegfried, Roy, and a Tiger

Almost a decade ago there was an infamous case in which one of two trainer tiger act, known as Siegfried and Roy, was mauled by their tiger during a live performance. In interviews after the affair, the trainers’ representatives claimed that the tiger was not acting maliciously, but was trying to protect one of the trainers as they tripped on stage. Whether or not this explanation is true, it seems clear that the tiger was not acting out of the one reason tigers would normally maul a human, to get food. Wise trainers of undomesticated animals always follow the first rule of handling a potentially dangerous animal: Make sure thy animal is well fed. Beyond hunger, the tiger may not have been acting out of the normal repertoire of evolutionary reasons: to obtain food, to obtain a mate, protect itself or territory. This is the rise of a pathological behavior.

Imagine yourself a tiger trainer stepping into a tiger’s cage . The likelihood of survival would depend on many of the factors listed earlier, but for simplicity sake will be termed calorie intake. These calories can be looked at much like today we survive on 250,000 calories but most are not in the form of food consumption. Once basic needs of the tiger are met, the chance of becoming tiger food decrease greatly (figure 3 left); however, while normal evolutionary drives for becoming tiger food drop, new pathological reasons develop. There are many ways to prevent the tiger carrying out pathological behavior. The tiger could be put through rigorous training sessions, could be physically restrained, made physically incapable of carrying out a lethal attack by removing teeth and claws, or chained and caged. The problem with Siegfried and Roy’s show was that its economic utility for spectators depended on the fact that the tiger could act out in a dangerous fashion, so the only control circuit available to them was training.Figure 3

Stepping into the Human Cage

Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, have spent a lot of time writing books on the decline of violence because of modern day civilization. The crux of their argument is that humans are safer from human on human violence than ever. While their books sell well to people who wish to be told how great they are, their lack of evidence falls flat. There actually exists very little evidence for human on human violence for the first 1 million years of human existence. In their books, they try to extrapolate people like the Yanomami as being non-state and therefore representative of human history. The Yanomami represent impoverished people on the edge of states instead of some primordial human state. Further, Diamond and Pinker fail to use the latest anthropological/archeological evidence to make their cases of high non-state human violence (see this for more in depth argument). They are correct that starting 12,000 years ago, humans became very violent towards one another. This time period coincides with the rise of agriculture, higher human organizational levels, disruption of human scaled communities, and pathological behaviors, ie human on human violence (figure 3 right).

There are two particular points in long-term human caloric intake where human on human violence is relatively low. The first is at 5000 calories, where human communities work out their evolutionary optimized functions. The second starts to occur at about 75,000 calories, which is the blossoming of large nation states. The nation state is much like the tiger trainer above. The amazing energetic flow of fossil fuels has essentially allowed the state to create an amazing array of control circuits. Depending on which nation state you live in, you can expect some of the following: massive prison populations, weapons control laws, massive individual monitoring programs carried out by camera, DNA and digital information collection, state sponsored schooling/education, religious sponsored schooling/education, and social transfer payment programs. These all work to control pathological human behaviors in the absence of functioning communities, but are unable to fix the underlying pathological mental states. However, much like the horror of a trained tiger acting out pathologically, modern day civilization is still struck with tremendous shock when a human acts out pathological behavior, like Columbine, Chinese school stabbing, Norway Island Massacre, and Sandy Hook. It may not be coincidence that the greater number of control circuits, the greater though less frequent the pathological outburst.

The Birth of a Child, the Death of a Community

Today there seems to be little in the way of anything recognizable as communities, because of the way control circuits at levels above the familial unit have altered its functions (see figure 4). If a neighbor develops an illness, it is often asked, “Is there anything I can do without offending them?”, instead of “What can I do to help them?” Looking at the landscape of modern day society, there remain a few stories of a time of a weakened but still persistent community. These stories seem to come to a dead-end at the construction of car passable roadways. Nothing is more telling of the persistence of a community than where children are born and sick are cared for and is instructive of when the community died. In the US, the death of the community has been a boon for pathology (figure 5). In 2000, 2.5 million people were diagnosed with serious mental illness (about 1% of the population), while in 1880, there were about 2500 diagnosed with serious mental illness (about .004% of the population). The nation state utilizing 250,000 calories per person has made us the safest individuals in the past 12,000 years, while leaving us listless in broken communities.

Figure 4Figure 5

All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men

There are no good answers to the problems faced by our lack of community. Not many would want to willingly go back to a world with less energy and therefore: less mobility, less medicine, and less longevity. More importantly with a world population of 7 billion, it is not possible to get a 5,000 human calorie diet with the proper population densities of the distant past. Everyone is on their own to try to create their own communities. This is going to take a lot of mental, physical, and probably fossil fuel energy until limits to growth come into full view. Once we hit these limits, we might find ourselves once again in more fulfilling, yet more dangerous communities.

Individual Action:

-Charles Hugh Smith has some great ideas about ways to physically get started in your community

-John Greer (the archdruid report) has been posting recently about the community. While I agree with his assessment of what we should/will do, I disagree with the reasons that brought us here and the previous health of our communities and the costs they imposed.

-Take a hard look at donations to assist people in developing countries to build roads and airstrips. Not that we shouldn’t, but there are true costs to these peoples lives and communities.

Next Time: I take out my macroscope and stare down some chickens and geese living in my yard.