As it turns out, rising CO2 isn't just an issue of climate change or ocean acidification.
High CO2 levels, as it turns out, make us dumb. Those in urban areas (where higher CO2 levels are typical) and those spending a lot of time indoors get it the worst. At 1,000ppm, human cognitive ability drops by 21%. We're on track to have 1,000ppm globally, by 2100. Indoor air often exceeds 2,000ppm. Check it out.
My favorite all-time movie was released by Disney when I was eleven years old, in 1983. As the only movie I feel compelled to watch again and again every few years, Never Cry Wolf, always teaches me something new each time I watch it.
The story line in a nutshell is that Mr. Mowatt, a biologist, is hired by the Canadian government to prove that massive declines in the caribou herds are due to wolf predation, thus providing a justification for an expansion of their wolf eradication program. Through observation and interactions with the local natives, he discovers that the herd's problem is not wolf predation but rather a disease outbreak -- one which is being mitigated by the wolves, who hunt down the sick and weakened animals and help prevent further spread of the disease.
While the basic wildlife biology lesson in the movie is a worthwhile one, I'd never thought about how it might apply to my own species until recently.
We like to pretend that we're different from other animals; not subject to the same laws that govern all other living organisms. The course of humanity over the last century has certainly given us plenty of reason to embrace this idea.
We have several "wolves" that have plagued us since time immemorial. Famine and disease are at the front of the pack. When they fail to cull our herd, war is usually right behind them. There are many lesser wolves which torment us, yet help to keep us healthy either individually or as a species. The physical effort involved in feeding, clothing, and sheltering ourselves is one we've scared off, to the point that obesity runs rampant. In our effort to ward off the disease wolf, we've sanitized our environments to the point that our immune systems have gone haywire, manifesting in numerous autoimmune disorders and severe allergies. In fact, most every wolf we've managed to ward off has left us with unintentional consequences which are ultimately worse than those were were first trying to avoid.
In an effort to ward off the Wolf of Economic Malaise in the face of energy and resource decline, we're now amassing ever growing piles of debt on a global basis. This wolf feeds on debt, which will make him far more ferocious when he returns. Debt is little more than a promise to pay at some future point, and the more debt there is, the more likely this promise will be broken.
The Famine Wolf has been kept at bay for so long that few in the industrialized world have any memory of it. The development of the Haber-Bosch process, which allows us to artificially fix atmospheric nitrogen for use in fertilizer and vastly improve agricultural yields, gave famine a near-fatal blow. When it was developed at roughly the time my grandparents were born, the world's population had reached 2 billion. Various inventions have dealt other serious blows, from the McCormick Reaper to tractors using internal combustion engines and the modern combine. Though it came at a cost in the nutritional quality of our food, the development of hybrid crops also greatly expanded production.
The Disease Wolf was beaten off in large part through scientific knowledge of microorganisms, such as the work of Louis Pasteur. The development of antibiotics and vaccines dealt another great blow, and greatly reduced childhood mortality. By the time my parents were born in the mid 20th century, the world population had crept up to 2.5 billion.
Shortly before I was born, Norman Borlaug took another swing at the Famine Wolf with his development of dwarf wheat varieties. He's credited with averting a massive famine in India, whose population has now nearly tripled in the time elapsed. He knew, however, that he hadn't scared it off for good, and warned that we should use the time he gave us wisely.
The War Wolf has also been scared off, in much of the world anyway. The development of nuclear weapons have kept it at bay for several decades now, though it's by no means a certainty that they can continue to keep it away indefinitely. As our population continues to climb and resource conflict intensifies, this wolf grows ever more menacing.
I frequently see conservative media pointing the finger at Thomas Malthus, exclaiming how very wrong he was about the future, simply because his schedule for the arrival of the famine wolf was off. They seem to think that our ability to scare this wolf off for a few years is the same thing as killing it.
Every time we scare off of yet another wolf, our population grows. The 2 billion people in my grandparents' childhood world have now exploded to 7.5 billion in my world. It's apparent that the wolves are never killed, but are scared off into the forest, where they grow ever more hungry the longer they're kept away.
The story of perpetual progress we like to tell each other is not one that ends happily ever after. Human societies have always grown as they scared off the wolves, and collapsed as the unintended consequences arose. Such was certainly the case with Greece and Rome, which overshot their resource base just as we're now doing. Now that our society and the overshoot of our resource base is global, collapse threatens to also go global. Just as the caribou need wolves to regulate their population, humans need the wolves we've fought away for so long.
So am I advocating for the abandonment of scientific knowledge? No, not really. Promoting ignorance doesn't seem like a good idea in any case. I do think, however, that we should try to domesticate our wolves by regulating ourselves as they once did. As difficult as that may be, it's far better than the alternatives we're now facing.
The starlings and blackbirds gather in flocks of ever increasing size these days, moving in magically synchronized clouds between our cricket-rich pastures and our barnyard oaks, where their constant singing livens up the mornings. Hummingbirds chase each other around the row of zinnias in the aging garden while goldfinches inspect the sagging sunflower heads. Mowing the orchard last week, I dodged a milkweed plant and noticed two monarch caterpillars happily munching away as I passed by. I accidentally hit our smaller pawpaw tree (the one which pollinated our first-ever pawpaws on the larger tree) with the mower. Hopefully the stump can re-sprout!
It's been hot this summer. In the past we'd always been able to keep the house comfortable by opening the windows to let in the cool night air and closing them as the heat of the day began. Huge maples shade the house, and we were always able to keep it at least 10 degrees cooler than the outside air this way. This year, however, the night time lows haven't been living up to their name, and made that technique unworkable. So now I sit in a room with the AC blasting away, doing something I'd prided myself on doing without, and increasing my dependence upon the grid. Today is supposed to hit 89 degrees, but the humidity is forecast to put the heat index at over 95 degrees. The horses don't stand panting with their tongues out as the cows would be, but they're covered with sweat as they stand in the barn to avoid the torment of monster sized horseflies. We're both thankful that the weather hasn't allowed us to put up any hay recently.
For all the heat, I would normally expect our pastures to be brown and crispy as with most years in August when I reluctantly feed out the hay we've just put up. This year, however, we've had rain, and lots of it. I've been scanning the forecasts for a weather window to cut our hay, and haven't seen one for a month now. Without the cows to feed, I think we may actually be self sufficient in hay for the first time. Assuming I'm able to eventually cut what remains in the field, that is. As an added bonus to all the rain, we've had a bumper crop of chanterelles and chicken of the woods mushrooms this year.
My health is much improved from earlier in the year, enabling me to catch up on delayed projects like the wood shed. It's essentially finished now, aside from some doors I need to put up before the snow flies. My best guess is now that the flu triggered a leaky gut, which lead to extreme food sensitivity and created the reactive arthritis symptoms. That's the problem I've been treating anyway, and I'm making slow but measured improvement. The "swollen thyroid", as I learned from a belated visit to the overbooked endocrinologist, isn't actually my thyroid, but is rather a thyroglossal cyst, and is basically just an annoying benign lump that will be most likely be surgically removed.
Sighting in a bow or rifle has been a neglected task since we moved here. Shooting the bow meant putting out a few straw bales, trying to prop them up so they don't fall over, and then hauling them back to the barn (or more likely, letting them stay out in the rain to get ruined). For the guns, I've been shooting into an old garbage can filled with wood chips and sand. Both made for poor backstops, so I finally got around to setting up something a little more permanent. Both are set up with locust posts and a tin roof made from barn leftovers. The archery backstop is basically a frame to hold and protect three straw bales. The rifle backstop is a wooden box filled with sand and lined with rubber to keep the sand from spilling out after shots put holes in the wood. I even thought to bury cobble sized stones every 10 yards down range as distance markers so that I won't have to pace out distances every time I shoot.
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In the interest of getting things done without manufactured or purchased inputs, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make my own ink and write with a quill pen. Fortunately, I live in a location where three essential ingredients are found: turkeys, black walnuts, and cherry trees. Turkey flight feathers provide nice strong quills, black walnut husks make an excellent ink, and gum gathered from the trunk of cherry trees (when they're attacked by insects) thickens the ink.
Results thus far have been mixed, but I still enjoy working at it. The quills need to be soaked and then hardened in hot sand and cut just right, with the nib split so that the ink wicks all the way to the tip. The ink needs to be just the right viscosity, which is thicker than that used with metal nibs. Sometimes it goes very well, and other times I have trouble getting enough ink on the quill without having it spill out, so I've been starting the freshly dipped quill on a piece of scrap paper until the ink flow seems about right. Writing left-handed with a "hook" is a much greater impediment with this type of writing than it is with a ball-point pen, as I have to take great pains to ensure I don't smear the ink with my hand following the quill.
Whereas finding a turkey feather in the woods was a mild curiosity before, I now get quite excited about it. I don't think they'll really wear out so fast once I've got everything figured out, but at this stage I've been going through quite a few as I try different cutting techniques for shaping the nib.
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I see that Back-stabbed Bernie has come up with a new bill to do wonderful things. I don't really expect congress to do much with it, but taxing employers for the social subsidies claimed by their underpaid employees sounds to me like an *excellent* idea. Wal-Mart is known for providing food-stamp applications to their new hires, because it knows they'll qualify on the wages they'll be making, thereby getting you and I to subsidize the Walton heirs. Yes, many businesses will likely fail if such a law is passed (oh no! No fast-food joints and less industrialized agriculture!? The horror!), but if they can't stand on their own two feet, they weren't really viable businesses now, were they? Seems like a perfect way to Make America Great Again.
Sighting in a bow or rifle has been a neglected task since we moved here. Shooting the bow meant putting out a few straw bales, trying to prop them up so they don't fall over, and then hauling them back to the barn (or more likely, letting them stay out in the rain to get ruined). For the guns, I've been shooting into an old garbage can filled with wood chips and sand. Both made for poor backstops, so I finally got around to setting up something a little more permanent. Both are set up with locust posts and a tin roof made from barn leftovers. The archery backstop is basically a frame to hold and protect three straw bales. The rifle backstop is a wooden box filled with sand and lined with rubber to keep the sand from spilling out after shots put holes in the wood. I even thought to bury cobble sized stones every 10 yards down range as distance markers so that I won't have to pace out distances every time I shoot.
In the interest of getting things done without manufactured or purchased inputs, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make my own ink and write with a quill pen. Fortunately, I live in a location where three essential ingredients are found: turkeys, black walnuts, and cherry trees. Turkey flight feathers provide nice strong quills, black walnut husks make an excellent ink, and gum gathered from the trunk of cherry trees (when they're attacked by insects) thickens the ink.
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