Light, Love, Darkness, and Delight

Two days ago was the Winter Solstice.  It's telling that I'm only getting to write this now.

Many years I write a Yuletime post about now.  I often talk about the darkness and the light and how we need both.

Darkness is formative.  Many things come out of it. The seed in the dark of the soil becomes the plant; the fetus in the dark of the womb becomes the baby.  The stars can only be seen in the dark--and candles and holiday lights pale in the daylight but shine so lovely in the dark.

It's true that darkness also brings death, destruction, and decay--but those things are often the necessary precursors to the creation of new things. And sometimes darkness brings delight.  Ask lovers or little children.

I am trying to find the balance in my life--not only between darkness and light, but between doing and being, giving and having, connecting with others and connecting with myself.  It's at this time of the year--what I see as a magical time between times, as the Solstice ends the old year but the New Year hasn't come.  It's a time to turn inward, a time to contemplate, a time to rethink. 

After many years of pursuing various Buddhist practices, I have stopped them and built a little altar in my room.  At Samhain I put compost and dried leaves on it.  Right now there is ivy and a pinecone, and stones and a twig and some red berries, and a ribbon-like piece of red cloth.  I think it looks Yule like, although someone who saw it thought it was "Xmas decor".  I am trying to take in the darkness and the light, as well as the cold and the quiet of the season.

And I wish you all much love, and light, and darkness, and delight.


Quote of the Day:  “Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.” - Edith Sitwell

Grateful

I'm back--for now, at least.

I've been way too busy with lots of other things and I'm just now having a bit of time. 

I've just finished one of my other blogs completely.  I've ended the story at Lagoon Commune--with a display of gratitude--and a hokey ending. 

I've also been spending lots and lots of time managing a blog focused on income-sharing, egalitarian communities entitled Commune Life.  Since there are new posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I've been very busy making deadlines.  And this continues.

And, today is a day to be thankful.  So I want to say what I'm thankful for.

First of all, I am thankful to be alive, to be able to enjoy my life, to be here and experience life's joys and sorrows.

I'm also very glad to have so many people to share my life with.  I'm grateful for close friends, here in NYC and in New England and Virginia and California.  You know who you are (I hope) and I love you all.

I'm grateful to be living in community.  I will be celebrating the day with the many folks I live with.

I'm grateful to be part of building community--particularly through Point A and Commune Life.

And I'm very grateful for this earth, for the changing seasons, and the trees that send me oxygen, and the compost that builds and renews the soil.

And I'm grateful to be able to work and write and make compost and walk and bike and be physically active.  I hope it will continue for a few more years at least.

I hope to be on this blog a little more frequently now but if I'm not, I hope it's because I'm busy doing stuff that (maybe) will make things a little better.

Quote of the Day:  "Joy is a heart full and a mind purified by gratitude."  - Marietta McCarty

Yuletide Comes

I missed writing a post on Samhain again this year.  Oh well.  I seem to remember at the winter solstice anyway.

And finally it’s getting cold in NYC.  After a December full of 60 degree days, temperatures in the 30s make sense.  While no one actually expects snow before (or even during or right after) Christmas,  it’s beginning to seem like winter.

The Yule (or Jul as they say in Scandinavia--as Wikipedia points out) is a celebration of winter--or rather life flaunting a ostentatious tenacity in winter--and the transformation of darkness back into light.  And we need it right now.  It’s important to remember that the cold and darkness and snow and ice are all part of the cycle of the year that we in temperate climates like so much and that spring and summer will come again.  And again. And again.  And we simply need to wait and appreciate what we have.

You can see all my other posts on Yule, the solstice, and the darkness and light but looking at what I’ve written in previous Decembers.  I think I’ve written a post on this every year that I’ve had the blog.  And I hope to write about this again next year.  Because we need to keep on hoping, keep on struggling, keep on building, keep on working to make a difference.  Through the darkness and cold, and celebrating through all of it.  That’s social alchemy.

Quote of the Day:  "So the shortest day came, and the year died,   And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world,   Came people singing, dancing,   To drive the dark away…”  - Susan Cooper

The Most Important Chemical Equations

I've become a chemistry geek in my old age.  It's surprising because I hated chemistry in college.  These days I'm busy memorizing the first few lines of the periodic table.

I certainly don't expect most people to share my love for chemistry, but there are two equations that I wish that everyone knew, because all human life and almost all life on earth depends on them.  I have written about the equations before (in posts on Biology 101: Photosynthesis, 5/17/12, and Biology 101: Cellular Respiration, 5/10/12) but this is important, and it's been a while, and I'm hoping this post will tie some of this together.  I also hope to build on this in upcoming posts.

The first equation is the one for photosynthesis: 6 CO2 + 6 H2O (+ sunlight) → C6H12O6 + 6 O2

This means that a plant uses six molecules of carbon dioxide and six molecules of water as well as the energy of the sun to create a molecule of sugar (glucose--C6H12O6) and six molecules of oxygen.  It's an elegant equation.  You can count the carbons (C), hydrogens (H), and oxygens (O) and there's the same number on each side of the arrow.

Basically plants suck carbon dioxide out of the air and (along with water) use it to build sugars--and from there build themselves (plant walls are made of cellulose which is made from long chains of glucose strung together).  When you look at a towering tree, you are looking at something built mostly out of carbon dioxide and water.  On a planet facing climate disruption because there is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, more plants and more trees are a big part of the answer.

There is a second, equally important equation that explains why we and most life exists.  It's the equation for cellular respiration, which is the process that cells (including our cells) use to function, and therefore it's the process that keeps us alive.  And it's exactly the reverse of the equation for photosynthesis:
C6H12O6 + 6 O2 → 6 CO2 + 6 H2O (+ energy)

What this says is that, in order for our cells to get the energy they need to survive, they use oxygen and food (broken back down into glucose).  This is why we need to breathe and eat.  And the process of cellular respiration gives off carbon dioxide and water (which we exhale and pee out of us).

Notice that plants (during the day) give off oxygen and store sugar which is what we need to survive, and we give off carbon dioxide and water, which is what the plants need for photosynthesis.  It's a perfect circle.  And all of us are totally dependant on plants for oxygen (plants are the reason for the oxygen in the atmosphere) and the sugars (etc) we need for energy.

All the carbon in our bodies comes from plants--directly or indirectly.  Even an extreme carnivore who eats nothing but carnivores is dependent on plants (someone somewhere along that food chain eats an herbivore that eats plants), because almost all animals (and fungi, for that matter) can't photosynthesize and need to get their carbon from plants which can.

So study these equations and thank a plant for your life.  Plants are what make the world sustainable.


Quote of the Day: "We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life." - Barbara Ward

The Earth's Spheres

While reading books on meteorology and ecology, I've found references to the 'spheres' of the Earth.  One book mentions four spheres and another book mentions four spheres in one place and five in another.  In one place it's called 'the Earth system', in another 'the climate system', and a third just calls it 'Spaceship Earth'.

Some quotes: "As we study Earth, it becomes apparent that our planet can be viewed as a system with many separate but interacting parts or subsystems.  The hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and solid Earth and all of their components can be studied separately.  However, the parts are not isolated.  Each is related in some way to the others to produce a complex and continuously interacting whole that we call the Earth system."  - Lutgens and Tarbuck, The Atmosphere, p 4

"...there is a climate system that includes the atmosphere, hydrosphere, solid Earth, biosphere, and cryosphere. (The cryosphere is the ice and snow that exist at Earth's surface.)  The climate system involves the exchanges of energy and moisture that occur among the five spheres." - ibid, p 321

"The biosphere or ecosphere merges imperceptibly (that is, without sharp boundaries) into the lithosphere (the rocks, sediments, mantle, and core of the earth), the hydrosphere (surface and ground water), and the atmosphere, the other major subdivisions of Spaceship Earth." - Eugene Odum, Ecology: A Bridge Between Science and Society, p 31

As I've been reading books on geology, soil science, meteorology, and now, ecology (probably the subject of my next post), I've become more and more aware of how connected they all are.  I tried to get that across in my post on The Chemistry of the World, 8/2/13, where I talked about how plants use minerals from the Earth's crust (the lithosphere) and chemicals from the atmosphere (especially carbon dioxide and nitrogen) as well as water (from the hydrosphere) to grow from, and how we then get those same elements from the plants.  And, as I've talked about in my posts on composting (see for example, Thinking in Circles, 1/6/13), eventually we return those elements back to the earth.

It's interesting thinking about these spheres in terms of climate change as well.  The book on The Atmosphere listed the elements in the atmosphere by percentages and parts per million.  They listed Carbon Dioxide (CO2) as 0.036% or 360 parts per million.  The book has a copyright of 1998.  The news this year is that CO2 in the atmosphere has just reached 400 ppm.  The book also states that "...glacial ice is the Earth's largest reservoir of water outside of the ocean, accounting for 85 percent of the planet's fresh water.  ... As glaciers are composed of solid water, they are usually considered to be part of the hydrosphere.  Sometimes Earth's ice is placed in it's own 'sphere',the cryosphere (cryo is from the Greek for 'icy cold')."  It occurs to me with the rate that the glaciers are melting, that distinction may not be that relevant for long.

It's all only one planet and everything is connected with everything else--and everything changes everything else.  The boundaries between what we call living things and the systems of air, rock, water, and ice aren't as great as we might think.


Quote of the Day:  "The biosphere includes all life on Earth and penetrates those parts of the solid Earth, hydrosphere, and atmosphere in which living organisms can be found.  ...it should be emphasized that organisms do more than just respond to their physical environment.  Indeed, through countless interactions, life-forms help maintain and alter their physical environment. Without life, the makeup and nature of the solid Earth, hydrosphere, and atmosphere would be very different.  ...
"Humans are part of the Earth system, a system in which the living and nonliving components are entwined and interconnected.  Therefore our actions produce changes in all of the other parts." - Frederick Lutgens and Edward Tarbuck

Weather

A few years ago, I realized that I had a basic understanding of most of the sciences.  A big exception was meteorology.

I would look at those weather maps and glaze over.  High pressure area, low pressure area, warm fronts, cold fronts, occluded fronts, what did it all mean?  What was with all those different types of clouds?  And how could anyone even try to predict the weather?  (Unfortunately, this post won't try to explain how to predict the weather.  I will list some references that you can get more information about weather prediction from if you want to learn more.)  I vowed that at some point I'd study the atmosphere the way that I'd studied oceans, lakes, and rivers a few years ago, and biology last year.

This summer, at a time when I was having trouble finding more books on soil science, and after studying as much basic geology as I wanted, I decided it was a good time to study meteorology, the atmosphere, and the weather.

To begin with, what causes the weather, the winds in particular, and the complexity of the weather in general, is a variety of factors in the way that the sun heats the earth. The first and most basic factor is the shape of the earth, which is a sphere.  The sun's rays strike and heat up the atmosphere around the equator more than at either of the poles.  This is because the angle of the sun's rays is more direct in the tropics (close to 90 degrees at noon) than it is at the poles (where it might be, perhaps, 30 degrees).  So, as we all know, it's a lot hotter in the tropics than it is within the arctic circle.  When air is heated, it rises (ask someone who lives in a third floor apartment), and when it's cold, it sinks.  The warm air rising causes the air pressure to fall (the area becomes a low pressure zone) and the cold air sinking causes the pressure to rise (creating a high pressure area). 

If the earth were a simple ball and the sun revolved around it, this would mean air would be constantly moving from the tropics to the poles. (And air moving is, of course, wind.)  But the earth does revolve and this causes the winds to shift (in several zones).  In the northern hemisphere, this causes winds blow from west to east.  (I had learned that in New England, our weather usually comes in from the west--in this case, New York.  Now I realize that weather can travel all across the continent, beginning at the Pacific Ocean.  In Europe, the weather comes off the Atlantic and moves west.)  But the earth isn't a perfect little ball.  To begin with, two thirds of it is water, mostly the oceans.  The water takes longer to heat up and longer to cool down than the earth.  (Ask anyone who lives near the ocean.)  Then there are mountains and valleys--not to mention concrete cities that form little heat islands.  The upshot of all this complexity is our ever changing (and difficult to predict) weather.

When a warm, low-pressure area, encounters a cold, high pressure area, it creates a front.  (This was figured out during World War I by Norwegian researchers with battles on their minds.)  If warm air is in charge, it's a warm front.  If the cold air advances, it's a cold front.  If it's more complex, with cold air and warm air 'battling it out', it's an occluded front.

I could write a whole post on clouds--but I won't.  I've got a lot more things I want to write on (including more science).  The basics are that there are three main types of clouds, cirrus (high, wispy clouds made mostly of ice-crystals), stratus clouds (a layer of clouds, just hanging there--if it comes all the way down to the ground, you've got fog), and cumulus clouds (big, white, puffy--and often fair weather--clouds).  These are subdivided into ten categories: cirrus, cirrostratus, and cirrocumulus (the high atmosphere clouds), altocumulus and altostratus (the middle atmosphere clouds), stratus, stratocumulus, and nimbostratus (the low clouds), and cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds (which develop vertically, that is, up).  Obviously many of these clouds are combinations of the basic three. 'Alto' means high in Latin, but this describes the middle level clouds. More importantly, 'nimbus' refers to a rain cloud.  The nimbostratus are your ordinary rainclouds, the cumulonimbus are 'thunderclouds' bringing lightning, and often squalls, hail, and occasionally tornadoes.

This is just the slightest bit of meteorology.  I've been reading a lot of books on the subject, but there are two in particular that I'd recommend.  One is a textbook on the subject that I got out of the library:  The Atmosphere by Frederick Lutgens and Edward Tarbuck.  The other is a more readable (and sometimes humorous) treatment that was loaned to me by my brother, Spencer Christian's Weather Book by Spencer Christian with Tom Biracree.

I know I originally said that I was going to write three posts on science.  I'm still reading and learning and I want to write a few more.  Next, I'll talk about the earth's five spheres.


Quote of the Day: "The sun is the source of almost all the energy that has, is, and ever will be used on Earth... Because our world is solar powered, the sun is the engine of the global weather machine." - Spencer Christian

The Chemistry of the World

This post is a lot more geeky than most of my writings and most people won't lose much by skipping it.  On the other hand, if you want some insight into the way that the natural world works, you might find this post useful.

I'm going to start with four tables that will be the basis for my discussion.


Elements Essential to Human Beings
(by volume)

• Oxygen
• Carbon
• Hydrogen
• Nitrogen
• Calcium
• Phosphorus
• Potassium
• Sulfur
• Sodium
• Chlorine
• Magnesium
• Iron
• Manganese
• Iodine
• Silicon
• Florine
• Copper
• Zinc

Elements Essential for Plant Growth

• Carbon
• Hydrogen
• Oxygen
• Nitrogen
• Phosphorus
• Potassium
• Sulfur
• Calcium
• Magnesium
• Iron
• Zinc
• Manganese
• Copper
• Boron
• Molybdenum
• Chlorine
• Nickel
• Silicon
• Sodium
• Vanadium
• Cobalt
• Iodine

Elements that Make Up the Earth's Crust
(by percentage)

• Oxygen
• Silicon
• Aluminum
• Iron
• Calcium
• Sodium
• Potassium
• Magnesium
• Titanium
• Hydrogen

Constituents of the Atmosphere
(by percentage)

• Nitrogen
• Oxygen
• Argon
• Carbon Dioxide
• Neon
• Helium
• Methane
• Krypton
• Hydrogen

Let's start with the first two lists.  The elements essential to humans are very similar to the elements necessary for plant growth.  The order of some of the initial elements is slightly different and it's obvious that plants need a lot less chlorine and sodium than humans (in fact, some scientists question whether plants need sodium, or any of the last five elements on that list, at all).

The similarities between the first two lists shouldn't be surprising.  Humans get most of what we need from plants.  (See my posts on Biology 101: Photosynthesis, 5/17/12, and Biology 101: Cellular Respiration, 5/10/12, for the details of our essential chemical interactions.)  Where do plants get these elements?  The most important elements come from the air (atmosphere) and the water in the soil.  Plants take in carbon dioxide and water and use the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen from them to create sugars.  (Again, see my post on Photosynthesis.) They then use these sugars as the basis to build more complex chemicals (for example, cellulose which makes up plant walls).

Plants also get nitrogen from the atmosphere--but not directly.  As I wrote in my last post (Soil Science, 7/20/13), the soil is filled with pores that contain air and water. Bacteria in the soil convert nitrogen (N2) to ammonium (NH4+), and then to nitrite (NO2-) and nitrate (NO3-).  These ions (as they're called) are easier for the plant to take up.  (A small amount of the nitrogen in the atmosphere is converted by lightning into nitrous oxide--N2O--which gets carried into the soil by the rain and the plants can also take up.)  This process of conversion which is so important to plants is called the nitrogen cycle.  (There is also a carbon cycle and a hydrologic or water cycle that carbon and carbon dioxide as well as water go through.)

The rest of the elements come through the soil.  As I explained in my last post (Soil Science), soil is made mostly of broken down rock.  If you look at the table of elements in the earth's crust, you'll notice oxygen is the top element (and is, in fact, in one of the first three categories on all four lists).  But the next two mystified me for a while.  Silicon is at best a trace and relatively unimportant element for humans and plants and aluminum isn't used by them at all.  Then I discovered that silicon and aluminum are bound tightly to the oxygen in the compounds found in rocks.  However, the next five elements (iron, calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium) are, along with sulfur and phosphorus, the most important elements in living creatures (well, sodium isn't so essential for plants) after the basic carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. It turns out that these elements aren't so tightly bound to the rock.  Ions (parts of compounds that are separated and thus have a charge) come loose.  The ions of these five elements (all metals) are positively charged and known as 'cations'.  (Negatively charged ions, such as chlorine, are known as 'anions'.)  One of the main reasons that humus and clay in soil (see my last post) are so important is that they have negatively charged areas that can hold these metal ions.  (This is known as the Cation-Exchange Capacity of the soil and is very important in understanding soil and plant nutrition.)  The roots of the plants exchange hydrogen ions (also positively charged) for these essential metal ions.

The whole thing is very delicately balanced and is, of course, circular.  (See my post on Thinking in Circles, 1/6/13.)  It makes me convinced that the whole earth is just one giant ecosystem.  Gaia.  We live here--and we live here because of the plants, and the rocks, and the soil, and the atmosphere.  It's all connected.

Next, the weather.


Quote of the Day: "We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity." - Margaret J. Wheatley

Soil Science

Now for a three part digression back to Science World. 

When I was at Dancing Rabbit, I discovered that they had a pretty good library.  I spent quite a bit of time there reading various books.  One thing they had a lot of were books on soil science.  (Which make a lot of sense since many people there were into growing food.)

As I was looking through the books, I realized that a lot of the things I'm interested in (composting--see my post Thinking in Circles, 1/6/13, humanure--see Humanure, 1/10/13, and growing food--see Gardening as Social Change, 5/7/10) were related to soil and that soil science was a very complex discipline involving the sciences of geology, botany, microbiology, ecology, and a lot of chemistry. (I will write more about chemistry in my next post.)   I've also written about extensively about soil and my interest in it before--see Food (Soil and Seeds), 5/13/09, and especially The Story of Soil, 3/13/10.  This post will be a recap of a lot of that.

Soil science begins with rock. Due to water and wind the rock is broken down or weathered.  The fractured rock becomes boulders, stones, cobble, and gravel.  This collection of loose mineral material is called 'regolith'.  This is the 'parent material' from which soil is born.

As even the gravel is pulverized, it's broken into the grains which become soil: sand, silt, and clay, each finer than the one before.  A soil of mostly clay won't drain water very well, a soil of mostly sand won't hold water and drains too quickly.  Loam, the best soil for growing things is 40% sand, 40% silt, and 20% clay.  (A little clay goes a long way.)

The most important element in the soil, both to hold water and for plant growth, is the organic matter, also known as humus.  This is the endpoint of things like compost and humanure.

About half of typical soil is solid material (sand, silt, clay, and humus) and half is air and water, which is also very important to the health of plants, since roots need to breath and take in water.  Pores in the soil (the spaces between soil particles) is where the water and air reside.

"Good structure allows the soil to retain adequate water as well as drain excess water; promotes ease of seedling emergence, root penetration, and tuber growth; air movement; and erosion control."  (from Eash, Green, Razvi, and Bennett, Soil Science Simplified, Fifth Edition--this is a good reference book on soil science that I got out of the public library and have been reading since I got back from Dancing Rabbit. It's not one of the books I read while I was there.)

There are also a lot of creatures that live in the soil, ranging from microorganisms such as bacteria, actinomycetes, algae, fungi, mycorrhizae (fungi that live in or around the roots of plants and provide nutrients and water for the plants), protozoa, and nematodes,  (a really good book about all of this is Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, a book I did read while I was at Dancing Rabbit) to larger organisms such as earthworms, springtails, mites, pill bugs, sow bugs, ants, and even larger animals like mice, shrews, rabbits, and moles.

There's a lot more I'm learning about soil chemistry (see my next post), erosion, and types of soil, but this is the basics.  If we are going to focus on the needs of people (which I think any radical social change is going to need to do), we have to realize that plants provide our food and air and basically keep us alive.  Soil is what keeps plants alive.


Quote of the Day:  "The soil is the lifeblood of your land and, therefore, you." - Nicole Faires