Category: Education

The only certainty is uncertainty.

The fascinating aspects of chaos.

I must immediately volunteer the fact that the thrust of this article is the result of a programme that we watched last Thursday night.  It was a programme originally featured on the UK BBC 4 channel in 2008.  Called High Anxieties, The Mathematics of Chaos, it is a fascinating examination into the way that mathematicians have fundamentally adjusted their views, from the certainty of Newtonian principles to the certain uncertainty offered by mathematicians such as Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov.  The 60-minute documentary, directed by David Malone, is wonderfully interesting and much more relevant to the uncertainty surrounding all our lives than one might anticipate from any references to mathematicians!  It puts the collapse of Lehman Brothers, some 2 years ago, last Thursday, into an interesting perspective.

Here’s the first 9 minutes as offered on YouTube, introduced thus,

David Malone http://golemxiv-credo.blogspot.com author of The Debt Generation, directs and presents this film, It is the first part of a documentary first shown on BBC4 Television in the UK in September 2008. The film was first broadcast 2 days after the collapse of Lehman brothers at the start of the financial crisis. It looks at the discoveries in mathematics during the 20th Century which have challenged the view that the world is an essentially knowable and therefore controllable place. The film focuses on the economy and the environment and suggests that ideas about unpredictability, the butterfly effect and tipping points, stemming from mathematics, are part of what underlie some modern anxieties about the world we live in.

If this first part grabs your attention then finding the other 8 parts is easy on YouTube.  Alternatively, the complete set of videos is linked together as one film on Top Documentary Films, click  High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos. where it is described as follows,

The documentary looks at the modern advances in mathematics and how they affect our understanding of physics, economics, environmental issues and human psychology.

The film looks at how developments in 20th Century mathematics have affected our view of the world, and particularly how the financial economy and earth’s environment are now seen as inherently unpredictable.

The film looks at the influence the work of Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov had on later developments in mathematics. It includes interviews with David Ruelle, about chaos theory and turbulence, the economist Paul Ormerod about the unpredictability of economic systems, and James Lovelock the founder of Gaia theory about climate change and tipping points in the environment.

As we approach tipping points in both the economy and the climate, the film examines the mathematics we have been reluctant to face up to and asks if, even now, we would rather bury our heads in the sand rather than face harsh truths.

Very, very interesting and rather puts the pictures of the Petermann Glacier shown here into context.

Food, growing your own!

The powerful story about how food could change

Yesterday, I referred to a piece on the Chris Martenson blog about Joel Salatin, proprietor of Polyface Farms.  I want to stay with the theme of food, and the growing thereof, as this is yet another critically important aspect of how we all have to change our attitudes and behaviours in the face of a growing ecological disaster.

I’m using a recent item presented by Rob Hopkins of Transition UK fame.  The link to the full piece is here but I am presenting some extracts and further links in this article.

A while ago I was sent a book called ‘SPIN farming basics: how to grow commercially on under an acre’ by Wally Satzewich and Roxanne Christensen.  The book describes itself as a “step-by-step learning guide to the sub-acre production system that makes it possible to gross $50,000+ from a half-acre”.  SPIN, which stands for ‘SmallPlot Intensive’ (their website is here), has the feel of an important, big, and timely idea, and it is one that fits into Transition beautifully.  So what is it?

At the moment, when contemplating urban food production, the models that are used tend to be allotments, community gardens, planting productive trees or forest gardens, private gardens or even, perhaps, rooftop gardens.  Commercial urban market gardens tend to be thought of as needing to be on a larger scale and requiring significant infrastructure.  SPIN is based on the idea of ‘patchwork farming’, of seeing unused areas of urban land as having the potential to be worked commercially, viewed through the eyes of a commercial grower rather than someone growing for a hobby.  This is a profound shift of emphasis and one that I find very exciting.  Here is a short talk by SPIN farmer Paula Sobie of City Harvest which gives her take on what SPIN farming is:

Let me quote how that article from Rob concludes,

‘SPIN farming basics’ is just one of the books that SPIN produce.  It isn’t a step-by-step growing guide, rather it is an overview book on how to run such an operation.  I have no way of gauging whether their figures are accurate and how they might translate into the UK context.  I’m also not sure what they do about slugs.   There is also, I guess, a distant danger that should this really take off it might edge out more egalitarian forms of urban land use, such as allotments and community gardens.  But even if they are only half right  about their potential yields, it is still an impressive approach, and it calls for a powerful shift in focus for urban growers.  In the wake of the recent riots in a number of English cities, I am struck by the potential of this approach to shift thinking about how to create viable social enterprises and a sense of purpose for young people.  It has certainly got my brain ticking over pretty rapidly.

As the authors put it, “once you put on SPIN glasses, you start seeing dollar signs all over vacant and underutilised patches of land”.  As economic contraction worsens, and peak oil starts to bite, this form of land use will become the norm, as it has done every time in history that societies have faced similar sets of circumstances.  The obstacle to getting started has always been how to make this stuff viable.  That obstacle, thanks to the work of the SPIN folks, would appear to no longer exist, or at least to be greatly diminished.   If you don’t do it someone else will, and they likely won’t do it in a way rooted in social justice, community benefit, food security and Transition.  This is an important window in time to get moving on this.

This is a revolutionary text, an incendiary call to rethink urban land use in a way that ticks everyone’s boxes.  I can’t recommend it too highly.

It is rather hard to tell from the SPIN website which of the books they offer is this one… so for the last time ever, here is a link to the book on Amazon…. it is quite pricey, but one to get and share with as many people as you can…

The SPIN Farming website is chock full of fantastic ideas, advice and guidance.  Website is here. From which you will understand,

THINKING OF FARMING? THINK AGAIN.

There’s a new way to farm. It’s called SPIN, and it is causing people to re-think not only how to farm, but what it means to be a farmer today.

  • Some practice SPIN in their backyards in the city. Others do it on front lawns in the suburbs.
  • Some do it part-time, others full-time.
  • Some are young and just starting out, while others are older and on their third or fourth careers.
  • Some have more money than they know what to do with, and others have less than they need.
  • Some are convinced the world is doomed, while others are trying to save it.

What unites them all is a calling to farm.

If you want to follow your calling, follow the system that shows you how to make money farming.

It’s one of the many beams from that wonderful rainbow just over the horizon!

 

Food

We are what we eat!

There are a few sayings that I would have loved to have authored!  ‘We are what we eat‘, is one of them.  ‘The world reflects back what we think about most‘, is another.

But anyway, this article is not about sayings, it’s about food.  And to get straight to the point, I’m going to republish something that recently appeared on the Chris Martenson blog.

Joel Salatin, proprietor of Polyface Farms and highly-visible champion of sustainable farming, thinks modern humans have become so far removed from a natural connection to the food they eat that we no longer have a true understanding of what “normal” food is.

The rise of Big Ag and factory farming over the past century has conditioned us to treat food mechanically (as something to be recoded and retooled) vs. biologically. And we don’t realize that for all our industrialization and optimization, we’re actually getting less yield and less nutrition than natural-based processes can offer.

Whether we like it or not, the arrival of Peak Oil is going to force us to realize that our heavily-energy intensive practices can’t continue at their current scale. And with world population still increasing exponentially, we’ll need to find other, more sustainable ways of growing our food.

“What we view today as “normal,” I argue, is simply not normal. Just think about if you wanted to go to town 120 years ago. If you wanted to go to town, you actually had to go out and hook up a horse. That horse had to eat something, which means you had to have a patch of grass somewhere to feed that horse, which meant you had to take care of some perennial in order to feed that horse in order to go to town. And so throughout history, you had these kinds of what I call ‘inherent boundaries,’ or brakes, on how much a single human could abuse the ecology.

And today, during this period of cheap energy, we’ve been able to extricate ourselves from that entire umbilical, if you will, and just run willy-nilly as if there is no constraint or restraint. And now we are starting to see some of the outcome of that boundless, untied progression. And so the chances are, the way to bet, is that in the future we are going to see more food localization, we are going to see more energy localization, we are going to see more personal responsibility in ecological lifestyle decisions, because it’s going to be forced on us to survive economically. We are going to have to start taking some accounting of these ecological principles.”

Joel, his family, and the team at Polyface Farms dedicate themselves to developing environmentally, emotionally, and economically-enhanced food prototypes and advocate for duplicating their production around the world.

In this interview, Chris and Joel explore what constitutes truly sustainable agriculture and the reasons why our current system has departed so far from it, as well as practical steps individuals can take to increase their own personal resiliency around the food they eat (in short: “find your kitchen,” source your food locally, and grow some yourself).

There’s a recording of the interview and a transcript, both of them from here.  Want to know more about Joel Salatin? Keep reading!

Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms

Joel Salatin is one of the most visible and influential leaders in the organic food and sustainable farming movement. His family owns and managesPolyface Farms, which has been featured prominently in such modern food movement works as The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and the film documentary Food, Inc. Joel’s unconventional but highly innovative farming practices are inspiring millions to increase their nutritional and community resiliency by seeking out local sources of chemical-free food raised using natural process-based farming practices. These practices have been documented in the many books he has authored, including You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise (1998), The Sheer Ecstacy of Being a Lunatic Farmer (2010), and the upcoming Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World (available for pre-order).

And if you think this is exciting and a powerful reminder of the speed at which the ‘New World’ is coming to us, then stop by tomorrow and read a recent article from Rob Hopkins from Transition Culture – will blow your mind away!

The XL pipeline. What comes next?

Full copy of an email just in from Bill McKibben.

Dear Friends—

I’m writing this from the lawn in front of the White House.

In front of me there’s a sprawling rally underway, with speakers ranging from indigenous elders to the great Canadian writer Naomi Klein. In back of me, another 243 courageous people are being hauled away to jail — it’s the last day of Phase 1 of the tar sands campaign, and 1,252 North Americans have been arrested, the biggest civil disobedience action this century on this continent.

But we’ve been just as cheered by the help that has poured in from around the world — today, activists in front of the White House held a banner with a huge number on it: 618,428. That’s how many people around the world who signed on to the “Stop the Tar Sands” mega-petition to President Obama, including many of you in the 350.org network. Check out this beautiful photo of passion and courage on display:

(Photo Credit: Josh Lopez. If you can’t see the photo above, click here to see it and more inspirational photos from DC.)

But this movement does more than sign petitions: many of you stood strong in front of the White House risking arrest, and protesters on every continent have picketed outside embassies and consulates. That makes sense, for global warming is the one problem that affects everyone everywhere.

And the next moment to prove that is Sept. 24 for Moving Planet — the massive day of climate action that will unite people all over the world. We’ve heard news of amazing actions from every corner of the earth -— from a massive bike rally in the Philippines to an incredible eco-festival in Philadelphia. I truly can’t wait to see the pictures pour in.

But here’s why it’s important: we’re not just a movement that opposes things, we’re also a movement that dreams of what’s coming. And we don’t just dream, we also transform those dreams into reality. On September 24, on bike and on foot and on boards, we’re going to point the way towards that future. By days’ end, we’ll have shown why the bicycle is more glamorous than the car, and why the people have the potential to be more powerful than the polluters.

On some days fighting global warming means swallowing hard, mustering your courage, and making a sacrifice — other days it means getting all your friends up in the saddles of their bikes to have some fun and help move the planet forward.

September 24 is the second kind of day; it’s going to be powerful, it’s going to be beautiful, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.  Please find or join a local event to get involved. 

Onwards,

Bill McKibben for the whole 350.org team

350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries. You can join 350.org on Facebook by becoming a fan of our page atfacebook.com/350org and follow us on twitter by visiting twitter.com/350. To join our list (maybe a friend forwarded you this e-mail) visitwww.350.org/signup. To support our work, donate securely online at 350.org/donate.

What is 350? 350 is the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Scientists measure carbon dioxide in “parts per million” (ppm), so 350ppm is the number humanity needs to get below as soon as possible to avoid runaway climate change. To get there, we need a different kind of PPM–a “people powered movement” that is made of people like you in every corner of the planet.

Feel free to circulate this as far and wide as you wish.  Thanks, Learning from Dogs

The fantasy of infinite growth

A fascinating and powerful message from CASSE.

(Apologies to all you readers – bit under the cosh at the moment in terms of free thinking time – so have lent on this timely update from CASSE for today.)

From CASSE, the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

Why Do So Many People Believe in the Fantasy of Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet?

by Rob Dietz

How do you feel about the economy these days? How about the environment? Do you think we’re sitting in a better spot than we were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago? It’s hard to find folks who are satisfied with either economic or environmental conditions. In the first place, the way we run the economy is producing appalling results. We have a mix of financial fiascos, unacceptable unemployment, and a dismal disparity between the haves and the have-nots. And if you’re not soiling yourself (or at least somewhat concerned) about what’s happening on land, sea and air, then you’re not paying much attention to the omnipresent signs of environmental breakdown.

Each day it becomes more apparent that we are on a misguided mission. Pursuit of perpetual economic growth is not a winning proposition for a lasting prosperity. Building a bigger economy can make sense in some circumstances, but always aiming to build a bigger economy means taking an ever-bigger chunk out of the earth’s ecosystems and the life-support services they provide. Why, then, do so many people believe in the fantasy of infinite growth on a finite planet? Is it because we can’t come up with a better idea? Is it because the rich and powerful have trapped the rest of us in their web of conspiracy? Is it because people are hopelessly greedy and materialistic?

At various times and places we might answer these questions affirmatively, but we can more commonly answer, “No, no, and no.” Putting aside conspiracy theories for the moment, there are three honest (but bogus) reasons why we pursue economic growth past the point of effectiveness and reason.

Bogus Reason #1: We think we have to have economic growth to create jobs.

People, and especially politicians, want jobs. We’ve used the blunt tool of economic growth to create jobs for decades, but do we really need economic growth to have good jobs? It’s true that there are typically more job openings in a growing economy, but there are other, less costly ways to make sure jobs are available. Growth, however, gives corporate elites an easy out. They can point to economic growth as the job creator while doing what they want without considering the impacts of their decisions on jobs.

If jobs are really the priority, then we wouldn’t replace people with machinery. And we wouldn’t eliminate service jobs to shift more and more burden onto people to serve themselves. My friend Chris works as a gas station attendant and provides a valuable service pumping gas for customers. He wouldn’t have a job, however, if he lived elsewhere. He happens to live in Oregon where the law says that only professional attendants can pump gas. In most states, gas station attendants have been replaced by customer labor and credit card readers. This sort of substitution has become commonplace in the name of efficiency — policy makers find it easier (or at least they’ve found it easier in the past) to avoid considering jobs explicitly. Just grow the economy and let Chris find a job elsewhere — that’s just the way it goes if his job is eliminated and the customer is forced to pick up the slack.

The truth is that we can have good jobs without producing and consuming evermore stuff. For starters, we can institute policies to make job-sharing an attainable reality. Many people would gladly trade some salary for more time. We can also stop the process of eliminating jobs through outsourcing and machinery-for-people swaps. Of course stopping this process would require a change in corporate incentives…

Bogus Reason #2: Screwy corporate incentives require growth.

Shareholder corporations are severely flawed. In my household, let’s say my overriding goal is to maximize my earnings. What would I do? I would take the highest paying job I could get. I certainly wouldn’t be involved in public policy or a not-for-profit enterprise. I wouldn’t spend much time with my wife or daughter — that would be time away from my career, and it could eat into my earnings (cue the Cat’s in the Cradle). If the goal is so single-focused, the results aren’t surprising. Profit maximization, whether it occurs in my household or in a corporation, produces perverse outcomes.

We know this about shareholder corporations. We know there are better ways to set up productive enterprises that have more worthy goals, but we don’t make the change. The reason is that we are addicted to two things corporations do well. First, we’re addicted to consumer novelty. We’ve gotta have the latest and greatest. People chase after I-phones, I-pods, I-pads, and plenty of other I-wants. Second, we’re addicted to receiving unearned income from investments in stocks or mutual funds. People who can afford it are invested in corporations. Their personal wealth is tied to the ability of corporations to grow. We’ve become accustomed to the idea of passive investment — we put extra money into an account and do absolutely nothing but watch the size of the account get bigger. Are we really entitled to get something for nothing?

Bogus Reason #3: We refuse to pay attention to the downsides of economic growth.

Few people are studying ecology and understanding how economic growth is degrading environmental resources. In fact, a whopping 21% percent of college students are business majors. And as Dr. Seuss noted in his classic book, The Lorax, “Business is business, and business must grow!” While we continue to tempt fate by disrupting and dismantling natural systems that we only partially understand, our attention is locked on the results of reality TV shows, Tiger Woods’s sex life, Jennifer Anniston’s and Justin Bieber’s haircuts, fairytale weddings of figurehead monarchs, and other matters of critical importance.

While we’re failing to pay attention, those who benefit most from growth — the corporate elites — will keep on doing what they do, and they’ll keep on selling it to the rest of us. If we don’t start asking, “why?” real soon, our kids will one day be asking “How did we let this happen?”

Toba

An unbroken record for two million years!

I came across this previously unknown, well to me, volcanic eruption during my research on my Vesuvius article for last week.  In that article I mentioned that I would discuss this truly giant eruption at a later date.

If your general knowledge is sufficiently good to know exactly what I am referring to, both in the title, Toba, and the sub-heading, then well done!  So to those that do know about the Toba volcanic eruption, my apologies.  To all you others, read on.

The Toba volcano produced the largest known volcanic eruption on earth during the past 2 million years.

Here’s an extract from the website Articles Extra,

Toba almost wiped out mankind 73,000 years ago. Back then Neanderthal man inhabited our Earth alongside Homo sapiens in Europe, Homo erectus and the recently discovered Homo floresiensis in Asia. It was cold in Europe, the last ice age was in full swing and reindeer, wild horses and giant stag were hunted in our breadths. Alongside the herbivorous nourishment, mammouth and woolly rhinos were occasionally on the menu for humans when Toba, with a diameter of 90 kilometres on the island known today as Sumatra, in the truest sense of the word, “blew up”.

A volcanic eruption with a diameter of 90 kilometres!  Ouch!  Back to the article,

Alongside gigantic Tsunami waves, there was the unimaginable amount of 2800 cubic kilometres of ejected ash, which, evenly spread throughout our planet’s atmosphere, should have reduced the total number of humans to just 5000 to 10,000 survivors, as the Australian vulcanologist Prof. Ray Cas explains in an interview: “The suns rays only weakly reached the ground all around the globe, plants received too little light, the average temperature dropped to 5 degrees, so that summer turned to winter and winter became deadly in Verbindung.”

Two thousand, eight hundred cubic kilometres of ejected ash!  It’s practically impossible to get one’s mind around that figure.  OK, it’s easy enough to look up the volume of just one cubic kilometre – it’s 1,000,000,000 m3 or a trillion litres!  Or for those of you in old money, as 1 US Gallon is the equivalent of 3.785 litres, then a trillion litres is 264,200,792,602 US gallons!   Approximately 264 billion US gallons!   264 billion US gallons which, in case you missed it, is just one cubic kilometre.  Toba ejected 2,800 times that amount in ash!

Back to the article,

Today we know that humans and their near relatives survived this global Armageddon of nature in small groups, mainly in Africa. It is incredible how scientists found all of that out with the help of thousands of DNA studies of today’s humans. Mag. Bence Viola from the Anthropological Institute of Vienna University: “We examined the DNA in human mitochondria, the powerhouse of cells, and thereby observed that the genetic composition in samples from humans from all over the world had to have been much more different if Homo sapiens were able to have developed in all parts of the Earth without problems.”

Actually today’s humans originate from a few thousand survivors and we can attribute the cause to the eruption of the super volcano Toba around 73,000 years ago. So it is a sort of genetic bottleneck, through which not only Homo sapiens had to have been forced, but also all of his relatives that were still living at that time but who died out later on due to other reasons.

Therefore a volcano in the region of Indonesia was responsible for the near destruction of mankind. From the 60 to 70 volcanoes that are to be found in the area today, a remarkable number have become active again in the weeks and months after the seaquake in December. Yet Toba is dozing today deep and safe under a huge sea bearing the same name in Northern Sumatra. Many people fear that if the suddenly active volcano of Talang that lies 300 kilometres south erupts, it could awaken the deadly giant.

Vulcanologist Prof. Ray Cas

Vulcanologist Prof. Ray Cas: “That could actually happen, but only if Toba were ready to erupt and at the moment there is not the slightest indication of that.” The expert does think that it is probable that one day another huge eruption will take place: “But that can only happen in 10,000 or even 100,000 years. The Earth is despite all efforts not predictable.”

It remains furthermore open to know what would happen to us in the face of such a devastating natural disaster, if a volcanic eruption similar to Toba were imminent. The way things stand today we cannot do anything against it.

Let’s close this reflection on a truly earth-changing event by looking at a picture of Toba today,

The Toba volcanic caldera as of today.

Mount Vesuvius

One thousand, nine hundred and thirty-two years ago, today, there was a loud bang in Italy!

On the 24th August, in the year 79 A.D. the residents of Pompeii would undoubtedly had very little time to ponder on the consequences of a volcanic eruption just five miles away.

Vesuvius as seen from Pompeii.

Indeed, as the website Classroom of the Future explains,

Try to imagine huge, billowing, gray-black clouds like those at Mount St. Helens rushing toward you at a hundred miles an hour. That is probably what the ancient Romans saw just before they were entombed by hot ash.

There is much material available for those that wish to read more about the devastating effects of that volcanic eruption, so superfluous to add much more here.  The Classroom of the Future link is as good a place to start as any.  What I would like to comment on is this – but first a picture,

Vesuvius and nearby cities

What is worth noting that in 2009 the CIA Factbook records that the population of Naples was 2,270,000 people.  Naples is very close to Vesuvius.  As WikiPedia puts it,

Mount Vesuvius (Italian: Monte Vesuvio, Latin: Mons Vesuvius) is a stratovolcano on the Bay of Naples, Italy, about 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) east ofNaples and a short distance from the shore. It is the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years, although it is not currently erupting.

Here’s another reference,

There is a saying in Italy that goes ‘vedi Napoli e poi muori’. Translated, this means ‘see Naples and die’. The actual meaning of this refers to being overwhelmed by what a beautiful and an incredible city Naples is. (although some may argue that what it really means that Naples is such a dangerous and chaotic city that it will kill you!)

H’mmm. Get the timing wrong and that saying could have a literal meaning way beyond the ancient author’s intent!  I quote from the website Geology.com,

Starting in 1631, Vesuvius entered a period of steady volcanic activity, including lava flows and eruptions of ash and mud. Violent eruptions in the late 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s created more fissures, lava flows, and ash-and-gas explosions. These damaged or destroyed many towns around the volcano, and sometimes killed people; the eruption of 1906 had more than 100 casualties. The most recent eruption was in 1944 during World War II. It caused major problems for the newly-arrived Allied forces in Italy when ash and rocks from the eruption destroyed planes and forced evacuations at a nearby airbase.

But for all it’s power, the Vesuvius eruption of the 24th August, 79 was a squib compared to the Toba eruption some 73,000 years ago. More on that one in a few days perhaps.

Ernst Friedrich “Fritz” Schumacher

Ernst Friedrich “Fritz” Schumacher (16 August 1911 – 4 September 1977)

Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

It seems amazing to realise both that this far-sighted man was born a century ago this day and that his incredibly influential book, Small is Beautiful, was published 38 years ago.

The book has been hugely influential.  Indeed, my gut sense is that it probably started the whole ‘green’ movement.  The Times Literary Supplement of October 6, 1995 regarded E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered as among the 100 most influential books published since the end of the Second World War.

Just a personal note that for many years I lived just a few miles from Dartington in Devon (UK) where Schumacher College was founded in 1991.  Named after the great man, it provided, and still does, learning for sustainable living.  Perhaps no surprise at all that nearby Totnes became the world’s first ‘transition town’.

Want to find out more?  Then go to the New Economics Institute website here and discover,

The New Economics Institute is a US organization that uniquely combines vision, theory, action, and communication to effect a transition to a new economy — an economy that gives priority to supporting human well-being and Earth’s natural systems. Our multidisciplinary approach employs research, applied theory, public campaigns, and educational events to describe an alternative socio-economic system that is capable of addressing the enormous challenges of our times.  Our premise is that a fair and sustainable economy is possible and that ways must be found to realize it.

The Institute, formerly the E. F. Schumacher Society, is working in close partnership with the New Economics Foundation from London to add the programs and experience developed in the UK to its own work in the US.

Finally, to get a flavour of this wonderful man and the amazing legacy that he has left the planet, watch this short video of E.F. Schumacher answering a question from the moderator about whether or not Buddhist Economics can work in the West. (Question & Answer Panel at Great Circle Center, 3/19/77.  Peter Gillingham Collection, E. F. Schumacher Library Archives.)

From ants to cities

More on the work of E. O. Wilson

Yesterday, I introduced a 50-minute film concerning the famous biologist E O Wilson, Lord of the Ants which, as well as being a wonderful tribute to Prof. Wilson, also allowed us humans to have a better understanding of our deeper human issues.

Coincidentally, around the same time of watching that film, I saw an article on the Grist website that referred to some research published in Nature magazine.  This what I read, first from Grist, reprinted with the kind permission of Libby S., Senior Marketing Manager of Grist.

Scientists have been doing studies for years that show you are more likely to suffer from mental illness if you live in a city. What they haven’t figured out is why.

Now, researchers in Germany have conducted experiments that they believe might begin to get at the neuroscience behind the crazy-making nature of urban areas.

Publishing in the journal Nature, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg’s Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, looked at how social stress affected the minds of subjects, some city-dwellers and some not.

If we then turn to that article in Nature (to get access you will need to arrange prior free sign-up) we get to read this,

City living marks the brain

Neuroscientists study social risk factor for mental illness.

Alison Abbott

Epidemiologists showed decades ago that people raised in cities are more prone to mental disorders than those raised in the countryside. But neuroscientists have avoided studying the connection, preferring to leave the disorderly realm of the social environment to social scientists. A paper in this issue of Naturerepresents a pioneering foray across that divide.

Using functional brain imaging, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg’s Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, showed that specific brain structures in people from the city and the countryside respond differently to social stress (see pages 452 and 498). Stress is a major factor in precipitating psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.

The work is a first step towards defining how urban life can affect brain biology in a way that has a potentially major impact on society — schizophrenia affects one in 100 people. It may also open the way for greater cooperation between neuroscientists and social scientists. “There has been a long history of mutual antipathy, particularly in psychiatry,” says sociologist Craig Morgan at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. “But this is the sort of study that can prove to both sides that they can gain from each others’ insights.”

I feel uncomfortable about reproducing more of this fascinating study without some formal permission to do so, therefore, if you want to read the full article then do sign up for access at the Nature website.

Back to the article from Grist written by Sarah Goodyear, Grist’s cities editor,

I called Dr. Meyer-Lindenberg to ask him more about the implications of his experiment, and what he thought might be the cause of heightened sensitivity to social stress among urban dwellers.

“On the neural level, we find two things,” he told me. “A, the neural effects are completely dissociated, so current urban living only affects the amygdala, urban upbringing only affects the cingulate. And B, these areas are associated with these illnesses. The amygdala is sort of a danger center, and it’s critically important for fear. And it is clear that the amygdala is a major player in depression. The cingulate is a prefrontal area regulating negative emotion, and it’s known to be one of the earliest areas affected by schizophrenia.”

So what accounts for the hyperactivity of the amygdala-cingulate circuit in urban dwellers? “That exact circuit that we found hyperactive has also shown to be activated when someone comes too close to you and crowds your personal space,” Meyer-Lindenberg told me.

But he cautioned against inferring that mere density of population is at fault. “It’s still speculation,” he said. “There could be myriad components of the urban experience that might or might not be bad for you from the point of your risk for mental illness. No one really knows. People are annoyed by noise or by traffic, or it could also be lead, or air pollution, but there’s no evidence base to say this is an important factor, this is not an important factor. Therefore there’s no basis for urban planning that’s grounded in human biology, at least with regard to mental illness.”

Later in the Grist article, Dr. Meyer-Lindenberg told Sarah Goodyear,

“Social status is closely linked to socioeconomic variables. What we found in our imaging studies is that if your social status becomes labile, and especially if you are in danger of losing it, a very similar brain circuit becomes active. There is a convergence of socially relevant risk factors on that circuit.”

Different types of urban environments might also affect people in different ways. “It’s very different if you live in Manhattan and you sort of live in a series of overlapping villages, if you will, or if you live in a city like Sao Paolo, in which no such microstructure is immediately available to you, or if you live in a large spread-out area,” said Meyer-Lindberg.

The social connections that are fostered in more walkable neighborhoods could help city dwellers from losing it. “A previous study found that that the size of your social support network is actually correlated to the size of the exact brain circuit we found in this study,” Meyer-Lindenberg said. “So that’s a protective factor. The more friends you have, the bigger those brain structures are.”

Already, more than half the human population lives in cities. That proportion will only increase. New cities are springing up all over the developing world, some built to order, some completely unplanned. The form they take could be crucial.

More knowledge about what exactly drives people could lead to concrete solutions that would make for better mental health — the same way the discovery of how disease was spread by waterborne germs finally ended the scourge of cholera in London.

“I think it would be important to make cities better, given that we can’t escape cities, given the dynamics of urbanization,” said Meyer-Lindenberg. “That’s a reality that we’re not going to get rid of.”

Fascinating article made doubly interesting by E O Wilson’s lifetime study of ants!

Lord of the Ants

A passing visit to the American biologist, E. O. Wilson

E O Wilson

Edward Osborne Wilson was born in June 1929 thus making him, at this time of writing, just into his 82 year.  His biological specialty is myrmecology.  Got that?  Myrmecology.  And if you, like me, didn’t have a clue as to what  myrmecology is and had to look it up, it is the study of ants.  Blow me down, there is even a myrmecology blogsite!

So where is this all heading?

One of the things that we do know about dogs, especially if we go way back into the dim and distant times when they behaved more like the grey wolf, from which the species ‘dog’ genetically originates 100,000 years ago, is that their social order, their pack behaviour, was highly stable.  As an aside, when Jean was rescuing dogs in San Carlos, Mexico during the years that she lived there with her late husband she readily observed that the stray dogs, of which there were too many, had a natural propensity to group up into their historic pack formations.  (And as an aside to my aside, Jean’s close friend of many years, Dan’s sister Suzann, today carries on the splendid work of looking after stray dogs from her San Carlos house!)

OK, back to the plot!

E O Wilson’s study of ants has revealed much about social order and organisation.  The following YouTube video was from a PBS programme, aired in May, 2008, from which I quote (that is the PBS website),

Program Description

At age 78, E.O. Wilson is still going through his “little savage” phase of boyhood exploration of the natural world. In “Lord of the Ants,” NOVA profiles this soft-spoken Southerner and Harvard professor, who is an acclaimed advocate for ants, biological diversity, and the controversial extension of Darwinian ideas to human society.

Actor and environmentalist Harrison Ford narrates this engaging portrait of a ceaselessly active scientist and eloquent writer, who has accumulated two Pulitzer Prizes among his many other honors. Says fellow naturalist David Attenborough: “He will go down as the man who opened the eyes of millions ’round the world to the glories, the values, the importance of—to use his term—biodiversity.”

It’s a fascinating film, truly engaging, so do settle down for a relaxing 53 minutes and watch,

Now there’s more to this and I do want to continue with the theme of this Post tomorrow.

So for now, look in on the E O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s website and I’ll see you tomorrow.