I can't play it straight today. When I get up in the morning, still thankful for another day, I don't always know what I'm going to write about. I keep a notes file which I consult on days like that. I write about certain themes because I've never seen others do so. That's what makes DOTE what it is.
One of those themes goes like this—
- Humans fuck up some part of the natural world (the biosphere, their habitat).
- The situation remains that way, or gets worse, until...
- Humans attempt to apply some new technology to fix what they fucked up.
Regular readers know I have written dozens, if not hundreds, of such stories over the last 41 months. I tend to collect such stories, which are common if you know how and where to look for them.
Today, following the narrative above, and if I were so inclined, I could give you a straightforward rendering of this story from The Atlantic.
One way to combat colony collapse disorder? Genetically diversify the bee population.
Honey bees are having a hard time of it. They're facing pesticides that can gradually weaken their bodies. They're dealing with parasitic mites that can impede young bees' development. They're existing within human monocultures that limit their nutritional diversity. All those things combined can lead to colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon in which worker bees abruptly disappear, dooming the entire hive — and threatening agricultural stability in the process...
Researchers at Washington State University think they've found a possible solution to those problems. It involves bees from both the United States and Europe. It involves liquid nitrogen. And it involves a sperm bank. One that is, probably, really, really tiny. Technically, the thing will be known as a "bee genome repository" — a sperm bank that will make use of liquid nitrogen to freeze semen gathered from different colonies of honey bees...
"We're trying to diversify the U.S. honey bee gene pool," explains Washington State's Susan Cobey. There are 28 recognized subspecies of honey bee, spread across Europe, Africa, and Asia. And the best chance bees have to fight the threats they're facing is to interbreed, producing offspring that might stand a better chance of fighting parasites and infections.
Or this story, also from The Atlantic—
Genetically Engineering an Icon: Can Biotech Bring the Chestnut Back to America's Forests?In the 20th century, a blight killed of four billion of these towering trees. Now, new research shows that a gene, taken from wheat, provides resistance.
"The forests of America," John Muir wrote in The Atlantic in 1897, "... must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted." Muir didn't know it yet, but by the time he wrote those words, the king of the eastern forests, the American chestnut tree, was already doomed. An interloping fungus had arrived at America's shores two decades earlier, and it would soon make short work of this then-common species. In less than a century's time, it killed off an estimated four billion of these towering trees.
Now, for the first time since the die-off, there is real hope. Researchers at SUNY's College of Environmental Science and Forestry have been trying to build a better American chestnut, one that would be resistant to the blight, and there's reason to think they've succeeded. Such a plant could repopulate the vast region of the eastern United States in which the tree was once found...
The trouble began in the 1870s, when Americans began importing chestnuts from Japan to New York. The Japanese trees were shorter, making for a better orchard crop, as their nuts could be more easily reached.
Unfortunately, those trees harbored Cryphonectria parasitica, a fungal blight to which they were resistant, but to which the American variety was highly susceptible. The fungus would attack a tree at a wound and then spread beneath its bark, releasing a toxin known as oxalic acid that would poison the tree and reduce it to a mere stump that would occasionally send out shoots, but could never grow tall. The blight was discovered in 1904 in what is now the Bronx Zoo by a scientist named Hermann Merkel. Within five decades of that date, the fungus had spread across the entire range of the American chestnut, from Maine to Mississippi...
Since the blight's discovery, countless efforts have been made to control the blight or somehow re-instate the trees...
Or, I could have posted about one of the dozens of stories I see about bringing extinct species back from the dead. Humans of course caused the extinctions in the first place. Such stories are common now because advances in genetics have made these fantasies possible. In fact, these stories are so common that I no longer put them in my notes file.
If you see enough stories like those listed above, and I have seen my share, you start to think of humans as uncontrolled, ungovernable infants who think the Earth is a giant sandbox for them to play in. That's how I see them.
In pointing out this typical human behavior, I was not trying to make humans aware of how they typically behave so as to make it possible for them to change those destructive (and self-destructive) behaviors. That's the fundamental underlying premise of psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy was an excellent idea—actually, the best idea humankind ever had—but generally it was a failure because humans simply can not or refuse to bring their characteristic behavior patterns (like 1,2,3 above) into consciousness, regardless of whether those behaviors are idiosyncratic or instinctual. Hell, humans can not or refuse to acknowledge the very existence of the unconscious mind. Humans think that tiny, feckless awareness of theirs (the overrated Ego) is running the show!
Viewed that way, DOTE can also be seen as psychotherapy for Homo sapiens. Again, that is not what I've been trying to do on this blog because that's an impossible task. I have described that impossibility generally by saying Homo sapiens is a species—what you see is what you get. That also implies that past human behavior is a reliable guide to future human behavior.
So what have I been trying to do by pointing out (and ridiculing) these typical human behaviors? In some sense, I am just like a fisherman. Like the fisherman, I've been hoping to catch some fish. I've caught a few
This was not what I intended to write when I woke up this morning. I was going to write a post called A Global Race To The Bottom.
But this is what came out when I sat down to write.
Dave,
your blog is one of the few that shows that not everything is only about money. But is also shows that almost everything IS about money.
Best,
Alexander
Posted by: Alexander Ač | 06/13/2013 at 10:18 AM