Organizing Principles

Two studies have finally linked the Colony Collapse Disorder of certain bees to a specific group of pesticides.
Here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/science/neocotinoid-pesticides-play-a-role-in-bees-decline-2-studies-find.html

and here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-deaths-in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady.html?pagewanted=all

Neonicotinoids! Such a tidy scientific name. It suggests that the problem has been quantified and isolated, and so the solution is near at hand. That’s was my gut reaction at least, reading the two New York Times articles. Don’t need to worry about the bees anymore.

They’ll—who? The government? Scientists?—will do what they always do when faced with this problem. Just a tweak to the formula of the pesticide. Or introduce an agent that will immunize the hives against the pesticide. Behold the easy miracles of SCIENCE. They’ll do like they do in bad Star Trek: techno-babble the solution just before catastrophe. Easy-Peesy. [Run your own experiment. Scour the web for people recommending that we can replace the at-risk bees with cloned bees or robot bees.]

But of course it is not so simple. The authors of the studies, the farmers and, thankfully, the journalists of the news articles all point out that there are many other likely reasons for bee collapse:

• fewer flowers due to land development
• pesticide-resistant mites
• fungicides that inhibit insect maturation
• pathogens or viruses

Here is the telling quote from the Times article on March 29th, by Michael Wines:

Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.

“Where do you start,” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”

That is a much more complex and difficult question than how to deal with one group of pesticides. And don’t get me wrong, neonicitinoids must be addressed based on the threat they pose. But we cannot simply order a solution to that one culprit and feel good about saving the bees, while ignoring the dangers and costs to bees inherent in the entire agricultural system that will remain. We can either alter the entropic makeup of that system, root and branch, or continue to impose modifications that keep the system’s efficiencies in place—until the next, compounded problem forces the choice on us yet again.

For those of you outside the region, there is def a need for rationing if only to keep people from flocking to the gas stations. We live three blocks from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, which is closed. All the gas stations along that road are closed--either because of power outage or more likely because police do not want people on that road.

I have a third of a tank of gas, and was thinking of gassing up. But there is a logistical problem. The rule is during even days of the week only people whose license plate ends in an even number can fill up. On odd days like today--Nov 3--only people whose license plate ends in an odd number can fill up.

Here is the problem. My license plate, and every NJ car that I studied as I walked Samson around the block, ends in a letter instead of a number. I probably checked over 100 cars. One website said that if your license ends in a letter, then you fill up on odd days. But many other websites are simply reporting the rule as if every plate ends in a number.

Sidebar: On thursday night I over heard a guy at a bar on his cell phone say the following: "I'm not going to go down there and commander the gas station. That's not my job."

The Hamilton Park area of Jersey City has power as of Thursday at 11:30am. The neighborhood is getting back to normal, but there is a tension in the air. Police, fire and ambulance sirens are heard almost every hour. At night blue and red police lights triwl up and down the street--I assume the police want their presence to be known. When the streets were dark there was a 6pm curfew. And I was glad to have it. There is a sense, even now, that there might be desperate people out there. There is talk of mobs of people going to town hall in Hoboken where there is still power out and standing water in buildings and streets.

Gasoline is another issue. I dont need to drive anywhere until next week, but there are long gas lines at the operational gas stations. The problem is that only half of the gas stations in New Jersey are operational due to power outages or other problems. The Obama administration has ordered the military to truck in gasoline, and they have removed restrictions on tankers.

One thought on the tankers: Ive sailed my little boat out in the New York harbor section known as the Parking Lot. They call it that because tankers have to park out there on moorings or anchors before comming in to off load their cargo. First of all, the tanker captains have to be replaced with a harbor captain because the skills that brought the tanker across an ocean are not the same as needed to navigate  the harbor. But gasoline and oil tankers are know to stay out there for months at a time waiting for gas prices to rise. The companies pay the tanker crew to sit out there for weeks and months because of the profits they will reap by an extra 10 or 20 cents on the gallon. Not sure if that is happening out there now. And if it is, not sure who would have the authority to make them move.  

Next up in Mad World: rampaging elephants.

Frequently, evidence of the madness that our sped-up entropy unleashes on the world is most clearly seen in the animal kingdom. Animals are a collective canary in the coal mine. Their delicate ecologies are highly susceptible, and vulnerable, to the outputs of our high-energy societies. The costs and consequences (unintended or otherwise) of our energy consumption are typically passed down the food chain to the furthest reaches possible, to where the animals live. Most of us do not see the effects because we live in communities that have long ago been beaten back the wilds. Still, there are boarder lands. And in much of the developing world, the wilds are always close and constantly encroaching.

Case in point: have you heard all the reports about elephant rampages in India and Africa in the last couple years? In the northern state of Assam, where there are 5,500 wild elephants, 500 humans have been trampled to death in the 1990s; in all of India, between 150 and 200 humans were killed by elephants. In this decade, these stories are growing even more common. Scientists had to invent a statistical category to continue to monitor the problem: Human-Elephant-Conflict, or H.E.C. (http://future.iftf.org/2006/10/animal_attacks.html).

There are competing theories as to why there has been an increase in rogue packs of rampaging elephants. The ecologists say that a shrinking habitat, matched with a rise in elephant population has caused their deranged behavior. Local people in India claim that elephants have discovered a liking for rice beer called “laopani.” Indeed, last year a pack of elephants broke into a distillery, drank the beer and started a drunken rampage that tragically ended in an electricity plant, where all the animals were electrocuted.

Animal behaviorists have another theory. Elephants live in highly socialized, matriarchal societies. The females are the leaders and the teachers:

Poaching kills many of the elder mothers and matriarchs of the herds, leaving young elephant mothers without direction, help, or guidance. Many young elephants witness their mothers being shot, and this causes them much distress, just as it would a human. These young elephants must somehow mature without their mothers, and thus the male elephants, already prone to violent outbursts and general instability, grow uncontrollable and go on rampages. As the social structure of the elephants grows weaker and weaker, they will become more unstable and violent (http://www.helium.com/items/373699-elephants-and-their-complex-social-behaviors).

Here is a list of causes for annual elephant deaths in India:

120 poaching for ivory or meat
25 poisoned
20 cattle born disease
16 electrocution
10 hit by trains
10 miscellaneous

(http://www.elephantcare.org/humanele.htm)

Sped-up entropy, unsustainable energy use, passing the costs to others and other life forms instead of equalizing energy costs—all of these factors contribute to the rending of not just physical and ecological fabrics, but also the intricate social tapestries that rise out of them.

It is instructive to relate to the elephant’s plight on your own level. Imagine the most dire, chaotic disaster movie plot you’ve ever seen, where the order of society has completely collapsed, and the townspeople become crazed, insane, homicidal maniacs. That’s what it must feel like for these elephants—except there is now hero unaffected by the insanity. There is no hope.

It is a mad world out there.

This is the first of the "Mad World" entries. The idea behind these types of posts is to discuss and analyze how the increased "flow-through" of energy, from ordered and usable to chaotic and polluting, in our current industrialized, global system may tend to create insane, obscene, destructive observable phenomena in the natural world and human behavior.



The essay below, quoted in its entirety form The New York Times Book Review, depicts a vision of a not-too-distant America. The author projects the end game for some of our current hyper-productive behaviors, such as women holding off on pregnancy until their sixties, and an chemically-induced end to sleep so we can work more. The essay is purely speculative, similar to the trend in sci-fi. But I can't help sense some bitterness in the author's tone, almost like he is scolding us to be careful what we wish for--also similar to that current sci-fi trend.



For myself, I can't get too worked up because I think entropy law prohibits our current path of development from getting too much crazier that it already is. A planet or society--like a body--simply cannot be kept alive on pills alone.

Here is William Saletan's "You:the Updated Owner's Manual"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/books/review/Saletan-t.html?_r=1