Monday, March 01, 2004

Deep Democracy and Community Wisdom Tom Atlee writes: A wise person has perspective. They can see the big picture without losing sight of the small. They can see the part without losing sight of the whole. They understand the partnerships of day and night, good and bad, the known and the unknown. They have observed how it all fits together, including their own limitations and immense ignorance - and that realization makes them humble, insightful and flexible. They are free to creatively see and respond to what's actually around them. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference." This famous "Serenity Prayer" arises out of, and nurtures, wisdom. Can communities be wise? Interestingly, a community of people (whether a group, a company, a town or a nation) is better equipped to be wise than an individual. This is true despite the fact most of the communities we live in or with are clearly foolish, small-minded, unconscious and/or destructive. Truly wise communities (some of which operate on millennia-old traditions) are seldom seen or publicized by our civilization, preoccupied as it is with bustling off to its own demise. As individuals, we are inherently more limited than a community. Although we can consult books and friends and critics, in the end we are limited to our own single perspective. We are, alas, only one person, looking at the world from one place, one history, one pattern of knowing. A community, on the other hand, can see things through many eyes, many histories, many ways of knowing. The question is whether it dismisses or creatively utilizes and integrates that diversity. (03/01/04) The Oil We Eat Richard Manning writes: The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This role, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll follow the energy. We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don't get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics. Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure. Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's "primary productivity." There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others. Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy hut really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population," Kennan wrote. "In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in tire coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction." "The day is not far off," Kennan concluded, "when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts." If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth--sun energy--to be found on the planet. As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. (03/01/04) Fish on Prozac Discover Magazine -- Over the past few years, ecologists surveying the waters around waste treatment plants have found contraceptives, synthetic musks, ibuprofen, and other compounds flushed off or out of our bodies and into the environment via municipal effluent. A recent study in Tromsø, in northern Norway, for example, found extremely elevated levels of caffeine in the seawater of the Tromsø Sound. Now the compounds are turning up in animals as well—with unknown consequences. Environmental toxicologist Bryan Brooks and his colleagues collected bluegill, channel catfish, and black crappie from Pecan Creek, a stream in the Dallas suburb of Denton, Texas, that is prime dumping ground for effluent from the city’s waste treatment plant. The researchers took brain, liver, and muscle samples from the fish and tested them for fluoxetine, the active ingredient in the antidepressant Prozac. Fluoxetine and norfluoxetine, the metabolized form of the drug, were found in every tissue sample and in high enough concentrations, Brooks says, to warrant studies of their possible physiological effects. Fluoxetine blocks nerves from gobbling up serotonin—a neurotransmitter known to elevate mood and increase relaxation—from the synapses between communicating neurons. In humans, the result is less anxiety and an improved sense of well-being. “We would suspect that some level of fluoxetine exposure would influence serotonin in the fish and could cause behavioral changes,” Brooks says. “It has also been shown that even low levels of pharmaceuticals may affect fish,” he says. In addition, in lab studies, other researchers found that injections of fluoxetine led to less aggressive behavior in fish. Brooks cautions, however, that “injection is a very different form of exposure than a fish taking up a chemical across its gills or acquiring it in its food. At this point it is too early to suggest that the concentrations of fluoxetine that we’ve detected might result in a behavioral response.” (03/01/04) Regrowing Optic Nerves BBC Health -- Scientists believe they have taken a big step forward in their effort to be able to repair damaged nerves. Researchers at Harvard Medical School say they have had some success trying to regenerate optic nerves in rats. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience they said while they were unable to restore sight they achieved three times more regeneration compared to others. Finding a way to re-grow nerves could lead to cures for a wide range of conditions from blindness to paralysis. Any injuries that cause damage to nerves tend to be permanent. This is because nerve cells cannot regenerate or repair themselves. Scientists around the world are working on projects aimed at finding a way to get nerves to re-grow. One of the reasons nerves are unable to regenerate is that proteins in the outer layer of nerve fibres are programmed to stop re-growth. Scientists have developed ways to turn these proteins off. However, this has not proved enough to make nerves regenerate. Dr Larry Benowitz and colleagues tried a two-pronged approach to try to stimulate re-growth. First, they damaged the lens in the eyes of a group of rats with optic nerve damage. This nerve links the retina to the part of the brain that enables them to see. Damaging the lens stimulates an immune response - cells travel to the eye and release growth factors to try to repair the damage. This causes nerve fibres to grow into the optic nerve. Dr Benowitz then used a gene therapy technique to try to boost this growth by injecting a gene designed to turn the proteins that are programmed to stop re-growth off. "When we combined these two therapies - activating the growth programme in nerve cells and overcoming the inhibitory signalling - we got very dramatic regeneration," said Dr Benowitz. (03/01/04) 7:28:44 PM

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