Graph-Post 1: Soil phosphorus after removal of invasive shrub (Rhamnus cathartica)

 

 

This graph shows the soil phosphorus levels during the first year after an invasive shrub, European or Common buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), was cut and removed from our experimental site (controls are uncut buckthorn).  Each bar represents 5 separate plots per treatment.

In this experiment, conducted in collaboration with Lauren Umek and other colleagues at DePaul university, we removed the invasive species and then implemented a variety of treatments:

Best Management Practice (BMP 1) is to cut and then seed with natives;  

BMP + cc, is cutting of invasive follower by planting of a cover-crop of grasses;  

Corn is removal followed by growing a rotation of corn; 

The commercial mulch treatment is incorporated into the soil and native seed is planted; 

A mulch is prepared out of the wood from Rhamnus and incorporated into soul for the final two treatments (with cover crop, or with native seed).

The idea that we are playing with here is that a manipulation of the soil - wood mulches are especially important in this regard - reduces that availability of key soil nutrients, nitrogen in particular, which in turn reduce the rates of reinvasion by invasive species, and create an environment favorable to species of conservation interest.  Mulches may reduce availability of some nutrients because the microbes that decompose the wood "mop up" any extra nutrients making them less available to plants.

The results of an analysis of soil nutrients (sampled with a probe buried for approximately a month in Spring of 2008) revealed that mulched treatments generally had more phosphorus available in the soil.  The uncut control plots had the least phosphorus.  Contrary to our expectation nitrogen is not altered by any of our treatments.

I'll show, in later graph-posts whether this corresponds to changes in the vegetation (spoiler - there are interesting patterns in the reinvasion of the plots after invasive species removal and treatment). 

 

Brute Neighbors: Urban Nature and the redress of the arts.

“Industries have been migrating steadily from the larger cities, leaving behind a lazarus stratum of the urban population that exists partly on the dole, partly on crime, partly on the sick fat of the city... Nothing more visibly reveals the overall decay of the modern city than the ubiquitous filth and garbage in its streets, the noise and massive congestion that fills its thoroughfares, the apathy of its population toward civic issues and the ghastly indifference of the individual toward the physical violence that is publicly inflicted on the other members of the community.” Murray Bookchin (1979) Limits of the City Black Rose Books (reprinted in 1996). 

“The more it [the city] concentrates the necessities of life the more unlivable it becomes.  The notion that happiness is possible in a city, that life there is more intense, pleasure is enhanced, and leisure time more abundant is mystification and myth.” Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 2003 (1970)

Despite our brooding discontent, our lingering sense that our environing world is in decline, that the world around us is aflame with war, famine, disease, climate weirdness, that our cities are unlivable, that our economies are doomed to collapse, that we are brotherly and sisterly no more, that under our use and abuse, nature’s web is frayed and weary; despite all of this, surely our best days should be ahead of us?

We are, after all, a vernal species, freshly minted by evolutionary processes dating back no more than a couple of hundred thousand years.  If a species typically sticks around a million years, by simple calculation we have run less than a quarter of our course.  Can we really have squandered all of our chances so very soon?  In a recent project poet Chris Green and I ask, paraphrasing Seamus Heaney, if poets, artists, creative writers, philosophers, and photographers, can help redress the environmental problems that beset us.  Artists who live where the flames rise highest, that is in cities – seemingly the very epicenter of our crises, cannot necessarily be appealed to for succor in tough times.  Good art after all may do very little, but by the reckless blaze of good work, surely we can see the new terrain in all its ambiguity and complexity, and re-envision the task ahead in a more hopeful way than we have become used to.    
Our natural proclivities equip us for debacle and solution in seemingly equal measure.  Primates, such as we are, are characterized by generalized natures, there is little that is distinctive about all of us other than our lack of distinction.  Said another way we have evolutionary suppleness – a commitment to innovation.  We humans, for instance, having no specialized defense mechanisms – we exude no toxic or noisome chemicals, our teeth may gnash but rarely assail, we have no carapace to shield our moist vulnerability.  Biological features noteworthy about us are extensions of our beastly condition: we are mobile, and we have brains swollen like ripe fruit atop erect bodies; clever apes that we are, we have perfected the manipulation of the surrounding world in a manner that extends our reach beyond bodily limitations – technology, another extension of primate innovation, is our ecology.  For ninety-nine percent of our history we exclusively gathered, and occasionally hunted, and our numbers were modest; we lived within the confines of local ecological systems.  Though perennially extending our range, pullulating out from our African home-range to encompass much of the inhabitable earth, we have generally been more constrained by nature, than we were a strain on nature.  A mere geological moment ago, everything changed.  Ten thousand years ago we became dramatically less mobile, we cultivated and accumulated rather than collected, we domesticated plants and animals, and indeed we ultimately domesticated ourselves.  The reverberations of this agricultural revolution, this domestication revolution, are still omnipresent.  Anthropologists inform us that civilization and its accoutrements: permanent architecture, metallurgy, writing, villages, towns and cities, are aftershocks of the agricultural revolution.

Kant makes me sick: Russell, Moore and Carnap and the liberation from Kant

In a number of philosophical memoirs Bertrand Russell describes his break from the Kantian (and Hegelian) tradition in which he trained.  Russell’s first book, an extension of a fellowship dissertation, took up the Kantian question, “how is geometry possible?” An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry elaborated a “mainly Kantian” theory of geometry in which he claimed that geometry is possible “only if space is one of three varieties, one of them Euclidean, the other two non-Euclidean but have the property of preserving a ‘constant measure of curvature’.”  As Russell noted, this was a claim subsequently undermined by Einsteinian General Relativity.  On later reflection, he claims that his book does not contain “anything valid”.  A heavy price to pay, perhaps, for its Kantian commitments.

 

The retreat from Kant was not merely a matter of scholarly progression.  For Russell, there was an emotional appeal to setting Kant aside.  He records it as “a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot-house on a wind-swept headland”.  Furthermore, he claimed that he “hated the stuffiness involved in supposing that space and time were only in my mind”.  Elsewhere, he further underscores the emotional flavor accompanying his disagreements with Kant, regardless of any claims about their veracity, indicating that he finds “displeasing” any attempts to “humanize the cosmos”. “Kant made me sick”, Russell reported to Alan Wood.

The Social Ladder and the Ecological Ground – Julian Steward and multilinear evolution in the middle 20th C

The urban experience is a relatively new one for us.   The oldest cities emerged from 5000-3500 BC, slowly evolving out of antecedent Neolithic villages and settlements throughout the world, some of which date back as far as 10,000 BC.  George Cowgill gives us a solid review.[1]  And agriculture - the productive excess of which urban living depends - is, of course, also a new business for humans, emerging around 10,000 BC after hundreds of thousands years in which we gained sustenance by hunting and gathering.  That these events – from primitive times to the greater complexity of urban life – have been lined up as a progressive scheme is not surprising.  Progress, as I discussed before, has two principle meanings: one is a developmental one in which advancement through a process is meant; the other suggests improvements, indicating that each step is better than the last.  Attempts in early anthropological theory to classify the elements of culture, and then theorize them as a developmental sequence of different stages of culture (“ethnical periods”) emerged as a successful paradigm for anthropological work in late Victorian times.  The idea that prevailed in those early days was that culture evolved through time, that it was directional, that it was represented by a succession of traits that moved towards a particular end, that the changes represented improvements, and that cultural retrogression was the exception rather than the rule.[2]  That is, there was belief that social evolution was progressive in both senses.

I like the way a hand

[From my manuscript Unpublishable Poems]

I like the way a hand can cup
The temple,
The way the shank
Of the arm props it thus upon the knee
And the way a calf can angle to the floor
Or curl under the torso –
How they all fit together
From head to toe:
Like sculpted metal!
Although it is all just
A fortuitous alignment,
The body’s geometry
Performing its unexpected yoga.

Progress on "progress" – towards a model of social evolution

Interpreting the story of a development, any development: personal, social or evolutionary, as progressive is an enormous seduction.  Of course this is because development often is progressive in the sense that it is advancement through a process, and towards an outcome or a conclusion.  There is, for instance, a progression of steps prescribed in normal organismal development – the steps are more or less prescribed ones.  There is a second sense of the term progress, one that registers development to more advanced stages, often regarded as higher or better states (most dictionaries including OED record both senses).  Progress towards finishing jigsaw might be progressive in both sense, one advances through a prescribed sequences (this is how one solves puzzles), but also, for most of us, advancing towards the better condition of being more complete. 

In matters evolutionary we are counseled to resist the seduction of seeing the process as a progressive one.  Douglas Futuyma, the evolutionary biologist, explains why: “future conditions cannot affect present survival. The enduring variations may increase the organism’s complexity or behavioral repertoire, or they may decrease it”.  There is enough said on the subject of progress in evolution to keep a dozen Scheherazades regaling their Kings for thousands of nights, though I suspect that many of these Kings would be caught snoozing.  And yet it remains almost irresistible.  The evolution of life from single celled animalcules to a multi-cellular Levitation, or better, the evolution of primitive primates to that balloon-headed Great Ape, the human, seems like a arrow-flight from simple to complex, from primitive to advanced.  This pattern is so blatant that many not only see it as progressive in the first sense, but also progressive in the second.  Kai Hahlweg, a philosopher at Bond University in Australia distinguishes three camps in this evolutionary debate.   The first group holds that the application of the term progress is anthropocentric that there is no evidence supporting a claim of evolutionary progressive directionality in evolution.  A second group rejects the idea of progressive evolution as anthropocentric, but concedes that evolution exhibits directionality.  Hahlweg places Stephen Jay Gould in this camp.  A final group thinks that “evolutionary progress can be purged of its anthropocentric connotations”, and with this done one can arrive at a acceptable scientific notion of evolutionary progress.  According to Hahlweg, Francisco Ayala, John Maynard Smith and William Wimsatt are in this camp.  It’s that camp that Hahlweg feels a close sympathy, and his thermodynamic solution is worth studying; but we won’t do that now.