Green Options

In an interview, this author asked Dr. Wang, about the foreseeable impacts/uses of this technique. “Ultimately,” said Wang, ” this is a new way of accelerating the evolution of the whole organism in a very directed fashion (i.e., controlled by scientist). This is going to be important in new cell based therapies, new cell based production of drugs, or, say, biofuels.”

Hi, you might recognize that beautiful smiling face before you. That is my face, well it was my face over the last couple of years. I am not here to talk about my face or my smile, which some have called “winning.” I am not even here to talk about myself, although I could do that all day, and I will relate to you my personal experience because that is the only experience I have. The real reason I am writing you today is to point out my hair.

These pictures happen to be in chronological order, so as you may see, my hair has grown a tad longer in the last couple of years. I would like to say that my reasons were always altruistic, but the fact is I just happen to like my hair a little longer.

Both economic theory and experimental data concur–increasing the distance traveled to find food incurs “negative fitness consequences”, by decreasing total energy for maintenance, repair and reproduction. Yet, most animals must travel to find food. Individual, small groups, and large herds of eutherian (placental) mammals–like wild buffalo, gazelles, lions, and elephants–often travel great distances to find food. This expenditure of energy, at the apparent risk of biological fitness, has puzzled zoologists for some time.

Biological and ecological scientists around the world are waiting for stability to return to Madagascar and are using what political muscle they have to convince the new government to restore stability, and to resume and expand its eco-tourism trade. The survival of one of the world’s last, great, biodiversity hot spots depends on it.

Move over Hubble Telescope, the European Space Agency has launched the largest telescope ever sent to space on a mission to study how the Big Bang created the universe. This comes right on the heels of another related and exciting scientific breakthrough: for the first time ever, scientists have successfully showed us how the earliest building blocks for life on the planet probably formed from scratch. Are we on the brink of a more complete understanding of our planet’s evolution?

Details you say? Here they are. The European Space Agency’s plan to study the Big Bang comes at a cost of $952 million. Yesterday a rocket launched from the South American country of French Guiana sent the telescope as well as a spacecraft above our atmosphere, and they both could very well soon be household names.

A bird recently discovered in the Solomon Islands is a member of the White Eyes (Zosteropidae) family that evolves more rapidly than any other bird.

The newly discovered species has been named Vanikoro White Eye. It was found on the tiny island of Ranongga, and is thought to only live there.  

A dinosaur age hatchling has been found in mainland New Zealand, the first of its kind to be seen there in over 200 years.

Although it may look like a lizard, it’s not. The tuatara (shown above) is perhaps best classified as the last living “proto-reptile”, and it’s the only surviving member of a distinct lineage that thrived 200 million years ago. In fact, it was misclassified as a lizard until 1867, when Albert Günther of the British Museum noted that the unique creature had features similar to birds, turtles and crocodiles.

Hey, you know that old conflict between religion and science? Remember the Scopes monkey trial in 1925 or the 1960 film about the case? How about the legislative battles of the last few years in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Kansas over the mandatory inclusion of intelligent design alongside evolution in public schools?

Waiting for worldviews to change to accommodate new science is like watching the emergence of multicellularity. Keep in mind that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is only 150 years old. Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres was published in 1543. That book wasn’t completely dropped from the Vatican’s list of banned books for another 300 years. (I wonder if foundation-shattering books would fly under heresy radars if the titles didn’t start with “On the…”)

Chuck, on the other hand, just got fast-tracked! On Darwin’s 200th birthday, the Vatican is officially on board with evolution! Also, more than 800 pastors and rabbis are celebrating “Evolution Weekend” following Darwin’s 200th birthday February 12.

Have you ever wondered about Mother Nature’s counterpart, Father Nature?

Look no further than ecologist and artist of nature, Steven Apfelbaum. You could even call him Father Nature. His book, Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm (Beacon, 2009), offers an engaging and refreshingly personal narrative of how, as humans, we can reconnect with the land, our community, and our true selves through restoration work on the land. (The book is also available as an eBook.)

“Dirty hands and sweat welded my relationship with Stone Prairie Farm … where I have worked to give nature a second chance,” writes Apfelbaum in the book’s Introduction. “My years of planting, of nurturing the resurgence of prairie, wetland, and forest cover where eroded fields once lay exposed, have created a deep, direct connection to nature.” The land became his home, love, passion, and peace — even the humble beginnings for his livelihood after launching the ecological consulting firm, Applied Ecological Services, Inc., and Taylor Creek Restoration Nurseries — both exemplary triple bottom businesses.

Apfelbaum’s inspiration, like many in his field, was renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold who so clearly enunciated a vision for a land ethic to guide our human relationship with all of nature: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise.”

When people go hunting, they kill the big trophy animals with the largest antlers, hide, horns, etc.  The scawny, weak animals are left behind, reversing the natural selection Darwin espoused in his theory of evolution.

Newsweek explains how hunting cause “evolution reverse”:

Researchers describe what’s happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along

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This article marks the first in the author’s series on Sustainable Communities, in which she investigates theories and examples of how we might organize ourselves toward sustainability.  This introductory article examines why it is crucial to focus on the viability of sustainable community prototypes, the likes of which are popping up in both urban and rural settings across the world.  Such efforts look humble and localized at first, but they may contribute more to the structural evolution of a global sustainable society than it seems.

From a humble sprout, a fragile orchid grows.  Not all of the seeds of its parent plant were pollinated.  Not all were strewn, and not all began to grow.  Some did.  Of those that did, one blossomed.  The orchid blossomed, a realized vision of the parent orchid’s design.

Not all efforts toward organizing ourselves for a better future have blossomed.  Communism fell to the stresses of maintaining an absolutist ideology among many individuals.  At this moment in our very own country, capitalism is finally beginning to buckle beneath its own design oversights (infinite growth within a finite planet).  If one examines the human political legacy, it seems that there never will be a final, best solution to our social woes.

But there may be an evolution.

Totalitarianism is better than a monarchy.  Representative democracy is an improvement over a totalitarian society.  Direct democracy is probably even better than representative democracy.  Having civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights satisfied feels much better than widespread injustice.  The only exception here may be class stratification in the U.S., which is apparently justified by the fundamental theory of our economic system.

But maybe capitalism is on its way out too.  New Scientist magazine features in its October 18 2008 issue a section of a half-dozen contributors, entitled “The Folly of Growth: How to stop the economy killing the planet“–which contains a thorough picture of the frankly unpalatable situation we’re in, and yet how appealing alternatives to U.S. capitalism seem.  Tim Jackson’s article “Why Politicians Dare Not Limit Economic Growth” speculates about the social worth of pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into floundering corporations when social trends and urgent environmental trends indicate that the money would be best spent otherwise–such as on the sincere development of green jobs or industry standards and incentives to proactively bring our greenhouse gas emissions within manageable levels (the famous “350″ movement).  According to a chart in Bill McKibben’s article “The Most Important Number on Earth” (Mother Jones, November 2008), it would take just $33 billion to update our major energy providers, reducing our carbon emissions by almost 20% annually.  “Just $33 billion” is not a phrase I would have imagined myself saying, prior to the Wall Street bailout.