Category: Uncategorized

November 30 sports a number of events that relate to conservation.  The Welland Canal first opened in 1829, allowing all sorts of environmental chaos to travel past the natural barrier of Niagara Falls.  Australia experienced its hottest November ever in 2014, a tribute to climate change.  The Paris Climate talks began on this date in 2015 (see the results on December 12, the day it ended).

            But I’ve chosen to highlight Mark Twain’s birthday on November 30, 1835 (died 1910).  Mark Twain needs no introduction.  He was born in Missouri, lived most of his youth in the Mississippi riverbank town of Hannibal, and is most notably associated with the river and its immediate surroundings.  The world loves Twain for his humorous homespun stories, from The Adventures ofTom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn to The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.  Beyond humor, however, his writing was often satirical and sometimes cynical, about life and human nature.

            Twain was an adventurer as well as a writer.  He spent many years tramping, as he would say, around the U.S. and the world.  He travelled to Hawaii and across the American West, working as a travelling correspondent for various newspapers and magazines.  He wrote a collelction of stories of his western adventures in Roughing It. He spent years as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and recounted his experiences in his book, Life on the Mississippi.  He also travelled around Europe and the Middle East.  His time in England was the basis for his magical tale of A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

            Let’s enjoy a few of the ideas that Mark Twain left us regarding nature and our relationship to it. 

“This is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and spirit.  To see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, …is a sight to stir the coldest nature, and make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.”

“Architects cannot teach nature anything.”

“The laws of Nature take precedence of all human laws. The purpose of all human laws is one — to defeat the laws of Nature. This is the case among all the nations, both civilized and savage. It is a grotesquerie, but when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.”

“Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.”

“Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual harmonious development, its culminating graces-and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train.”

“To one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest.”

“Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.”

References:

AZ Quotes.  Mark Twain Quotes About Nature.  Available at:  https://www.azquotes.com/author/14883-Mark_Twain/tag/nature.  Accessed December 3, 2019.

Mark Twain Quotes.  Nature.  Available at:  http://www.twainquotes.com/Nature.html.  Accessed December 3, 2019.

Quirk, Thomas V.  2019.  Mark Twain, American Writer.  Encyclopedia Britannica, Nov 11, 2019.  Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mark-Twain. Accessed December 3, 2019.

Coffee rationed.  Imagine that.  No longer could you just get a cup of coffee whenever you wanted.  No double French vanilla latte with skinny cream!  No senior decaf with three sugars! 

            But, it was World War Two, and the U.S. was rationing everything—food, gas, clothing.  So, no reason that coffee shouldn’t be added.  Interestingly, the rationing occurred not because coffee was scarce, but because shipping it up from South America endangered merchant ships being targeted by German U-boats.  Thankfully, the rationing only lasted one year, freeing Americans to resume their coffee habit (and get to work on time and not growl at their loved ones).

            Since then, the world’s coffee habit has exploded  Coffee is now the second most traded commodity worldwide, surpassed only by oil.  About 22 billion pounds of coffee are produced per year, filling the daily demand of about 750 million cups.  The biggest producers are Brazil (by far the biggest), followed by Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia and Ethiopia.  And although Americans aren’t the biggest per person consumers of coffee (rank 22^nd among countries; Europeans drink a lot more per person than Americans), the U.S. does lead the world in total consumption (about 2 billion pounds), as we do for almost every materialistic stat.

            Coffee was rationed during the war, but we might just need it again in the fight for sustainable lifestyles.  Your daily cup of coffee (or three or four cups) can have a devastating impact on the environment.  Traditionally, coffee was grown in the shade, under a canopy of tropical forest trees.  Individual farmers tended small farms of coffee bushes in a sustainable manner that required little fertilizer, pesticides or water, and kept the soil intact and fertile.  But in the 1970s, increasing demand for coffee caused a revolution in growing strategy.  Small shade-grown plots were combined into co-ops, the overhead forests were cleared, and plantations of coffee bushes were planted.  The new style required all the inputs of modern agriculture—fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation.  Recent statistics show that at least 2.5 million acres of forest have been cleared for coffee production in Central America alone.

            The change to large plantations was particularly hard because of the environment where it occurred.  Coffee grows in tropical areas, where forests created habitats for a diverse fauna.  The shade-grown coffee farms have been called the second most favorable habitats for biodiversity in the tropics, right below undisturbed forests.  But the sun-grown coffee plantations are monocultures with no place for native biodiversity.  Sun-grown coffee also impacts soil fertility and erosion, because clearing removes the trees that previously fed and stabilized soil.

            Thankfully, coffee production has a chance to become sustainable again.  Environmental groups, such as the Rainforest Alliance, have developed certification programs based on a return to shade-grown coffee.  Other groups have developed fair-trade certifications that assure better returns to farmers and investment sin local communities.  Starbucks has led the way, now serving almost entirely shade-grown coffee.  This process has a long way to go, however, with only about 25% of all coffee now grown under shade, almost all from Central and South American sources.  Asian countries have begun consuming and producing more coffee, with Vietnam now the world’s second largest producer.  Asian countries grow almost all their coffee in the sun.

            Want to do your part winning the war for sustainability?  Fill your cup with that wonderful elixir brewed from certified shade-grown and fair-trade coffee. And maybe just have one cup today!

References:

Blacksell, George.  2011.  How green is your coffee?  The Guardian, 4 Oct 2011.  Available at:  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/oct/04/green-coffee.  Accessed December 1, 2019. 

Caffeine Informer.  Caffeine (Coffee) Consumption By Country.  Available at:  https://www.caffeineinformer.com/caffeine-what-the-world-drinks.  Accessed December 1, 2019.

International Coffee Organization.  Trade Statistics Tables.  Available at:  http://www.ico.org/trade_statistics.asp.  Accessed December 1, 2019.

Moore, Victoria.  2013.  The Environmental Impact of Coffee Production:  What’s Your Coffee Costing The Planet?  Sustainable Business Toolkit, January 31, 2013.  Available at:  https://www.sustainablebusinesstoolkit.com/environmental-impact-coffee-trade/.  Accessed December 1, 2019.

National WWII Museum.  Coffee Rationed.  Available at:  http://www.nww2m.com/2012/11/coffee/.  Accessed December 1, 2019.

Rainforest Alliance.  2016.  Rainforest Alliance Certified Coffee.  September 24, 2016.  Available at:  https://www.rainforest-alliance.org/articles/rainforest-alliance-certified-coffee?utm_campaign=cy18aware&utm_source=18vvaawarecomms&utm_medium=cpc&s_src=ADK18VX&s_subsrc=18vvaawarecomms&gclid=CjwKCAiA5o3vBRBUEiwA9PVzalPEMLPr1ousUqeggUN95pjQ8B-dhDTIV7cKNyvfCbK1xfkIDXUQzRoCjVsQAvD_BwE.  Accessed December 1, 2019.

Wernick, Adam.  2016.  Can coffee become the world’s first 100 percent sustainable agricultural product?  PRI, March 20, 2016.  Available at:  https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-03-20/can-coffee-become-world-s-first-100-percent-sustainable-agricultural-product.  Accessed December 1, 2019.

There are only a few conservationists who have achieved lasting international fame.  But there are many who have done remarkable things at a somewhat smaller geographic scale.  Today I write about such a person, who concentrated her career on one particular type of ecosystem—and made the earth a lot more sustainable.

            Elsie Quarterman was born in Valdosta, Georgia, on November 28, 1910 (died 2014, at 103 years old!).  She grew up on a family farm, where walks with her mother and aunts nurtured her interest in plants.  She graduated from what is now Valdosta State University in 1932 and then received an MS from Duke University in 1943.  She taught at Vanderbilt University in Nashville from then on.  But knowing that she would need a doctorate to keep her job, she simultaneously pursued her Ph.D. in botany at Duke, which she received in 1949.

            Her doctoral research focused on the ecology of “cedar glades,” a unique Tennessee habitat.  Cedar glades are underlain by limestone rock with shallow soils—no deeper than about 8 inches—that support correspondingly unique plant communities.  Red cedar trees often border these areas, where gaps in the rocky substrate accumulate deeper soils that allow scrubby tree cover.  But within the cedar glades themselves, the vegetation is largely grasses and flowering plants.  Quarterman’s research established the composition of the plant communities and related their structure to soil conditions, exposure and inter-species competition.  Although once covering 5% of the region, human modification of the landscape has eliminated most of them.

            In the early 1960s, Quarterman and a colleague saw an unusual flower growing in a cedar glade as they drove by.  It turned out to be the Tennessee coneflower, Echinacea tennesseensis, a species that had been declared extinct decades earlier (also called the Tennessee purple coneflower).  She found other isolated populations in other cedar glades and studied the plant’s distribution and life history.  Because of her work, the Tennessee coneflower was one of the first plants placed on the U.S. endangered species list—and more importantly because of her efforts to establish new populations in suitable habitats, the species recovered and was delisted in 2011.

            Along with becoming the world’s authority on cedar glades, Quarterman made equally important contributions to Vanderbilt University.  She was one of the nation’s first female botany professor to earn a doctorate, and in 1964 she became the first woman to chair an academic department at Vanderbilt.  She taught a dozen doctoral students, who have carried on her work on cedar glades along with their own students.  After retiring in 1976, she continued working and exploring actively through her 90’s, always ready for a hike to look at plants, especially if students could join her.

            The list of her professional achievements is staggering.  She was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and held important positions in many other botanical and conservation organizations.  She founded the Tennessee Protection Planning Committee, and was a founding member of the Tennessee chapter of The Nature Conservancy.  She received a long list of awards for her role as one of the region’s leading plant community ecologists.  A particular cedar glade, which was among her major research sites, was named in her honor in 1988; the Elsie Quarterman Cedar Glade State Natural Area covers 185 acres in Rutherford County, Tennessee, and contains a recovery population of Tennessee coneflowers.

            Dr. Elsie Quarterman won’t make the list of the most important people of the century and she doesn’t have a biography in Encyclopedia Britannica or anywhere else, but she should have.  I find her work more inspiring for the very reason that most people don’t know about her.  She focused on the importance of one habitat and its unique diversity, making sure that we saved some for the future.  Because of hundreds of dedicated people like her, our world is that much better than it would have been without them.  Thank you, Dr. Quarterman.

References:

Canopy Roads of South Georgia.  Dr. Elsie Quarterman, November 28^th 1910 – June 9^th 2014.  Available at:  http://www.okraparadisefarms.com/blog/2014/06/dr-elsie-quarterman-november-28th-1910-june-9th-2014.html.  Accessed November 27, 2019.

Furlong, Kara.  2014.  Elsie Quarterman, who rediscovered Tennessee coneflower, dies at 103.  Vanderbilt University News, June 12, 2014.  Available at:  https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/06/12/elsie-quarterman/.  Accessed November 27, 2019.

Hemmerly, Thomas E.  Cedar Glades.  Tennessee Encyclopedia.  Available at:  https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/cedar-glades/.  November 27, 2019.

Quarterman, John S. et al.  2014.  Elsie Quarterman (1910-2014), Centenarian Ecologist.  Clan Sinclair.  Available at:  http://sinclair.quarterman.org/who/elsie_ecologist.html.  Accessed November 27, 2019.

Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation.  Elsie Quarterman Cedar Glade Class II Natural-Scientific State Natural Area.  Available at:  https://www.tn.gov/environment/program-areas/na-natural-areas/natural-areas-middle-region/middle-region/elsie-quarterman-cedar-glade.html.  Accessed November 27, 2019.

I’ll say a phrase, and you say the first thing that comes into your mind.  I say, “Bill Nye,” and you say what?  The Science Guy, duh!  But we might just as well answer, the Environment Guy.  Whatever you call him, he’s our guy for today.

            Bill Nye—or William Sandford Nye, as he parents named him—was born on November 27, 1955.  He had an early penchant for science—and humor.  He said, “My family is funny.  I mean funny in the sense that we make people laugh, not just funny looking.”  After he graduated from Cornell with a degree in mechanical engineering, he moved to Seattle to work as an engineer for Boeing.   He say, “I’ve always loved airplanes and flight.  There’s a hydraulic resonance suppressor ‘Quinke’ tube on the 747 horizontal stabilizer drive system that I like to think of as my tube.”

            That sort of humor spawned his second career.  While working as an engineer during the day, Nye began doing stand-up comedy in the evenings.  He called into a live Seattle television show one afternoon to correct the host’s pronunciation of “gigawatts.”  Soon after, he was a regular, answering science questions and cracking jokes.  That’s where he earned the name “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”

            And that’s how most of us got to know Bill Nye.  His PBS television show about science aired for five years in the 1990s.  The show sought to de-mystify science in a light-hearted manner, along the way earned 7 Emmys for Nye and 18 overall for the show.

            Nye believes that science is of essential importance to sustaining life on earth, and his messages have focused more recently on combating climate change.  He rebukes the claims that one doesn’t need to believe science or scientists.  “You can’t chose to believe in gravity; if you walk off a cliff, you will be affected adversely.  Climate change is not a 50-50 thing which you can choose to believe or not.  If you choose to ignore human’s influence on the world’s climate, we will be affected adversely.”  And he walks the talk—he competes with his friend and neighbor, Ed Begley, to see whose home is more sustainable.  He has installed solar power, solar hot water, and a water-saving garden in his home (but I don’t know who is winning).

            His more recent Netflix show, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” reflected that more serious side of his mission.  “I don’t think of it as educational so much as thought provoking,” he said.  “It’s science with an opinion.  We hope to give our viewers a scientific perspective on global issues.”  Nye was co-chair of the global March for Science in 2017, and he protested outside the White House when President Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accords.

            We can expect Bill Nye to keep up his assault on those who would deny science and deny climate change.  He says, “Climate change is bigger than I am; it’s bigger than you are.  I’m sorry, peple, you can shoot the messenger but the climate is still changing.”

References:

BillNye.com.  Bill Nye biography.  Available at:  https://billnye.com/resources/Bill-Nye-bio-2018.pdf.  Accessed November 26, 2019.

Sayej, Nadja.  2017.  Bill Nye: ‘You can shoot the messenger but climate is still changing.’  The Guardian, 25 Jul 2017.  Available at:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/25/bill-nye-the-science-guy-climate-change-books-netflix.  Accessed November 26, 2019.

Bees are among the world’s most important insects.  And a great deal of what we know about bees comes from the career of Dr. Anna Maurizio, who became one of the world’s leading melissopalynologists.  You do know what a melissopalynologist is, don’t you?

            Anna Maurizio was born in Switzerland on November 26, 1900 (died 1993).  Her father was a professor of botany, and Maurizio followed closely in his footsteps, completing a doctorate on the topic of mycology.  She learned of fungi that  affected the lives of bees.  She started working on bees, and never stopped.  In 1928, she began working in the Bee Section of the Swiss Federal Research Institute for Milk Husbandry, and she remained there for the majority of her career.

            Her research ranged widely across bee biology.  Studies of pollen dominated the first half of her career, covering the relationships between bees and pollen.  In 1954, she published a major work on the composition, collection, utilization and identifications of pollen that established her as the world’s leading scholar on the subject.  Her knowledge of pollen led in the second half of her career to studies of the linkage between types of pollen and various aspects of bee nutrition, honey characteristics and ecological relationships.  As she wrote,

“The concept of bienenbotanik (bee botany) comprises the relations of the honeybees with their plant environment.  To this field belong first of all bee plants (secretion of nectar, collection of nectar, production and collection of pollen), poisoning of honeybees by plants, microscopy of honey and pollen and also the relation of apiculture and agriculture.”

            Anna Maurizio pioneered techniques to trace the pollen in honey back to the originating plants—that work is called melissopalynology.  Understanding the pollen composition of honey allows researchers to trace plant use by bees, a fundamental aspect of bee ecology.  From that basic research (her work is still the foundation of much pollen analysis) comes rationales for conserving plant diversity and controlling factors that reduce bee survival.

            And that work is important for environmental sustainability, because bees play such a large role in the pollination of flowering plants.  According to the Earth Day Network, individuals of the world’s 20,000 bee species (4,000 in the U.S.) pollinate about 35% of the world’s food production, valued at $577 billion U.S. dollars—and more importantly, feeding billions of people.  In total, about 90% of all flowering plants in the world (that’s about 370,000 species) depend on insects, especially bees, for pollination.

            How effective are bees at pollination?  A typical colony of bees includes from 10,000-80,000 individuals.  The Earth Day Network uses 25,000 as an average number, and then suggests the average bee takes 10 trips to and from the hive each day and visits 50-1000 flowers on each trip.  Therefore, one colony can pollinate between 12.5 and 250 million flowers per day!

            Bee populations have been under stress lately.  In the U.S. and Europe, colonies have been losing about 30% of bees annually, for all sorts of reasons—habitat loss, climate change, diseases and chemical pollution.  This rate of loss is well below replacement levels..  However, in other parts of the world (and bees live everywhere, from deserts to polar regions), we know little about the condition of bee populations.

            Looks like we need a lot more melissopalynologists—or maybe just apiculturists—to “bee” working!

References:

Earth Day Network.  2018.  Fact Sheet:  Bees.  Available at:  https://www.earthday.org/2018/05/23/fact-sheet-bees/.  Accessed November 25, 2019.

Encyclopedia.com.  Maurizio, Anna (1900-1993).  Available at :  https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/maurizio-anna-1900-1993.  Accessed November 25, 2019.

Louveaux, J.  1990.  L’oeuvre d’Anna Murizio.  Apidologie 21(5):397-416.  Available at:  https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/abs/1990/05/Apidologie_0044-8435_1990_21_5_ART0003/Apidologie_0044-8435_1990_21_5_ART0003.html.  Accessed November 25, 2019.

Playfair, Richard.  2019.  How Many Bees Live in a Hive?  School of Bees, February 10, 2019.  Available at:  https://schoolofbees.com/how-many-bees-live-in-a-hive/.  Accessed November 25, 2019.

When science and politics mix, the result is usually bad—and science is generally the loser, but only in the short term.  Such was the case of Nikolai Vavilov, an extraordinary Russian geneticist who ran afoul of Soviet doctrine under Jospeh Stalin.

            Vavilov was born on November 25, 1887, to a wealthy family in Moscow (the “wealthy” part is foreboding).  Always interested in natural sciences, he studied agronomy at the Moscow Agricultural Institute.  There he formed his life’s goal—to use the new science of genetics to breed agricultural crops tailored to specific growing conditions (temperature, soil type, water availability), and, therefore, to rid the world of hunger and famine.

            He was up to the task. He spoke several languages, had a photographic memory and was a tireless researcher. “Life is short,:” he wrote, “there is no time to lose.”  His scientific abilities were recognized early, and he advanced rapidly through the ranks of Russian academia and government science.  People liked him and gladly joined his mission.  He traveled across the world on more than 100 expeditions, amassing a seed collection (what we now call a gene bank) of 250,000 specimens, the largest in the world at the time.  He won awards (including the first ever Lenin Prize), led international botanical congresses, and wrote seminal works on plant distribution and diversity (today we would call that biogeography).

            His work grew from the emerging understanding of genetics, based on the work of Gregor Mendel.  Genes determined the traits of a plant, and those genes separated and recombined in ways that produced diversity in plant characteristics.  That process could be guided by scientists to produce new hybrids with desirable traits.  After disastrous crop failures in the new Soviet Union after World War I, the nation’s president, Vladimir Lenin, was looking for solutions—and he found Vavilov. 

            In 1922, when just 35, he was installed as head of the research institute that became the V. I. Lenin All-union Academy of Agriculture.  He built the institute into a network of 400+ agricultural research stations across the country, employing more than 20,000 workers.  As Russia Today states, he “was one of the most outstanding scientists of the twentieth century.”

            When Lenin died in 1924, the country was taken over by Joseph Stalin.  Gradually, a different concept of genetics took hold in the country.  Led by Trofim Lysenko, a peasant farmer turned plant breeder, the new view was that organisms could inherit characteristics derived from their environment.  Lysenko advanced a practice of chilling wheat seeds so they could be planted earlier in the spring, supposedly increasing yield.  And seeds from those plants would then acquire the ability to live in colder conditions.  This theory was wrong (acquired characteristics are not inherited), but that did not dissuade Stalin.  Lysenko was from the proletariat, Vavilov was from the bourgeoisie; therefore Lysenko was correct.

            Vavilov refused to stand down.  “We shall go to the pyre,” he said, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.”  Convictions is what he got.  In 1940, Soviet police arrested and imprisoned Vavilov for sabotaging Soviet agriculture, spying for England, and being a right-wing conspirator.  He died in prison in 1943, when just 56 years old, and buried in a common grave without fanfare.

            The passage of time, however, has restored Vavilov’s scientific and Russian reputations.  His major works on the geographical locations of centers of plant diversity are acknowledged as the basis for new scientific fields in ecology and evolution.  His pioneering gene bank led the establishment of many others across the world, one of the most important plant conservation strategies we have today.  Scientific institutes across Russia now carry Vavilov’s name, as do streets in Moscow and St. Petersburg, glaciers and a crater on the moon.

            So,the lesson is clear.  In the longer term, truth will always prevail over lies, especially in science. The struggle may produce martyrs, like Nikolai Vavilov, but truth will always prevail.

References:

Janick, Jules 2015.  Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov:  Plant Geographer, Geneticist, Martyr of Science.  HortScience 50(6):772-776.

Klevantseva, Tatyana.  Prominent Russians:  Nikolay Vavilov.  RT Russiapedia. Available at:  https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/science-and-technology/nikolay-vavilov/.  Accessed November 19, 2019.

N.I.Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources.  Biography of Nikolai I. Vavilov.  Available at:  http://vir.nw.ru/test/vir.nw/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=88:00-biography-of-nikolai-i-vavilov&catid=28:02-nikolay-ivanovich-vavilov&Itemid=495&lang=en.  Accessed November 19, 2019.

“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.”

            And so, in one brief sentence—and one long book—Charles Darwin changed our understanding of the world.  That long book was published on November 24, 1859.  Its proper title is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, a fittingly long title for a 502-page book The Origin of Species, as we shorten the title today, is undoubtedly the most important ecology book of all time and makes many lists of the most important books of all time, on any subject.

            Darwin took his sweet time getting his ideas into print.  He was born in 1802 (died 1882) to a cultured family, and  was educated as a Victorian gentleman, spending time studying at Edinburgh and Cambridge.  He drifted from subject to subject, but nature was clearly his core interest.  When he was 22, an opportunity came his way to act on that interest.  He was invited to join the voyage of the HMS Beagle as the gentleman companion of the caption, Robert Fitzroy.  The rest, as they say, is history.

            Darwin jumped at the chance.  He spent the next five years on geological and biological expeditions throughout South America.  As a gentleman passenger, he did as he liked, spending months at a time on land, exploring the continent (he only spent 18 months on board).. The observations he made and specimens he collected (770 pages of diary, 1750 pages of field notes, and 12 catalogues detailing 5,436 plants, animals, fossils and more) gave him a lifetime of material to consider.

            By the time he returned to England in 1836, Darwin was already a scientific celebrity.  He had dispatched many articles during the voyage, to be read at scientific meetings by his colleagues.  He continued to write and think, his understanding of nature diverging more every year from the universal religious thought of the Victorian age—that a divine hand had created all species just as they are today.  But Darwin knew that species changed over time and varied from one place to another—his observations of bird species on the Galapagos Islands and the fossils he collected were undeniable.

            Darwin might never have published On the Origin of Species if he hadn’t been pushed.  He was a cautious man who shrunk from argument and public debate, and his high status in society made him even more reluctant to risk his reputation by pushing unpopular ideas.  He had spent two decades refining his ideas, and he was in no hurry to publish them.  His plan was to produce a three-volume work that laid out all his ideas and evidence.  But Darwin learned that a colleague and fellow South American explorer, Alfred Russel Wallace, had come to similar conclusions as his own.  They published articles together in 1858 (and so are rightly considered the co-equal originators of the idea of natural selection), and then Darwin got down to work on a book that would beat Wallace to press.

            On the Origin of Species was published on November 24, 1859, in an edition of 1500.  The book sold out in one day.  An edition of 3000 was issued in early January, and it sold out immediately.  And, of course, the book has been in print continuously since then, selling countless millions and translated into many languages.  A 2017 poll found On the Origin of Species to be the single most important academic in history; it is, they wrote, “a book which has changed the way we think about everything.”  We are perhaps fortunate that Darwin didn’t have time to pen his planned three-volume work; as the famous botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker wrote to him, “…three volumes…would have choked any naturalist of the nineteenth century.”

            In environmental matters, Darwin’s work is the undeniable foundation work of ecological science.  The inter-relationships among organisms and their environments only matter if each can influence the other.  But let’s allow Darwin himself to tell the story, as he did in the closing pages of On the Origin of Species:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us … Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

References:

Darwin Online.  On the Origin of Species.  Available at:  http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Freeman_OntheOriginofSpecies.html.  Accessed November 18, 2019.

Desmond, Adrian J.  2019.  Charles Darwin, British Naturalist.  Encyclopedia Britannica.  Available at:  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Darwin.  Accessed November 18, 2019.

Flood, Alison.  2015.  On the Origin of Species voted most influential academic book in history.  The Guardian, 10 Nov 2015.  Available at:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/10/on-the-origin-of-species-voted-most-influential-academic-book-charles-darwin.  Accessed November 18, 2019.

Well, it’s almost Thanksgiving, so why not a day about that most American of fruits,  the cranberry? According to all the nonsensical “national day” calendars on the Internet, November 23 is that day.  I can’t find anyone who claims to have started eat-a-cranberry day or any history about it, so let’s just give the day to cranberries without any official endorsement.

            And cranberries deserve a day.  The cranberry is one special little fruit, full of all the good things nutritionists tell us to seek in our food.  It is also all-American, endemic to the U.S.  According to the Cranberry Marketing Association, about 1100 family farms grow cranberries, with Wisconsin and Massachusetts in first and second place for most grown.  Cranberry farms go back generations, partially, I suppose, because the type of cultivation—old vines growing in reclaimed bogs and marshes—provides large barriers to entry into the business.

            And cranberries deserve a day around this time of year, because, as we all know, the special dinners in this season aren’t complete without cranberries.  Cranberry sauce, cranberry bread, cranberries in the salad, cranberry punch, cranberry-scented candles.

            What most don’t know, however, is that one of the first “recalls” of food for pesticide contamination involved cranberries–the “Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.”  A perfect cranberry storm left the nation with empty bowls where the cranberry sauce should have been.

            The first part of the perfect storm came in the mid-1950s, when cranberry growers began to use a new chemical, aminotriazole, to control weeds in their cranberry bogs.  FDA approval of the herbicide required that it be applied only after the fall cranberry harvest so that none of the chemical, a known carcinogen, would contaminate the berries themselves.  Part two was a change to federal food-safety legislation in 1958 (the Delaney Clause) that prohibited sale of foods containing cancer-causing substances (there were only a few known at the time).  Part three was a series of tests of that showed aminotriazole contamination in some lots of cranberries from Washington and Oregon, in November.  Secretary of the (then) Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Arthur Fleming, felt he had no choice but to warn the public not to eat cranberries.

            The storm grew to hurricane proportions just before Thanksgiving.  Sales of fresh cranberries dropped 63% from the previous year.  Sales of canned cranberries dropped 79%.  Almost half of people interviewed said they would never eat cranberries again.  The $50-million cranberry industry, which had been anticipating a great year after a bumper crop, went into a tailspin, losing most of their revenue for 1959.  Arthur Fleming was persona-non-cranberry across the country.  In Modesto, California, Miss Cranberry burned Fleming in effigy!  Mamie Eisenhower struck cranberries from the White House thanksgiving menu—as did most other Americans (on the campaign trail, however, presidential candidate Richard Nixon ate several helps of contaminated cranberries to prove, well, something).

            Many believe that the government went overboard that fateful Thanksgiving.  Quickly after the uproar, large batches of cranberries that had tested clean were released, a $10 million fund was created to compensate cranberry farmers, and the food-safety regulations began an evolution towards more sophisticated nuance. 

            But the cranberry was out of the bog, so to speak.  Since then, governments around the world have become more conscientious about food safety, with recalls of contaminated foods an almost weekly occurrence  And whether we consider that a good thing, protecting our health, or a bad thing, creating health scares over nothing, we owe it all to the humble fruit that graces our dinner tables beginning every November and disappearing again in January—the cranberry!

References:

Cranberry Marketing Association.  About US Cranberries.  Available at:  https://www.uscranberries.com/.  Accessed November 17, 2019.

O’Donnell, Edward T.  The Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.  InThePastLane, November 21, 2012.  Available at:  http://inthepastlane.com/the-great-cranberry-scare-of-1959/.  Accessed November 17, 2019.

Tortorello, Michael.  2015.  The Great Cranberry Scare of 1959.  The New Yorker, November 24, 2015.  Available at:  https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-great-cranberry-scare.  Accessed November 17, 2019.

Pundits often say that the truly American contributions to literature, philosophy, and the arts all stem from the American landscape.  As Woody Guthrie wrote and sang, “…From the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters…,” this land was made for stirring the imagination and creativity of America’s artists and writers.  A prime example of that combination of art and landscape is the Grand Canyon Suite, which premiered on November 22, 1931.

            The composer of Grand Canyon Suite is Ferde Grofe, who lived from 1892 to 1972.  Born to a musical family, he grew up playing almost any musical instrument, most notably viola and piano, in local jazz clubs, bars and, sometimes, brothels.  As his reputation grew, Grofe graduated to positions in touring bands and orchestras and began composing his own songs and longer works.  In 1923, he was hired as a pianist and arranger for the Paul Whiteman Band, one of the nation’s leading jazz ensembles.  In 1924, George Gershwin sent a piano score to Whiteman.  Whiteman liked it, but asked Grofe to arrange it for full orchestra.  When the composition premiered in 1924, it made history—Rhapsody in Blue became an instant hit, both as popular and classical music.  And it made the careers of all three men. Whiteman became known as the “king of jazz,” and Grofe as jazz’s “prime minister.”

            Several years before then, however, Grofe experienced a sight that propelled his career even further.  In 1916, he went camping at the Grand Canyon.  When the sun rose, he was hooked: 

“I first saw the dawn because we got there the night before and camped. I was spellbound in the silence, you know, because as it got lighter and brighter then you could hear the birds chirping and nature coming to life. All of a sudden, bingo! There it was, the sun. I couldn’t hardly describe it in words because words would be inadequate.”

He determined then to write about his feelings, but composing the suite had to wait in line behind other obligations.  Undeterred, he wrote that “It became an obsession.  The richness of the land and the rugged optimism of its people had fired my imagination.  I was determined to put it all to music some day.”  He eventually finished the suite, and it premiered at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago.  “Five Pictures of the Grand Canyon,” as it was titled then, became an instant classic.

            The most well-known of the suite’s five parts is “On the Trail,” that depicts a cowboy riding his mule down the canyon, a ride that many Americans have taken.  The orchestra simulates the braying of the animals and the unsteady clip-clop of their hooves (using, in true Monty Python fashion, coconut shells to replicate hoof-beats).  The suite’s other parts are much more natural, depicting sunrise, sunset, the Painted Desert and a cloudburst. 

            As a boy, I lay on the living-room floor between the two swing-out speakers of my parents’ console stereo, immersed by the sounds of a day at the Grand Canyon (which I wouldn’t see for another 30 years).  I strained to detect the first notes of “Sunrise,” as the music picked up as the sun burst over the horizon.  I rocked with the rhythm of the mule walking “On the Trail.”  I thrilled as “Cloudburst” boomed into my ears from the facing speakers. 

            Grofe composed, arranged and performed many other orchestral works based on the American landscape.  These include Mississippi Suite, Hudson River Suite, Niagara Suite, and A Day at the Farm.  All reflect what he first saw in the Grand Canyon as “an infectious passion for the beauty of the untouched American West.  It’s become an international postcard.”

            And whether that postcard depicts the west or east, Grofe’s music welcomes us all to find the same beauty and inspiration in what is truly unique about America—a landscape filled with marvelous places, some spectacularly beautiful and others less so but still able to stir the imagination.  And so many, like the Grand Canyon, are preserved for all time through what has been rightly called America’s greatest idea—our national parks(learn more about the National Parks here).

References:

Guion, David.  2017.  Grand Canyon Suite, by Ferde Grofe.  Musicology for Everyone, May 29, 2017.  Available at:  https://music.allpurposeguru.com/2017/05/grand-canyon-suite-ferde-grofe/.  Accessed November 15, 2019.

Schiavone, Theresa.  2000.  ‘Grand Canyon Suite’.  NPR Music, October 29, 2000.  Available at:   https://www.npr.org/2000/10/29/1113160/grand-canyon-suite.  Accessed November 15, 2019.

Songwriters Hall of Fame.  Ferde Grofe.  Available at:   https://www.songhall.org/profile/Ferde_Grofe.  Accessed November 15, 2019.

President Calvin Coolidge was known as a man of few words (his nickname was Silent Cal), and he characteristically used few words to proclaim a new national monument on November 21, 1925.  The lands, he said, “contain objects of such historic and scientific interest as to justify their reservation and protection….”  And so, Lava Beds National Monument was born.

            Lava Beds is located in far northern California, just below the border with Oregon.  The park covers more than 46,000 acres, and over 60% of the area is now preserved as wilderness (designated in 1972).  Lava Beds is adjacent to other federally protected lands and water, including Modoc National Forest and the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge.      

            Lava Beds is a geological marvel, the landscape shaped by a history of volcanic lava flows that repeatedly covered the area in the past.  As the flowing lava cooled, it formed a dozen or so long, undulating lava tubes, subterranean channels left empty as the cooling lava shrunk or drained away.  Over time, the roofs over many of those tubes collapsed, breaking the tunnels into “caves” that lay just below the surface and have open access from the top.  Lava Beds National Monument contains about 500 lava caves, more than any other place in the United States.

            The lava caves create a formidable landscape.  The surface is fractured with caves and fissures that make traveling around the area difficult and dangerous.  Bats like it, however, as the variety of caves in size and extent provide a variety of niches for different species.  Fifteen bat species inhabit the monument.  The most common is Townsend’s big-eared bat, but the most exotic is the Brazilian long-tailed bat, a migrant that travels thousands of miles between its summer and winter homes.  Bird life is also abundant and diverse because Lava Beds sits at the intersection of several different habitat types.

            Native Americans lived in the area for thousands of years, making Lava Beds one of the longest continually occupied homelands in North America.  Ancestors of today’s Modoc people left an astounding display of rock art, both petroglyphs (carvings into the rock) and pictographs (paintings on the rocks).  More than 5,000 individual rock pictures occur, many at the entrances to lava caves.  The artifacts date back more than 6,000 years.

            Lava Beds was also the site of one of the most brutal battles between native peoples and the United States during 1872-1873.  The Modoc War, as the confrontations are now called, occurred because the US government forced Modoc people out of their traditional homelands in the Lava Bed area, moving them to the nearby Klamath reservation.  When Modoc families continued to return to their homes in defiance of the government, the US Cavalry finally resorted to violence to enforce their orders.  The resulting series of battles left many Native Americans and US soldiers dead or wounded.  The landscape prolonged the warfare, providing ample routes and locations for Modoc warriors to use to escape or ambush soldiers.  Eventually, all Modoc people were relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma.

            Despite its location and interesting cultural, geological and biological resources, Lava Beds is not heavily visited.  During 2018, about 128,000 people enjoyed the park, a number that hasn’t changed much in this century. 

References:

National Park Service.  A Brief History of the Modoc War, Lava Beds National Monument.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/labe/planyourvisit/upload/MODOC%20WAR.pdf.  Accessed November 14, 2019.

OhRanger.com.  Lava Beds National Monument, History.  Available at:  http://www.ohranger.com/lava-beds/history.  Accessed November 14, 2019.

US Geological Survey.  Lava tubes at Lava Beds National Monument.  Available at:  https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/medicine-lake/lava-tubes-lava-beds-national-monument.  Accessed November 14, 2019.