Bacteria - Masters of the Biosphere

Bacteria have been perceived by most people as disease-causing microbes since the germ theory of contagion caught on. Otherwise they have been largely ignored. Yet had bacteria been discovered on Mars, their description would have been much more dramatic and the bizarre quality of their natural history, which often seems like science fiction, would not have been missed.

The greatest division in the kingdom of the living is NOT between plants and animals, but between “bacteria” and “organisms made of nucleated cells”. (1) Bacteria are called “prokaryotes” and “organisms made of nucleated cells” are named “eukaryotes”.

A third category of tough bacteria living still today are called “archaebacteria”. They are considered to be the direct descendants of the earliest life on earth. Archaebacteria include salt-loving “halophiles”, heat-loving “thermophiles”, and methane-producing “methanogens”. The most important thing to remember about archaebacteria is that they despise oxygen. They prefer to live in anaerobic (oxygen-less) environments, such as on the bottom of the ocean, in sewer water, in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, and even in the stomachs of cows. (2) It is easy to understand how these ancient bacteria thrived on earth when there was no or very little oxygen, but a lot of carbon dioxide.

So, how did oxygen get into the atmosphere? Oxygen was only released into the atmosphere when “blue-green bacteria” evolved a way to use energy from sunlight to break apart water molecules to grab their precious hydrogen, explains Margulis. (2) “Combining the hydrogen with carbon atoms drawn from then-abundant carbon dioxide, blue-green bacteria were able to manufacture DNA, proteins, sugars, and all their other cell components. These light-needy bacteria quickly expanded to sunny waters everywhere on the Archean Earth. In so doing, they released vast amounts of molecular oxygen left over from their hydrogen mining of water.” (2) These earliest of bacteria were true innovators! They are the predecessors of plastids in plants, which remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using carbon for their bodies and eliminating as waste the oxygen we breathe in fresh air.

Bacteria, to repeat, do NOT have a nucleus, which is why they are prokaryotes (which means “before nuclei”) and NOT eukaryotes. Instead, their DNA is loose within their bodies. As a result of this situation, bacteria NEVER reproduce by mitosis, which evolved AFTER the Archean time (in the Proterozoic). “A parent bacterium simply elongates its DNA, dragged by growing membrane to which it is attached, until the full-grown cell splits to form two offspring identical to it,” explains Margulis (p. 94)

Bacteria may not reproduce by mitosis, but they DO trade their DNA very easily. Margulis imagines the Archean Earth as a “promiscuous place of prodigious growth and rapid genetic transfer that led, by and by, to the genetic restrictions of the Proterozoic descendants known as “protists”. (p. 93) Bacteria will sometimes trade naked pieces of DNA called “plasmids” or as protein-coated pieces called “viruses”. [Hmmmm] The way that bacteria trade their DNA is to grow a cell bridge through which the genes pass. This is called “conjugation”. The offspring is a unique genetic recombinant. Bacterial recombination is the rage among biotechnologists who force the colon bacterium Escherichia coli to produce, for example, human insulin by getting the bacteria to take up a particular human gene.

Prokaryotic bacterial cells NEVER fuse (like an egg and sperm). Their genes instead FLOW. Margulis paints a compelling picture of a world in which human genes behaved like prokaryotes: “Imagine you are a blue-eyed person (perhaps with newly acquired green hair) who, in a swimming pool, gulps the more common gene for brown eyes. Toweling off, you pick up genes from sunflowers and pigeons. Soon the brown-eyed you is sprouting petals and flying—eventually reproducing into gliding brown-eyed, green-haired quintuplets. This fantasy is mundane reality in the world of bacteria, except that most genes traded there are for metabolic and subvisible traits.” (p. 96)

1. Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan: “What Is Life?” University of California Press, 1995, p. 113.

2. Ibid, p. 89.

Dopamine and Fight Club

New research from Vanderbilt University shows for the first time that the brain processes aggression as a reward – much like sex, food and drugs – offering insights into our propensity to fight and our fascination with violent sports like boxing and football.

The research will be published online the week of Jan. 14 by the journal Psychopharmacology.

“Aggression occurs among virtually all vertebrates and is necessary to get and keep important resources such as mates, territory and food,” Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics, said. “We have found that the ‘reward pathway’ in the brain becomes engaged in response to an aggressive event and that dopamine is involved.”

“It is well known that dopamine is produced in response to rewarding stimuli such as food, sex and drugs of abuse,” Maria Couppis, who conducted the study as her doctoral thesis at Vanderbilt, said.

“What we have now found is that it also serves as positive reinforcement for aggression.” The Vanderbilt experiments are the first to demonstrate a link between behavior and the activity of dopamine receptors in response to an aggressive event.

“We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said. “This shows for the first time that aggression, on its own, is motivating, and that the well-known positive reinforcer dopamine plays a critical role.”

Wizardology 102 - What is Life?

In 1943, a decade before English biophysicist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin discerned the fine structure of DNA via X-ray diffraction imaging which formed the framework of Watson and Crick's hypothesis of the double helical structure of DNA in their 1953 publication, one of the original quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger posited an ontogenetic dilemma and offered a novel speculation about the fundamental character of life processes.

In a series of lectures What is Life? – The Physical Aspects of Living Cells (1945), Schrödinger postulated that the answer to this most fundamental question requires a new approach.

A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects and, therefore, is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a life master. This is regarded as a matter of noblesse oblige. For the present purpose I beg to renounce the noblesse, if any, and to be the freed of the ensuing obligation. …some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them -and at the risk of making fools of ourselves. So much for my apology. (Schrödinger 1945, p. vii).....

....Today, thanks to the ingenious work of biologists, mainly of geneticists, during the last 30 or 40 years, enough is known about the actual material structure of organisms and about their functioning to state that, and to tell precisely why present-day physics and chemistry could not possibly account for what happens in space and time within a living organism. (ibid. p. 2).....

What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something', moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect of an inanimate piece of matter to 'keep going' under similar circumstances. (ibid. p. 70).....

Every process, event, happening – call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy – or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e., alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy...(ibid. p. 72).....

How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamic equilibrium (death)? We said before: 'It feeds upon negative entropy', attracting, as it was a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level…. Indeed, in the case of higher animals we know the kind of orderliness they feed upon well enough, viz. the extremely well-ordered state of matter in more or less complicated organic compounds, which serve them as foodstuffs. After utilizing it they return it in a very much degraded form -not entirely degraded, however, for plants can still make use of it. (ibid. pp. 74-5)

Focusing on energy, matter and thermodynamic imbalances provided by the environment, Schrödinger proposed the consumption of negative entropy as the fundamental requirement for life, i.e., i.e., the use of thermodynamic imbalances in the environment. Presently, Schrodinger's ontogenetic dilemma is generally considered solved, and his original postulate attributed to the status of knowledge in the pre-DNA era of molecular biology. But the fact of the matter is that the genome-centered paradigm does not satisfactorily address Schrodinger's original intuitions about the nature of life, at all. Despite profound advances in human knowledge of genetic structure, we fundamentally lack a satisfactory framework of explanation for living systems.

Units of Selection and Zero-Sum Games

My man Prof. Lester Spence has set out a smorgasbord of thought for food on the zero-sum psycho-political warfare raging in the American mediaspheres;

What's striking in all of the controversy is that it centers on racial symbols, rather than substance. I believe Clyburn missed a prime opportunity to move the country's focus beyond symbolic slights toward real democratic change -- and this says a great deal about the practice of black politics at the elite level. And the fact that the mainstream media is paying such close attention to the debate over words and symbols says even more about what America thinks of black politics -- that it is more about reducing racial offense and fights over "black leaders" than it is about reducing the real impact of racism on the lives of black citizens, using government to do so.

Not content to leave us sated with the his gourmand's political analysis published at Salon.com - Spence then wheels out the desert cart so that we can hear a spicy and delectable exchange between his colleague Melissa Harris Lacewell and Gloria Steinem - partisan combatants representing distinct units of selection in the war for American hearts and minds.

For those interested in the rigorous hardline on what's happening in the primaries, there is only one destination.

Accept no substitutes......,

Human Microbiome Project

Now I know that before I even get started here, nobody read the Oxygen Wars, nobody read Gould's Planet of the Bacteria - and nobody read Wizardology 101 so the noodle-baking I really want to put on you - is only going to come out half-baked - if it gets baked any at all.

Be that as it may, I will continue scattering bread crumbs in hopes that somebody attending to this peculiar web log will connect them all up and go AHHH!!!!!

At the end of the day - all it is - is a different angle of approach or perspective from which to view and consider the affairs in which it is broadly and uncritically believed and accepted that we are the agents. What pipsqueak arrogance leads us to conclude, believe, and act as if it were natural and theological law that we are the fundamental units of selection, the sine qua non and center of the implicate order of creation?

Gut Reaction;

For the first time, scientists have defined the collective genome of the human gut, or colon. Up to 100 trillion microbes, representing more than 1,000 species, make up a motley "microbiome" that allows humans to digest much of what we eat, including some vitamins, sugars, and fiber.

In a study published in the June 2 issue of Science, scientists at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and their colleagues describe and analyze the colon microbiome, which includes more than 60,000 genes--twice as many as found in the human genome. Some of these microbial genes code for enzymes that humans need to digest food, suggesting that bacteria in the colon co-evolved with their human host, to mutual benefit.

"The GI tract has the most abundant, diverse population of bacteria in the human body," remarks lead author Steven Gill, a molecular biologist formerly at TIGR and now at the State University of New York in Buffalo. "We're entirely dependent on this microbial population for our well-being. A shift within this population, often leading to the absence or presence of beneficial microbes, can trigger defects in metabolism and development of diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease."

The Human Microbiome Project;

Within the body of a healthy adult, microbial cells are estimated to outnumber human cells by a factor of ten to one. These communities, however, remain largely unstudied, leaving almost entirely unknown their influence upon human development, physiology, immunity, and nutrition. To take advantage of recent technological advances and to develop new ones, the NIH Roadmap has initiated the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) with the mission of generating resources enabling comprehensive characterization of the human microbiota and analysis of its role in human health and disease.

Traditional microbiology has focused on the study of individual species as isolated units. However many, if not most, have never been successfully isolated as viable specimens for analysis, presumably because their growth is dependant upon a specific microenvironment that has not been, or cannot be, reproduced experimentally. Among those species that have been isolated, analyses of genetic makeup, gene expression patterns, and metabolic physiologies have rarely extended to inter-species interactions or microbe-host interactions. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies have created a new field of research, called metagenomics, allowing comprehensive examination of microbial communities, even those comprised of uncultivable organisms. Instead of examining the genome of an individual bacterial strain that has been grown in a laboratory, the metagenomic approach allows analysis of genetic material derived from complete microbial communities harvested from natural environments. In the HMP, this method will complement genetic analyses of known isolated strains, providing unprecedented information about the complexity of human microbial communities.

By leveraging both the metagenomic and traditional approach to genomic DNA sequencing, the Human Microbiome Project will lay the foundation for further studies of human-associated microbial communities.

Just a little food for thought...., are you thinking about it yet? (the picture accompanying this post is of a polished stromatolite in the shape of an egg)

President Obama and Attorney General Edwards

Accept no substitutes.................,

Dopamine, Dopamine.......,

A dopamine agonist is a compound that activates dopamine receptors, mimicking the effect of the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Tell your doctor if you experience new or increased gambling, sexual, or other intense urges while you take requip.....,



The choice is yours, restless legs or intense urges and impulsivity.....,

Planet of the Bacteria

Planet of the Bacteria;

Not only does the Earth contain more bacterial organisms than all others combined (scarcely surprising, given their minimal size and mass); not only do bacteria live in more places and work in a greater variety of metabolic ways; not only did bacteria alone constitute the first half of life's history, with no slackening in diversity thereafter; but also, and most surprisingly, total bacterial biomass (even at such minimal weight per cell) may exceed all the rest of life combined, even forest trees, once we include the subterranean populations as well. Need any more be said in making a case for the modal bacter as life's constant center of maximal influence and importance?

See also;

• Oxygen Catastrophe
• Archean
• Proterozoic

One of My Favorite Short Stories

"You have a severe oxygen deficiency, like most people in this time period. Due to pollution and deforestation, right now your atmospheric oxygen levels are at an all-time low, so the oxygen pressure in your blood is insufficient to guard you against oxygen-hating microbes. You become slightly stagnant, and serve as a growth medium for anaerobic parasites. But all pathogens are inherently much weaker than your own cells, which are a lot more highly evolved than viruses, bacteria, fungus and such. So you can always get rid of them by just raising your intemal oxygen concentration above what they can stand."

Bob and the Oxygen Wars Part I

Bob and the Oxygen Wars Part II - Enjoy!!!

Be sure to peep the reference list at the end of Part II. Twenty plus years ago, this reference list pointed me toward fascinating rabbit-holes around the fringe...,

Transgenerational Transgenics

A cloned pig whose genes were altered to make it glow fluorescent green has passed on the trait to its young, a development that could lead to the future breeding of pigs for human transplant organs, a Chinese university reported. The glowing piglets' birth proves transgenic pigs are fertile and able to pass on their engineered traits to their offspring, according to Liu Zhonghua, a professor overseeing the breeding program at Northeast Agricultural University.

"Continued development of this technology can be applied to ... the production of special pigs for the production of human organs for transplant," Liu said in a news release posted Tuesday on the university's Web site.

Calls to the university seeking comment Wednesday were not answered.

The piglets' mother was one of three pigs born with the trait in December 2006 after pig embryos were injected with fluorescent green protein. Two of the 11 piglets glow fluorescent green from their snout, trotters, and tongue under ultraviolet light, the university said.

Robin Lovell-Badge, a genetics expert at Britain's National Institute for Medical Research, said the technology "to genetically manipulate pigs in this way would be very valuable."

Lovell-Badge had not seen the research from China's cloned pigs and could not comment on its credibility. He said, however, that organs from genetically altered pigs would potentially solve some of the problems of rejected organs in transplant operations. He said the presence of the green protein would allow genetically modified cells to be tracked if they were transplanted into a human. The fact that the pig's offspring also appeared to have the green genes would indicate that the genetic modification had successfully penetrated every cell, Lovell-Badge added.

But he said much more research and further trials — both in animals and in humans — would be necessary before the benefits of the technology could be seen.

Other genetically modified pigs have been created before, including by Scotland's Roslin Institute, but few results have been published. Tokyo's Meiji University last year successfully cloned a transgenic pig that carries the genes for human diabetes, while South Korean scientists cloned cats that glow red when exposed to ultraviolet rays.

Remember this article from last week? China offers unproven medical treatments;

Savage spent 2 1/2 months in late 2006 and early 2007 at a hospital in the southern China city of Shenzhen to get what he was told were stem cell injections in his spine from umbilical cord blood. He made the arrangements through Beike Biotechnology Co., which offers the treatments at a number of hospitals in China.

Afterward, Savage said he was able to move his right arm for the first time since his diving accident; a video made at the hospital appears to show slight movement. He also said he noticed greater strength in his abdomen and more sensation on his skin.

Just how many foreigners like Savage are coming to China for treatment isn't known; and China is only one of several countries where such techniques are being offered.

Many Chinese doctors don't wait for results of rigorous testing before treating patients and they offer what they say are stem cell or other cell treatments to those willing to pay.

What is known about the procedures being performed comes from material on their Web sites or from patients who give detailed accounts of their visits. Little has been published in scientific journals for other doctors to scrutinize.

William Gibson was/is the Nostradamus of our time....,

The Price of Biofuels

Full Technology Review article is a 13 page pdf. Great overall primer on the politics and market psychology that has trumped scientific understanding and underlying technological realities in terms of emphasis and investment in the U.S., and, which will have a near term impact on the price and availability of food here but with far more devastating impact in other countries.

[Bro. Makheru, if certain folks don't understand that food availability is a non-negotiable trigger for resource-based conflict, then there's a better than even chance they don't understand much of anything at all.]

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla makes a great counterpoint to Lester Brown and effectively calls many of Brown's panaceas "toys" and unrealistic. He explains Scalability, Cycle Time, and Cost and underscores the inexcusable paradox of American intransigence in the face of abundant opportunity.

If there is a deus ex machina technology capable of rescuing us from our predicament, ultimately, genomic programming and synthetic biology is where it's at - remember that I told you so on subrealism's zero day.

Food Crunch

"The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil - it's getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we've got to expand food output dramatically" - [CN - dopamine is one helluva drug.....,]

Full story in the Financial Post

The impact of tighter food supply is already evident in raw food prices, which have risen 22% in the past year.

At the centre of the imminent food catastrophe is corn -- the main staple of the ethanol industry. The price of corn has risen about 44% over the past 15 months, closing at US$4.66 a bushel on the CBOT yesterday -- its best finish since June 1996.

This not only impacts the price of food products made using grains, but also the price of meat, with feed prices for livestock also increasing.

"You're going to have real problems in countries that are food short, because we're already getting embargoes on food exports from countries, who were trying desperately to sell their stuff before, but now they're embargoing exports," he said, citing Russia and India as examples.

"Those who have food are going to have a big edge."

With 54% of the world's corn supply grown in America's mid-west, the U.S. is one of those countries with an edge.

The Root of Blackospheric Objectivism

It took me a minute to figure out why Thegrayconservative and Denmarkvesey have such unbounded love for Ron Paul, and then I remembered the "quarry" and the "discipline" scenes from The Fountainhead...,

Wizardology 101 - Units of Selection and Zero-Sum

The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win–win solutions instead of win–lose solutions.... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well — so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other.... Bill Clinton, Wired interview, December 2000

A unit of selection is a biological entity within the hierarchy of biological organisation (e.g. genes, cells, individuals, groups, species) that is subject to natural selection. For several decades there has been intense debate among evolutionary biologists about the extent to which evolution has been shaped by selective pressures acting at these different levels. This debate has been as much about what it means to be a unit of selection as it has about the relative importance of the units themselves, i.e., is it group or individual selection that has driven the evolution of altruism? When it is noted that altruism reduces the fitness of individuals, it is difficult to see how altruism has evolved within the context of Darwinian selection acting on individuals

Zero-sum - in game theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). It is so named because when the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Go is an example of a zero-sum game: it is impossible for both players to win. Zero-sum can be thought of more generally as constant sum where the benefits and losses to all players sum to the same value. Cutting a cake is zero- or constant-sum because taking a larger piece reduces the amount of cake available for others. In contrast, non-zero-sum describes a situation in which the interacting parties' aggregate gains and losses is either less than or more than zero.

Situations where participants can all gain or suffer together, such as a country with an excess of bananas trading with another country for their excess of apples, where both benefit from the transaction, are referred to as non-zero-sum. Other non-zero-sum games are games in which the sum of gains and losses by the players are always more or less than what they began with. For example, a game of poker, disregarding the house's rake, played in a casino is a zero-sum game unless the pleasure of gambling or the cost of operating a casino is taken into account, making it a non-zero-sum game.

The concept was first developed in game theory and consequently zero-sum situations are often called zero-sum games though this does not imply that the concept, or game theory itself, applies only to what are commonly referred to as games. In pure strategies, each outcome is Pareto optimal (generally, any game where all strategies are Pareto optimal is called a conflict game) [1]. Nash equilibria of two-player zero-sum games are exactly pairs of minimax strategies.

In 1944 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern proved that any zero-sum game involving n players is in fact a generalized form of a zero-sum game for two players, and that any non-zero-sum game for n players can be reduced to a zero-sum game for n + 1 players; the (n + 1) player representing the global profit or loss. This suggests that the zero-sum game for two players forms the essential core of mathematical game theory.

Jevon's Paradox and the Tata Nano

India’s Tata Motors on Thursday unveiled the world’s cheapest car, a $2,500 four-door subcompact the company promises will revolutionize the auto industry by bringing car ownership within reach for tens of millions of people. The potential effect of Tata’s Nano has given environmentalists nightmares, with visions of the tiny cars clogging India’s already choked roads and spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air.

Industry analysts, however, say the car may do for India and the developing world what Ford’s Model T did for America nearly a century ago — deliver unprecedented mobility to the masses.

In economics, the Jevons Paradox is an observation made by William Stanley Jevons, that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource may increase, rather than decrease. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to Jevons's intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given output, improved efficiency lowers the cost of using a resource – which increases demand. Overall resource use increases or decreases depending on which effect predominates.

Dopamine hegemony ruthlessly drives the herd over the cliff and into the olduvai gorge....,

UPDATE:
Ed Dunn caught in the act of simultaneously peeping the same phenomenon and coming correct with its implications;This Car Should Make You Lose Sleep Tonight

Wizards at War - VII

Population cull resulting from large scale thermonuclear war (Joseph George Caldwell)

Can America Survive;

The thesis of this book is that when fossil-fuel reserves deplete in a few years, the global human population of Earth will drop to about 500 million people or less -- a small fraction of the current six billion. The future is one of global ethnic war and the end of the modern industrialized world. The book examines a "minimal regret" population strategy that shows promise as a sustainable, environmentally sound basis for world population. This population consists of a single industrialized nation of five million people and a hunter-gatherer population of five million.

If I simply compare the level of investment and preparation dedicated to a zero-sum, minimal regret population scenario for resolving the earth's ecological crisis vs. the systematic crash aversion strategy outlined by Lester Brown - it appears that exponentially more has been invested in the former than in the latter......, (and levels of additional investment continue unabated)

Plan B 2.0 - Rescuing a Planet Under Stress

Lester Brown's comprehensive plan is available online, in its entirety, for free here.

Ted Turner, purchased 3,569 copies to distribute to heads of state, cabinet members, Fortune 500 CEOs, the U.S. Congress, and others;

With holdings of two million acres in 11 states, Ted Turner, the media entrepreneur and philanthropist, has become the largest private landowner in the country, and his land purchases have some in Nebraska, where he owns a ranch, wondering what he is up to, reports the Associated Press.

While supporters of Mr. Turner say he just wants to be a rancher, others accuse him of trying to corner the land over the world’s largest underground water system, and of conspiring with the United Nations — to which he has donated millions of dollars through a nonprofit group he created — to build a huge federal wildlife refuge that would remove the land from Nebraska’s tax rolls.

Evidently there are elites in the U.S. quietly and diligently pursuing a non-thanaturgic agenda for the planet...,

Consume The Net

Trip the loop, make your switch, consume the net!

Of course I'm not a farmer - I just happened to grow up in the middle of GAWD'S country and used to go hunting and fishing quite often with my father and uncle and acquired a deep and abiding aspiration to one day become a successful gentlemen farmer. In addition, one of my close colleagues helps me keep my rural enthusiasm really real.

Though I'm a big proponent of urban agricultural schemes and have a keen interest in food security - my work is involved with low cost, community and Internet based telecommunications systems. I've figured out and implemented methods for folks to do telecommunications at the lowest possible price, and, to have some of their telecommunications activity become self-funding through leveraging person aggregation in their community(s) of interest, be these neighborhood, faith, sports, school, or other brick and mortar real-world social network based communities of interest.

Cuba's Urban Agriculture

These two documents are excerpts from a Master of Arts thesis completed in 2004 by Janine de la Salle (author) at Dalhousie University in Halifax under the primary supervision of Dr. John Kirk as well as Dr. David Patriquin and Dr. John Devlin. These particular portions of the thesis were selected on the basis that they had the most discussion and description of urban agriculture (UA) in Cuba during the past 15 years in conjunction with a detailed historical context of food security and public policy in Cuba since the beginning of the 20th century. The historical excerpt helps to set the tone for contemporary developments in Cuban food security such as the emergence of UA and is therefore essential. The gist of the entire thesis is given below as the "Thesis Abstract". If you have any questions about this material please contact the author at jsalle@dal.ca (Market photo linked from Havana Journal.)

Until we see a candidate for elective office make the 2000 Watt society and renewable and sustainable urban agriculture the centerpieces of his/her platform, we can conclude in full certainty that these candidates are not meaningful change agents and are fiddling while "Rome" burns - whether out of personal and idiosyncratic ignorance, or because they've been enlisted and handsomely compensated to play a distracting and misleading role - while the wizards of woe continue doing what they know how to do best.

I mean really, what good is a professed change agent who doesn't have a clue about what needs to change, or, lacks the organizational and operational skills, resources, and required authority to implement meaningful change?


On their Leavenworth County farm, Jeff and Pam Meyer of Cal-Ann Farms, above, raise tilapia in a former dairy barn. The nutrient-rich fish wastewater is used to grow 10 varieties of peppers, left. But the farm’s signature crop is basil, top, which the Meyers grow hydroponically.

An applied instance of local change agency requiring knowledge, skill, ability, and a viable social network to help it achieve its promise.

Goal State - How Do We Get There?

originally posted 11/08/07 - reposted in the context of discussion of American coalition building and genuine change agency.

subtitled, if at all.....,

E.C. Hopkins has repeatedly admonished us to think about the issue of "movement at the top";

Few of us will have opportunities to wield enough wealth, power, or prestige to change the world in any significant way. Few of us will have the political, economic, or military influence to steer the world in another direction. Most of us are just here for the ride and here to play the games the power elite allow us to play. Yet, each of us, especially each U.S. citizen, has some power and a few opportunities to access more power. And, it is important that we evaluate our current and estimate our future levels of wealth, power, and prestige in order to help us better determine what we could do to change the world, even if insignificantly, during our lives. We would probably need some idea of what we could do in order to best determine what we should attempt to do. We would probably determine that we couldn’t change the world significantly no matter how hard we might try. Most of us might determine that it would be best for us to focus on securing a life’s supply of economic resources for ourselves and our families first. Then, if we found we were lucky enough to have the economically valuable talents or skills, the energy, and the leisure time to accumulate more wealth, power, or prestige than we and our loved ones would need in order to flourish, we might attempt to help a few dozen other folks take good care of themselves or their loved ones. I suspect very few of us will be able to do more than this.

Personally, it's an issue that angers me to the marrow of my luciferian and implacably rebellious bones. My motto as a teenager was taken straight from Milton; "Better to rule in hell, than to serve in heaven" and very honestly, this ethos has informed my worldview ever since.

With middle age and dependent children of my own - I find that the anarcho-barbarian warrior of the wastelands fantasy of adolescence has lost much of its savor. While the body and mind are still quite able, they are increasingly less and less willing..., so the question turns to Francis Schaeffer's perennial "How then shall we live?".

Much as many folks seek to deny it, the fact of the matter is that "our polity is our way of life". To the extent that Black, White, Progressive, Conservative, etc..., participate in a 12,000 watt per capita society - which is utterly thermodynamically unsustainable - and which is leading to massive injustice, infringement on civil liberties, and escalating levels of unjust war - then we have a shared way of life and polity which absolutely must change if we are to obtain the greatest good for the greatest number.

Reading James R. Maclean's new wiki for Hobson's Choice, I was absolutely struck by the rightness of something he had written;

Much of the radical critique of contemporary society tends to be so filled with negativity and rage; that's not meant to disparage radical critiques per se, but a precautionary word to readers venturing down that path. Your ability to transform society in a radical way is, to put it gently, limited, and you will find that the things you're fighting against are surprisingly resilient. A lot of great radicals found themselves totally exhausted and embittered at times, and you will too. It's important to remember that the same mankind who shaped this cruel world also is ingenious, generous, noble, and witty. Always be open to fresh ideas, always seek to discern fairly, and don't forget to appreciate the wonderful achievements of the others with whom you share the world.

Which answers in part Schaeffer's question and brings me to the article I chanced upon last night hoping for a new deal which gets full back around to E.C.'s lofty perspective - and gives us a very concrete and constructive place to channel our political emphasis.

Ultimately, power holders must be convinced that [energy transition] policies, if obnoxious to them now, will be far less destructive to their interests than a complete breakdown of society and biosphere - which is the very real alternative. For a historic example of a similar conversion of elites think of the 1930s New Deal: then the titans of industry had to sacrifice some of their financial power in order to keep from losing it all. Many wealthy individuals never forgave Franklin Roosevelt, whom they regarded as a "traitor to his class," but most of them reluctantly agreed that redistribution represented the lesser of evils.

The analysis offered is original, detailed, and very well worth your perusal.