Maggie and Eliza, dazzling. If it weren't for the two of you, 5 months from now this would still be a concept. Maggie, you are the sperm to my egg, and Eliza, the placenta to take ground on. Welcome Earth Chat, our newly formed zygote.

Now, onto the topic.. I thought since everyone is going to be in very different places over break, it be a great place to contemplate what the experiences did for us. I'll check in with more later, but feel free to start, I'm new at this and don't really know what I'm doing.

I think that's a great idea... I'm sure that going to the heart of where costs are externalized and the air is never clean will give me plenty to say. You guys are amazing and I can't wait to see what this will become.

A zygote is the perfect way to describe this, Lindsi; zygote comes from a Greek word that literally means "joined," or "to join"  (I'll be honest, I only know Latin- that I wikipediaed).  I don't think there's a more appropriate mascot for this tangle, because when it comes down to it the sharing of ideas is what will drive this new wave of environmentalism (if it's even a wave and if it's even environmentalism, but hopefully we'll figure that out).  So here's the seed that I've brought back from Ghana to share with you- the internet situation there wasn't ideal, so I'm going to transcribe part of my journal entry from Tuesday, March 18, our second day there:

We've learned in Environment and Society about a concept called "distancing." This is what we do when we separate ourselves from the things we consume or the waste we dispose of.  When we learned this,I was struck with a sort of "yeah, that makes so much sense.  That's why people can do things that they know are harmful to others and to their own environment."  But today I actually experienced its effects and though I knew about distancing I was still struck by the revelation as if the concept were totally new to me.

We were in the Royal Botanical Gardens, outside of Accra and away from the city.  We took a tour of the garden, led by a guide who showed us medicinal plants, some native to Ghana but most from China or India, thriving in this similiar climate.  The one thing that sticks out in my mind is the cinnamon tree.  How many times have I eaten cinnamon- sprinkled it on my cream-of-wheat, put it in my coffee, baked with it...  Although I wouldn't say that cinnamon is an integral part of my life, it is certainly a part of it, and yet I had never seen a cinnamon tree before.  I've seen the rolled-up pieces of bark, nicely packaged in a plastic box and labelled accordingly.  But I'd nvere seen the tree -- I could have easily looked up a picture of a tree on-line but I never have.

Besides, looking at a picture isn't the same as actually seeing the tree; touching its bark, feeling the rough, warm life beneath your palm and smelling the sweet cinnamon fibres when you scratch the bark away.  It's not the same as actually standing in the shade underneath its branches and looking up at the patches of sky that dance bright between the dark, shifting leaves.  Until today I did not know the cinnamon tree, I only knew cinnamon.  That's what happens with distancing.  When I first walked up to the tree it was just a tree, no different from any other.  The guide peeled away some bark and had us guess what we thought it was.  He shook his head and chuckled as everyone guessed wrong-- we guessed wrong for the camphor (Vicks Vapor rub), lemongrass (citronella), and shea butter too.  Christmas, someone said-- "think Christmas," that's what the scent of the bare, exposed trunk reminded them of.  Eventually someone guessed cinnamon.

It was just a tree but as soon as I found out that it was a cinnamon tree my view of it changed entirely.  This is what had been spicing my pumpkin pies for nineteen Thanksgivings, creating a scent that is so integral to my memories that times of festivity are brought to mind at slightest whiff of it.  Just a tree.  Hardly anyone who uses cinnamon knows the tree.  We are all distanced from it...(I'll stop transcribing here).

And honestly I'm already beginning to forget the smell of the bark- it's sweeter when it's alive, less harsh.  The trunk had large spots on it, I think- big like giraffe spots.  I can't remember the shape of the leaves.  But now that I'm back in Manhattan what does it matter?  I was foolish to think that I could know the cinnamon tree after seeing it one time, after one brief encounter.  Am I free of distancing?  Not at all, and it's dangerous to think so.  Maybe if I'm lucky the next time I'm in Think Coffee and I'm about to grab the tin with "cinnamon" written on it in black Sharpie, I'll be reminded of Ghana and the welcome shock I recieved there in the Royal Botanical Gardens.  And now, in the aftermath of that shock which made me realize that we can only know that which we see continually from its beginnings-- that which we can feel and create and be a part of-- I have to wonder, is there anything that I am not distant from?

wow.  i just realized the incredible length of that last post. sorry- I promise to try to keep them shorter :/

it certainly is strange to be proximate to so much in this huge metropolis, but not to feel connected to foundational components, like this 'ere cinnamon tree. more to say about this later.

"But now that I'm back in Manhattan what does it matter?  I was foolish to think that I could know the cinnamon tree after seeing it one time, after one brief encounter."  

-Now, while i like your whole post, this little excerpt I think is brilliant. It says so much. It talks about the distances in a few different ways. First, now that you're back in New York, what does it matter? Of course it is not good from our perspectives that we are distancing ourselves from the environment because, well, we study it. But for the average person, they look at those trips to the Botanical Gardens as their moment with nature. They don't think they *should* be any closer to it, especially when they live in a city like this one. With so many other important things to fill their heads, do they really need to clog it up with what a cinnamon tree is? (this I say 'of course' to)

Secondly coming from this quote of yours, the idea of knowing the cinnamon tree. I think it's very interesting the way you put this. We can look at the same example of someone going to visit Botanical gardens. For many of them, they will only do this once and only be exposed to all of these different plants once. Is this enough to really understand the plants? NO! I should actually look into this for our group project, which is in Zoos and Leo the Snow Leopard. This brings in the question of what are our zoos and gardens really doing for us other than giving us the false sense that we are becoming more familiar with our environment? Could this really deter us from getting to know these things on a more intimate level, or we we know even less about our environment if we didn't have them?

Both of these part bring me, ultimately, to the discussion of an ecovillage. It seems the environment needs to be brought into the cities, to become a more integral part. This would, hopefully, solve the problem that once back in the city, nature has no place, and nothing we think or learn about it matters. This is another critique you could take from those vertical cities (the ones discussed in Tyler's class last semester). By only living in a city and having nature on the outside, will this result in us separating ourselves even more from our environment?

These are all pretty short responses; there is much more to say, but I'd like to quickly write what my trip made me think before this gets too long to read.

I went to the Netherlands for break, and what shocked me the most was the city infrastructure. Transportation, recycling, not bringing a bag to the supermarket. All of these things are not only practiced by the people, but they are the way society is run. In the middle of Utrecht, along with others, there is this area with rows of 'trash bins' for different kinds of recycling. Here you can separate out your colors of glass and your textiles, along with your cardboard and everything else. Yes, yes, we have these in the states, but they usually require you to drive to a drop off center somewhere. Why not in the middle of the city, in the middle of times square? They were not ugly, actually quite the opposite, designed very attractively.

Also, the other examples of grocery stores not having a bag for you, if you don't bring one you must either buy or go home juggling all of your items. Whole Foods will actually start this with plastics bags in Earth Day, but they will still have paper. This serves not only the purpose of not using bags, but of people buying less. When you have a set area in which your food can fit, you can only buy so much. I know this happens to me when I go shopping and can only carry a certain amount on my bike...

which leads me to the transportation. The streets were designed not only separating bikers, bus also having many places where there were (recognized unlike new york) separate bus lanes. This and the light rails..I could go on, but this post is getting long. The point I want to make, or rather the question I want to ask, is why has the Netherlands, and the rest of Europe really, done such a good job with 'reinventing' (let's bring gottlieb into this) their cities considering their much older existing infrastructure? We are struggling to make these changes to our cities that have been around for hundreds fewer years and should be easier to redesign. One thought I have on this subject is the pace at which they developed. I have an idea that maybe because they developed earlier, when everything wasn't this constant race to build the fastest, they innately have a better infrastructure that is more suitable to grow with its peoples' needs. This worries me when I think of todays developing countries, who are at risk of making the same mistakes we did, and even more for us, who are now stuck in this place where we don't know how to serve our environment and our people at the same time (we could get into PLANYC issues here and some of the problems they are facing).

sorry about the length of the last post, i was trying to spare you.. does anybody know how to post in pictures? I can't only figure out that it does URLs. Does it not do from our computers? this would be a bummer

Hey everybody! Excited about the blog, this is my first post! I wrote my Volk essay while it was snowing outside in Chicago. It puts together a few particular ideas about city-living I've had in my brain for a while. This is seriously all I thought about during my break after the paper. This first draft of that essay is looooong... SKIP THE FIRST 2 or 3 PARAGRAPHS IF YOU'RE SHORT ON TIME. Let me know what you think about the elephant and the mouse...

 Bio-Logic: A Solution to the Conundrum?

            One of the more dazzling aspects of Professor Volk’s lectures is his keen ability to reveal parallels between the most complex body of life that is the biosphere, and the simplest of biological systems - be it a single cell, protist, or beehive. As if to capacitate one’s brain to conceptualize the entire evolutionary timescale, Professor Volk follows a holistic approach to his environmental vantage point and demands a change in one’s perception of the natural world around us. I believe this change to be of the most crucial importance to both understanding our carbon conundrum and solving it. I point out some particular biological homologies partly inspired by Professor Volk and discuss their relevance to our planet’s own life system.

            If there was ever proof that Earth was a living body, it would be David Keeling’s graph of atmospheric CO2 being recorded at the Mauna Loa observatory. It is a picture of a breathing planet. As the graph curiously begins to climb, suddenly all of the borders and boundaries connotative of an atlas or globe begin to disappear from your mind. Not long after, you realize that our planet’s carbon conundrum is as much a result of our interconnection as the great tree of life. The question must be raised then, what knowledge or understanding of smaller-scale biological systems can we extend to the potential benefit of the biosphere?

            Not long after the lecture in Jeroh, I uncovered a new fundamental law of biology in my Campbell text. It has been discovered that the more massive an organism, the less energy it uses per mass.That is to say that an elephant is more energy efficient per pound (per cell even) than a mouse. With Tyler’s lecture fermenting in my mind, I could not help but consider this mass/efficacy relationship in light of how society coalesces into cities and megacities. Do we have an inherent inclination to collectivize? Is a megacity the result of an evolutionary mechanism that selects us to be more colonial and thus more energy efficient? New York City is known to be one of the most carbon-efficient sites, per-capita, in the United States. Surely, it is also one of the most massive. Density entails more efficient transportation, better heat allocation, and economies of scale among other civil benefits. Surely the city is experiencing advantages much like the elephant. I consider what more we can learn about this biological convergence that might be extended to our conundrum’s solution.

A biological phenomenon known as endosymbiosis occurs when two symbiotic organisms build such an affinity for another that they merge together to become a single organism. One example of this is the case of the flagellate protist Hatena Arenicola engulfing, quite literally, its symbiont, a photosynthetic algae called Nephroselmis. Not only do the two get along, the photosynthetic metabolism in the algae sufficed enough to make obsolete the predatorial energy expense of the host. What a symbiotic spectacle! But wait! Didn’t human civilization do something like this during the Neolithic Revolution when agriculture was first developed? We domesticated primary producers, settled and collectivized, and abandoned the expense of hunting and gathering. The cultural radiation that resulted was a landmark in human history - just ask any Jared Diamond.

Far from the Neolithic Era, today’s globalized world should search out the next potential evolutionary quantum of endosymbiosis as to improve our energy efficiency. Consider it to be the modern city that exploits the margins around it to support the life within it. Much of the food is imported from miles away; it’s waste is exported similarly; a few central generators power the city. It is a bit of a predator, a gatherer - a fairly inefficient one judging by the CO2 ppm meter. Is there a primary production mechanism the city can engulf or domesticate?

An urban agricultural endeavor known as vertical farming might be the answer. Much like the maximum volume of a cell depends on its relative membrane area does our planet’s agricultural, and thus all downstream production rely on the available quantity of land surface. As agricultural land becomes populated, and even as the volume of a city increases at a much slower rate than its available margin, our only place to grow food and biomass for fuel may be up. This is not a bad thing.

A phenomenal thing to note about the instance of endosymbiosis I previously described is that the little photosynthetic symbiont never lost its protective membrane, probably for better maintenance of its metabolysm. This holdfast to the efficiency of a protective gradient reflects the immense advantage of indoor horticulture over the constituent outdoor tradition. A list of potentially detrimental variables (weather, sunlight, temperature, etc.) are immediately made obsolete with the installment of this sort of architectural membrane.

It is obvious that city-living is yet the most efficient way for the world’s population to aggregate. Professor Volk is a great advocate of using biomass as an energy alternative to fossil fuels. The catch is that today’s cities are the poorest of arenas for biomass production. I suspect a future in which a beautiful marriage (an endosymbiotic one!) exists between our existing cities and indoor agriculture. It is yet again time to engulf!

I have to clear up something about my description of endosymbiosis. If you haven't taken biology recently, my description might be unclear. Have you ever heard of the theory that mitochondria and possibly other plastids were once prokaryotes until they joined forces to become the first eukaryotic cells (Lynn Margulis, UMass)? That is "primary endosymbiosis." What I describe is "secondary endosymbiosis" which is to say that a eukaryote went through a second round of engulfing something - here an algae. I say that the two were "symbiotic" and "had an affinity for eachother." This is wrong. The host's intention of engulfing the algae was to eat it! So in summary... picture looking through a microscope. There is a big blob (predator) next to a smaller blob (producer). The big blob gets hungry, swarms around the smaller blob, but the little guy winds up living - inside of the predator! THE KEY is that the host relaxes its predation because the photosynthetic algae inside of it is now feeding it! Cool, right? Hopefully that helps. Sorry for focusing on MY OWN post... I'll be commenting on Maggie's/Lindsi's this evening. Cheers.

1. You guys make me so happy.

2. Lindsi, if you upload your pictures to photobucket, you'll have URLs that you can insert with the insert image function. That's actually what I'm going to do, because I took a bunch of E&S pictures.

I'll also try and  post tonight. I miss having jet lag as an excuse for not getting anything done.

Before I write anything else I would like to say that Adam Brock commented on one of my frolic photos with "dude your getup was incredible."  ummm.. i think no more needs to be said about that

Now that I finally have a moment to respond to these great posts I think I want to focus on the one thing that both Lindsi and Tim talk about.  "It seems the environment needs to be brought into the cities, to become a more integral part," was what L wrote and T, "The key is that the host relaxes its predation because the photosynthetic alge inside of it is now feeding it."

(I need to learn not to chave this on chat mode- i did that with my vsm post too, which is why it ended so abruptly)

So as I was going to say:

I'm going to get back to those points, but since we had the Frolic today I can't help but have my mind stuck on the raw energy and sense of community I felt while riding my bike around that group of people.  I was free and yet I was a part of something larger, solitary and yet not at all alone.  We were there for different reasons, but the very fact that we were there united us- together we exposed ourselves to judgement, and together we didn't care if we were judged.  When I was with the frolickers I realized that our actions and efforts and thoughts-- the time we take to write and talk to each other-- are not in vain.  And I can only speak on my own feelings here, but I think that that sense of community and solidarity is eaxctly what we need to enact the sort of change which we all know is necessary and at the same time this sense of community is exactly what our society is lacking.

Taking off our clothes was merely a physical representation of what we were really doing today.  We're not supposed to question the way things are.  We're not supposed to walk around outside in our underwear.  But we did, and not only did we bear our bodies to the world but we also stood together and acknowledged the fact that "the way things are" MUST be questioned.  And if questioning means that we will get staired at and judged or scoffed at and ignored, it doesn't matter.  Because there are some people who will stop in their tracks, tear off their clothing, and join in the march.  But WE have to frolic or those people will never find us.

Nature does need to be brought into the city and to do this we'll need new ways of thinking, like seen in Tim's algae post.  But every single thing that we do and every word that we write will be meaningless if we don't have that feeling of community, if we can't capture the energy that I know we all felt at that frolic today and feed it so that it endures and grows. I have no idea how we could do this or even if we can, but I do know that it must be done. Somehow we have to do it.

Hi everybody, long time [no] earth chat. Lindsi & Maggie, I just re-read your posts in the hopes of inspiration slash crash-and-burn procrastination... As I'm becoming more environmentally informed, my brain has been creakin' and moanin'; I'm not sure if this is a result of the natural digestion & marination process, but it has made me realize just how complex or lives are (as maggie mentioned in regards to the VSM)--I want and need to understand all of this knowledge, but as described in the "Tipping Point" we really only have so much space in our sweet little brains... this leads me to wonder what I should get rid of, and how I should dispel this junk... Maggie, it all goes back to the ecovillage, how much more relevant would these issues be if I were living, breathing, and expanding on them everyday? I want to write more about this, particularly pertaining to my experience as a conservation crew leader

back to el commentary.