In true appreciation of your continued reading, encouragement and critical interaction my gift to you for the holidays is:
No politics today.
No social justice issues today.
Nothing complicated or sad today.
A poem about how to be hopeful with the help of nature.
Here’s a collection of images from a hike up Wahkeena Falls last week, into the mist with a sprinkling of snow. There was beauty and the reminder that there are always more chances. If you had told me in the hospital at the beginning of the year that I would hike some miles up the steep hills of the Gorge by the end of it, I would have declared you insane.
Mist
It amazes me when mist chloroforms the fields and wipes out whatever world exists
and walkers wade through coma shouting and close to but curtained from each other
sometimes there’s a second river lying asleep along the river where the sun rises sunk in thought
and my soul gets caught in it hung by the heels in water
it amazes me when mist weeps as it lifts
and a crow calls down to me in its treetop voice that there are webs and drips and actualities up there
and in my fog-self shocked and grey it startles me to see the sky
by Alice Oswald (elected as the first female professor of poetry at the University of Oxford in 2019)
Here is to crows, blue skies and actualities. I will see you in the – happy – new year.
———————————
And in case you still need more support to get through these next weeks, I urge you to try the following relaxation exercises. If Bruno Pontiroli’s models can do it, so can you! Possibilities abound!
That’ll be me!
Since all the animals reminded me of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival, here is his Christmas Oratorio, equally enchanting. Merry Christmas.
Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or fear or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.” – Mariame Kaba
I will write about the amazing scholar, prison abolitionist and activist Kaba on another occasion. Today I want to use her guidance, quoted above, to offer a few recent examples out of my “hope exercise bag,” so we can enter this week with a smile on our faces.
Over 40 camels barred from Saudi “beauty contest” over Botox! Organizers of the 6-year old competition are on top of tampering! All 143 attempts! No more inflated body parts, stretched with injections or rubber bands! No more braiding, or cutting, or dying the tail of the camel! Camels were x-rayed, subjected to ultra sounds and genetic analysis, to ensure true beauty wins fairly (to the tune of $ 66.000.000 no less.) There’s hope!
Delay wins the day! Hundreds of thousands of bees survived being buried under volcanic ash for over 50 days after the volcanic eruptions on the Canary island of La Palma. The owner of the hives had not yet collected the summer honey before the volcano erupted last September. The bees were able to sustain themselves with their own honey, after sealing themselves in by creating a resinous material called propolis. This “glue” is created by mixing saliva and beeswax with secretions from sap and other plant parts. There’s hope ! Procrastination isn’t always bad and spit, wax and honey can save you. Be prepared!
The cure for seasonal depression discovered! Acquire a Moomin rug and all else will fall into place (or at least you land on something soft if you fall…) There’s hope! My Moomin addiction is constantly served by new creations. (And no, I do not own this rug; it was meant symbolically. I do have a Moomin bag, though!)
The antidote to hate in this world is remembering its victims as one way to prevent more harm. This is not the funny kind of hope, but the real hope I strive for when practicing the discipline. In awe of the film maker Güzin Kar, with gratitude to the New Yorker that picked the short film up in this country. There is hope when people remember. (And this one probably one that Mariame Kaba would approve of.)
Remembrance (The Refugees’ Dreams – 2016)
Or at least there are glimpses that we can, should, must hold onto until real hope returns, as instructed by Adam Zagajewski, who died last March. A huge loss to the poetry community.
Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.
Conifers are a group of ancient plants that include cedars, firs, cypresses, junipers, kauri, larches, pines, hemlocks, redwoods, spruces and yews. I notice them most during the fall season, perhaps because the surrounding hues of yellow in the gardens intensify the blue shades of the trees and the mist in the air gives them a silvery sheen. The structure of their branches, the various arrangements and patterns of their needles start to stand out, garnering attention when surrounding competing flowers are gone.
Conifers flourished in the region in and around Berlin, where this photo of my maternal grandmother, my aunt and my mother (in front) was taken in 1929. And here’s your’s truly with my mom, in front of yet another pine forest around 1955.
Berlin has one of the highest percentages of remaining forests within the city limits, almost 20% compared to say Hamburg or Munich which range in the 5% league. The forests are currently under extreme duress because of drought, heat and unmanageable pests like pine bark beetles. The city government is now planting 329.000 (!) trees, mostly elms and oak trees which are displacing the fragile pines.
Pines and in particular junipers are also an essential part of the Lüneburger Heide, a large area of heath, geest, and woodland in the northeastern part of the state of Lower Saxony in northern Germany close to where my paternal grand parents lived. One of the perennial highlights of our visits was a hike with my Opa to the Ahlftener Flatt, a large pond created by constant winds scooping the sandy loam. It was surrounded by various types of conifers, which we had to identify dutifully in order to make it to the water, the real magnet: time to hunt for frogs and grasshoppers! Or skating in the winter. Only in retrospect have I realized, how much I owe to these nature walks, including my love for birds, whose calls and songs my Opa was whistling to perfection, ever the musician even without his stand-up bass.
My Opa Eduard as a young man and below, me in center between him and Oma Dora Some years later, with my sister.
The heath has been a National Park since 1909, one of, if not the oldest in Germany. The sandy loam makes it ideal for junipers to grow. They dot the landscape, their dark green offsetting the purple of their surround, when the heather is in bloom. Large flocks of sheep are grazing year round to keep the heather plants in check. You can watch it here.
Considered beauty there yet a curse here, in Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. Juniper used to grow only on rocky surfaces and steep slopes, where they were protected from fires, since little fire fuel grew around them. When settlers started to graze their cattle in the 1870s, native grasses, food for fire, disappeared from the plains as well and so the junipers took root everywhere. The problem? They outcompete grasses and shrubs, killing habitat for wildlife that needs those. They also serve as hiding places for mountain lions, allowing them to stalk pronghorn sheep and antelopes more easily. They use a lot of water, which in turn dries out nearby streams and springs – all of which then affects cattle farmers who have not enough grazing and watering resources left.
Most threatened by junipers, though, are the sage-grouse. Not only do junipers wipe out the sage grass on which the grouse depend. The birds also give anything over four feet tall a wide birth, since a taller tree could host predator birds. The places, then, where they met and mated are now feeling unsafe due to stands of large juniper trees and so they abandon the region without finding suitable replacement. The Bureau of Land Management has undertaken juniper control projects spanning tens of thousands of acres in Oregon alone, and millions of acres across the West, trying to eradicate them by pile burning.
“Several federal and state agencies offer grants to help ranchers tackle invasive juniper on private land. And the BLM coordinates juniper eradication on the vast swaths of public land it manages. One recently completed project in southeastern Oregon spanned 70,000 acres, and another, in the Burns area, aims to clear about 50,000 acres. Past monitoring has shown that the growth and productivity of herbaceous plants like grasses do in fact rebound after juniper is removed, and ranchers have reported increased flow in springs and streams.” (I’ve summarized a longer, beautifully photographed essay on this problem, found here.)
Don’t try it yourself, though: the old trees are protected, they might live for more than a thousand years—some known to be dated at 1,600 years. These trees are irreplaceable, and cutting one down on public land is punishable by a fine of $100,000 and up to a year behind bars.
It is such a complex issue in interdependent eco systems where the arrival of non-native species, or human interference with the natural-set up of a region can bring looming catastrophe.
Let’s revel in the beauty of the various conifer species I photographed last week, though, thoughtfully planted in a garden where they do no harm to larger expanses of wilderness.
Music has to be The Juniper Tree from the bitter Grimm Fairy Tale.
Today’s photographs are views of fall’s bright yellows. The woods and meadows are not just full of color but also teeming with plants that are edible, mushrooms at this time of year first and foremost (I offered their photographs already last week.)
I was taught about edible plants in a podcast on foraging, the search for food in the wild, or your back yard, or the town commons, take your pick. A young Black woman from Ohio, Alexis Nikole Nelson, provided in equal measure food for thought and references to food for our stomachs.
Beyond introducing (real) food stuff, teaching about biology and botany and creating amazing recipes, she reminds the listener of how Black people had a relationship to foraging during slavery, and how their traditions and knowledge were cut off with the hardships and legal or customary exclusion from nature following emancipation. Proprietary rights of White landowners were harshly enforced, once they had no gain from people’s survival, a survival that depended on supplementing the meager scraps of food they received on plantations.
Nelson has by now over 3 million followers on TikTok, and I must say that I got drawn into her videos, getting used to the intensely lively quality that many of them display – after a while it becomes infectious, or less noticeable, can’t say. The content is what convinced me, so much to learn in ways that obviously appeal to a HUGE number of people who are now equipped to bring food to the table even when funds are short. She is a gifted teacher beyond her culinary skills and adventurous spirit.
Here is a link to her site, where you can choose among so many interesting offerings (you don’t have to sign up, just click on any of the videos.) She talks about food as a way to connect to people, a way to show love and and way to express creativity – available for free to all if you know where to look in our eco-system. This is a key point for learning how to forage in a society where 50 million people are food insecure – not knowing where their next meal is coming from.
Black populations were, of course, not just prevented from accessing naturally occurring food sources that grew on private or local lands. There is now a public conservation about how access to nature in general is inherently more difficult for Blacks than for Whites.
If you are tempted to join the chorus that protests: “Public trailheads are open to everyone. Campsites are not segregated. Rivers belong to all!” I urge you to familiarize yourself – as I had to do, since I was clueless about the severity of the issues – with what is happening in real life.
The range of obstacles is vast.(Ref.) – It starts with the experience that you are singled out as someone unusual on the hiking path (borne out by statistics that show how enormously underrepresented Blacks are in outdoor recreational activities,) and beyond that hypervisibility often made to feel the you don’t belong. It continues with being told directly or indirectly not to trespass on traditionally White activities like fly fishing, or entering a space that was meant as an escape for people from “crowded urban centers,” often a euphemism for poverty, crime and POCs. Most frighteningly the range includes attacks on your property and physical safety, from slashing tires and tents, to actual attempts at lynching. If you don’t believe me, read up in such publications as the Sierra Club Magazine, not known for hyped-up commentary. Or the local Washington State news. Or stories about Black birders in Central Park….
The history of public park systems – culturally segregated even after legal segregation ended – and current day prejudices against non-Whites interact. POCs are three times more likely to live in places where they have no immediate access to nature, and lacking the funds or time to travel far. That is not a coincidence, given the historic structural issues around racism in the National Park movement, claims Myron Floyd, dean of the College of Natural Resources.
“The underlying rationale for creating parks was this idea of U.S. nationalism, to promote the American identity, and the American identity was primarily white, male and young. …..It was really trying to distinguish the American identity from the European identity: being a separate, more mature nation in the mid-19th century.”
John Muir, who is credited with the creation of the National Park System and the conservation movement, was recently called out for his long history of racism by the Sierra Club. For Muir, who co-founded the organization in 1892, Indigenous people “seemed to have no right place in the landscape” despite the fact that they had lived there for thousands of years. He also believed that Indigenous peoples’ villages and their ways of life should be destroyed in order to have “unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.”
Other important figures in the conservation movement, like Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, held racist beliefs and believed that parks were created for Americans of only Northern European descent.
Some months ago the American Trails organization published a list of new organizations that hope to increase participation in outdoor activities by all those traditionally excluded. It did so in the context of a historical perspective on racisms in the outdoors, a short read that I highly recommend.
One of my favorite essays this year describes how another question of access to nature plays out in our own back yard. Strongly recommended reading. It is about the urban rural divide in Yamhill County and how a proposed hiking path was torpedoed by the extreme Right. It was a locally supported trail project that all of a sudden became a hot button in the “culture wars,”now dominating election campaigns for local office, dividing a community, enhancing bigotry and extremism. Spoiler alert – the 12 mile trail project got successfully killed by conservative forces that did not want urban “trash” to blight their landscape. Its remaining proponents are receiving death threats.
Here is an upbeat musical offering to fall – with leaves rustling and colors shimmering, before ending in a pensive mood that goes with today’s discussion of continued inequities.
Before we get to today’s musings, here is an urgent request (and please share the information.)
With the grocery shelf shortages, please remember NOT to buy WIC marked items. (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) I think we used to call them food stamps.) The people who use WIC benefits to get their food are not allowed to switch to other brands or types. When those items are gone (usually labeled on the shelves) people go hungry.
Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us, Stops us, betrays us; The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding,
Even the paving. Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!
We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.
Yes, this poem was actually used by the Oklahoma Ag in the Classroom, a program of the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry and the Oklahoma State Department of Education to teach about mushrooms. (Ref.) Together with an instruction page on the biology of mushrooms and how they grow.
No, this poem is not really all about mushrooms. Some see it as a gender metaphor, a feminist allegory about the fate of women kept small in a misogynist world, asking little or nothing. Others see it as veiled description of the fate of immigrants.
“… it was really about immigrants making their surreptitious way into a country. Hence ‘Nobody sees us’ because of their movement by night, or ‘We diet on water’ which suggests their impoverished state. The choice of vegetable is witty as these people are a ‘mush’ in the cabins through which they travel and the places they will have to secretly live in.
Plath herself is an immigrant to Britain. But it doesn’t matter if she did or didn’t mean this, the point is that mushrooms seem metaphorical for, for example, women’s rights and many other issues regarding the powerful and the powerless.”
Judge for yourselves…
Here is a lovely analysis of the poem by a biologist and poet who tries to give weight to the voices of nature as much as those of women who might try to be seen through the lens of the verses. Worth a short read.
All photographs were taken last week in my immediate vicinity. Fall has arrived.
Music today is recommended by no other than the scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Here is the link to their work and playlist when trying to figure out the effects of psilocybin (shrooms!) on patients living with depression.(carefully tailored to ascent, peak, descent of the experience.) I chose the Gorecki piece since I’ve always liked it. I think Sylvia Plath would have approved.
Well, I lived to tell the tale. For a moment, though, I thought I’d succumb to a heart attack. Here I am, early morning in my chair at the window overlooking the pear tree, scrolling though my emails on my iPhone. All of a sudden something like a cannonball approaches, hitting the window right next to my head with a loud enough boom that the dog starts barking at the three-fire-alarm level. Not one, but two sizable birds, one clutching the desperate other, tumble downwards after impact, leaving in their wake a cloud of soft, small, white feathers that drift slowly like snowflakes over the butterfly bushes onto the ground.
All the way down there, the bigger one, a hawk, finishes what he started, hacking the mourning dove to death. High on adrenaline I manage to get a picture on the iPhone, then start yelling at him, if only to prevent the poor dove to be torn to pieces – which I would have to remove bit by bit… Then I run down, hissing at my dog to stay inside, and pick up the poor bird to dispose it where the puppy can’t get to it.
Upon my return, the hawk sits among the leftover feathers, wondering where breakfast went. With me still standing there, just a few meters away, a couple of crows swoop down and start to chase him. That was the end of it.
Except in my head. I could not stop thinking about the symbolism of hawks and doves, of war and peace, of the demise of the latter, no matter how much I tell myself about the necessary ways of food chains in nature. What is a woman to do? Why, distract herself with questions that can be answered, in contrast to the ones about warriors seeming to rule, forever.
Where did the hawks and doves connotation come from? It turns out it was coined, about 200 years ago, by a Congressman in this country, John Randolph.
“In the run-up to the War of 1812, Randolph described those clamoring for military action against Great Britain in the name of American honor and territory as “war hawks.” The term had talons and caught on. He was especially thinking of Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, members of his own Republican party.“
Of course I had to look up that war as well, and found bitter-sweet convergence to my last blog’s claims about the variability of historical narratives. Historian C.P. Stacey summed it up:
“..the War of 1812 is ‘an episode in history that makes everybody happy, because everybody interprets it differently’. Americans believe they gave their former mother country a good drumming, Canadians pride themselves in turning back ‘the massed might of the United States’, and ‘the English are happiest of all, because they don’t even know it happened’. These competing perspectives are the result of the different functions the Anglo-American conflict served in their respective nations’ historical master narratives.”
“The war provided Americans with a set of symbols, heroes, and legends on which to build their national identity. Aside from giving a boost to American westward expansion and growing political support for a large standing army and a sizable navy, federally sponsored internal improvements, and a national bank, the war also produced symbols of national identity such as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘Uncle Sam.’” (Ref.)
What was it all about? Well, who would have guessed, economic competition and trade disputes at a time when England was busy trying to fight Napoleon, the British blockading sea ports and trying to prevent American westwards expansion, capturing American ships and forcing some 15.000 American soldiers shanghaied at sea into their own military forces. Hailed as a second War of Independence here in the US, it eventually catapulted General Andrew Jackson into the presidency. He was an expansionist who opposed the abolitionist movement and is most infamously known for his pivotal role in signing the Indian Removal Act, which forcibly removed most members of the major tribes of the Southeast to IndianTerritory; these removals were subsequently known as the Trail of Tears.
And our friend John Randolph, he of the hawks and doves? Not really our friend, even though he did oppose the war of 1812. He was pro-slavery with a passion, with ardent speeches during his many years in congress. In 1825, he talked for several days in opposition to a series of measures proposed by President JohnQuincyAdams; Randolph argued these measures would give advantage to the emerging industrial powers of New England at the expense of the Southern states. This series of speeches was the first Senate filibuster. I repeat, not our friend.
Makes me grieve the dove, the doves, all over again.
But, of course, life goes on.
This is actually two doves, one drinking, shown from behind, the other looking on.
Meanwhile, in the old countries, Russia was fighting off the French, and this 1812 Overture is the eternal reminder….
When you catch me reading Popular Mechanics you know something is off. Well, you should know if you are a regular reader. In fact, all of today’s musings came about because something was off: my (insensible) assumption that irises have no smell. From flowers to a popular mechanics article – it’s been an interesting ride. Let me drag you along.
I have been photographing irises in my neighborhood across the last week, thinking I might do a bit on painters who were drawn to these showy plants. Along the way I was wondering why some flowers smell and others don’t, believing that the latter was true for irises. It turns out they do smell, if faintly, as long as you stick your nose into the blossom. It also seems to be the case that the rarest of perfume ingredients is delivered by irises, although by their roots – orris roots. The reason the stuff is so precious has to do with the fact that when you harvest the rhizomes you have to store them (insect- and fungus-proof) for 3 to 4 years in order for them to develop some scent.
My general question about smell vs no smell had a pretty straightforward answer: if plants are pollinated by birds (wildflowers, hibiscus and many other tropical plants, for example) then scent is unnecessary since birds don’t have an olfactory sense. If plants need insect pollinators, then they want to smell good to guide bees or other critters to the blossoms. And here it gets truly interesting: there is an insane calibration going on between what insects are around, when they are around, and how the plants maximize their attractiveness in idiosyncratic ways. (I was told across the dinner table that all that is taught in 5th grade – well, I must have played hooky…)
Let’s start with time: flowers who are pollinated by moths or bats smell the strongest in the evening into the night. Others prefer morning or afternoon, depending on who is most active during those times, bees and butterflies included. The period before blossoms open widely, and when they are almost spent and have been already sufficiently pollinated, matter as well. During these times the plant produces few volatiles (as the scent molecules are called in science speak), sparing their pollinators effort without reward.
Each scent sends specific signals, often across long distances, attracting those who are the best match. Species pollinated by bees and flies have sweet scents, while those pollinated by beetles have strong musty, spicy, or fruity smells. Successful pollination is of course essential to agricultural crops and fruit-bearing trees, so maximizing your chances of getting the right insect to the right plant is what scent is all about.
Next, leave it to us humans to put a wrench in the works. Flowers smell far less intensely these days than they used to. Selective breeding of flowers has focused on many attributes, all of which seem to have had a detrimental effect on the genetic make-up responsible for odors. Breeders in the cut-flower and ornamental plants market have concentrated on aesthetics (color and shape,)improved vase life and shipping characteristics.So long, scents….
Which finally brings me to Popular Mechanics, where I found, while learning about all this genetic engineering, an article that talks about genetic engineering of scents in reverse order. The plants are no longer among us, but scientists are able to recreate their scent with pretty nifty synthetic chemistry. Scientists from a Boston-based synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, a smell researcher and an artist teamed up to re-create the scents from extinct plants. They got DNA extracted from specimens of three plants stored at Harvard University’s Herbaria, and used synthetic biology to predict and resynthesize gene sequences that might be responsible for the smell. Using Ginkgo’s findings, Sissel Tolaas used her expertise to reconstruct the flowers’ smells in her lab, using identical or comparative smell molecules.
The smells they tried to resurrect were from plants that where killed off by human expansion: Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, a plant from Hawaii last seen in 1912, destroyed by cattle ranching; Orbexilum stipulatum, a scurf pea that was drowned when a dam built in the Ohio River flooded its habitat in 1920; and the Wynberg Conebush, native to South Africa, superseded by vineyards in Cape Town. The collaborative work was eventually made into an interactive art exhibit, Resurrecting the Sublime, which can be visitedhere, should you want to travel again. The video in this link tells the whole story.
Nature. Science. Art. All you’ve come to expect to read about in this space. Just tell me, how do I fit in the politics?
Music today is from a few centuries apart. Haydn addressing the flower and Ibarrondo perhaps a woman, but we can pretend it’s the flower. Enough flowing ruffles in the composition to match the blossoms….
One of my lasting childhood memories involves standing in front of huge European cathedrals. My mother would explain to me that they were built across centuries, often by generations of masons within one family, given that trades were handed down from father to son. A strange thing to think that you would not see the completion of your work, but others related to you might. And then the endless dragging through pews and naves and side altars would commence…. (For the record, there isn’t a cathedral I have left out in all of my adult travels – clearly I was hooked.)
The memory was triggered by reading about a parallel development in science. What would you call a scientific experiment that lasted 142 years, so far? I call it old. And remarkable. And astounding.
William Beal, photograph from MSU archives
Started in 1879 by a botanist at the campus of what is now Michigan State University, the experiment is ongoing, tended by subsequent generations of scientists, and planned to last another 80 years. What could it be?
William Beal, a frequent correspondent with Charles Darwin, was interested in how long seeds would last in the soil until they could no longer germinate – a question pressing for agricultural farmers weeding their fields. To find out how long dormancy could last, he buried 20 bottles, each with 1,050 seeds from 21 species, the bottles uncorked and placed with the neck downward to avoid accumulation of water. All weeds!
Photographs today are of some of these – and no, I did not have the patience to label them all.
Buried in a secret location, the bottles remained undisturbed. Opened first every 5 years, then 10, then 20 years, to make the experiment last, one bottle was removed from the cache at a time, brought to the lab for germination under favorable conditions, and nowadays for cell structure analysis with the tools of genetic research. During the latest round they removed some seeds of Setaria glauca— a species of millet, which hasn’t sprouted in the experiment since 1914 — for genetic analysis of DNA and RNA. It allows scientists to find out whether the seeds’ machinery has degraded or persisted, how damaged the genetic material is and what processes may still be possible even if germination isn’t. (Ref.)
From Beal on down, each researcher entrusted with the map for the location chose a scientist from another generation to carry on. This year it has been more than one successor, given the fear that a single person might fall prey to illness or accident, and also included, for the first time ever, women. Maybe there is progress after all….
When bottle # 15 was removed in the year 2000, Verbascum blattaria, a splay-leaved, yellow-flowered herb, seemed to be the most viable. Nearly half the Verbascum seeds bloomed, even though they’d been dormant for 121 years. Its common name is Moth mullein (so named because of the resemblance of its flowers’ stamen to a moth’s antennae.) (See image below.)
After a treatment with cold, simulating a second winter, a single seedling of Malva pusilla sprouted as well – you know it as small mallow.
This year’s bottle (one year delayed due to the pandemic) was removed on April 15th. So far one seed has sprouted, still waiting on a full report. The scientific interest has, of course, expanded over the century, away from the question of weeds’ effects on agriculture, towards the preservation of species under changing climate conditions. (I wrote a short bit about that here 4 years ago.) Next to dooms-day prevention seed vaults, Indigenous food sovereignty projects are a also increasingly focused on seed viability research.
“The soil seed banks underlying different habitats are “great unknowns” in restoration ecology, as experts try to promote native species while fending off invasive ones, said Lars Brudvig, an assistant professor at Michigan State and another member of the Beal seed experiment team. In some cases, seeds of endangered or long-lost plants may even be hiding out in the soil.“
Next step in this experiment? Expose the seeds to smoke. It might trigger germination in plants that thrive after wildfires. The fireweed seeds included by Beal in the samples have never once sprouted. Maybe this is what will do the trick. Other than that? Wait for 19 years to exhume the next bottle. We’ll be old. Well, ancient, really.
Today’s song is called Through the Woods – the nightly adventure of the seed-searching ministry of William Beal, in my imagination. The musician, Yasmine Williams, is a young artist who is changing the way of traditional guitar playing.
On a personal note, since I mentioned the Indigenous food sovereignty project above: wild rice harvesting is threatened by the Enbridge Line 3 Oil Pipeline approved in Minnesota’s Wild Rice Region. As I have written here before, I am part of a documentary project that tackles the issues of Climate Resistance, spearheaded by indigenous leadership. On May 6th, 6-7:30 PM we have a webinar, Climate Resistance: Art, Action and Allyship.
Hosted by Portland State University, the panel includes artists, activists and an attorney who bring their wisdom and knowledge to the Necessity film project– a two-part documentary that features Indigneous leadership in responding to the climate crisis and shows how activists are using legal tactics, including the necessity defense, in the fight to save the planet.
Registered attendees will receive a link to watch Necessity Part I: Oil, Water and Climate Resistance with their donation, and will also get a link to the panel five days before the May 6th event. Contributions to this event support Necessity Part II, currently in post-production.
Tickets are available via Eventbrite and more information about the project at our website and on social media @necessitythemovie.
(The Eventbrite site will give you a choice of dates – just click on one that works for you and from then on things are straightforward – zoom ticket will be delivered to your email.)
Remember all those times you were told size doesn’t matter? They lied.
No lies about size, though, when it comes to gorillas beating their chest. It turns out that those percussive sounds of gorillas drumming against their upper chest reveal accurate information about their size. The bigger the gorilla the lower the frequency of the sounds, possibly because bigger gorillas have larger air sacs near their larynx. This means that chest-beating isn’t just a visual display, but what a study calls an “honest signal of competitive ability.” And wouldn’t you know it, the bigger males attract the females, after all.
Gorillas stand up and thump their chests with cupped hands, not fists, which allows for a sound that can be heard up to half a mile way, signaling to females from other troops where the best mating choices lie. Not only that, it also informs other males if and when to choose to get into dominance fights – thus actually preventing aggression, since it makes smaller gorillas think twice. Or whatever the equivalence is in gorilla decision making….
They don’t thump all day; and apparently each one has a signature rhythm that allows them to be identified.And they are not the only ones. Honest acoustic cues to size can be found in the bellows of alligators and the vocalizations of North American Bisons, to name just a few, with those who have longer vocal tracts mating more successfully.
And if you don’t have a voice? No problem! Funnel-web building spiders, for example, use their body weight directly. It determines their web vibrations, so that conspecific receivers can reliably predict a potential opponent’s competitive abilities. Get that net swinging!
And then there are the Indian jumping ants. They are the first species that we know of that can voluntarily shrink their brains up to 25% – all in the service of their ovaries that swell up to five times their earlier size when energy used for the brain is rerouted. They do this when a queen dies, eliciting competition between these emerging pseudo-queens, one of whom takes the prize with the biggest reproductive system. Normally colonies die off when their queen goes. This system makes these specific colonies functionally immortal.
Not only that. If they didn’t make the cut, they can regrow their brains and revert to the previous existence as a worker ant. Oh, as a dear reader recently declared about nature’s tricks: ASTOUNDING!
Now all we need to learn is how to prevent our own involuntary shrinking of brains by any degree…
Here is traditional Rwandan music to end the week. Enjoy the sunshine!
Photographs are of things that are small and beautiful and blissfully silent.
