> Well spoken story and import of ecosphere II preview of one limiting
> outcome. Let's go on and can you summarize some microherd processes that
> bear on succession or maintenance of particular vegetative cover? Prairies
> from woods soil, for instance?
I am currently hundreds of miles from my familar library, where I know
how to lay my hands on specific facts with least effort and least wasted
motion. I cannot therefore refer you to specific citations of literature
whose synthesis is portable and I can carry it in my head. As I have made
clear in past postings, I am incompletely knowledgeable, or wholely ignorant
of a trillion millions of possible DNA assemblies (lifeform species).
Those who have made a lifetimes work of peering into a microscope say
that they count 10,000,000~ individuals in a dry gram of topsoil, and say that
there are 4,000~ to 5,000~ different species represented of which most are not
described in the extant scientific literature. These same persons also say
that when they take samples from different ecologies they get similar
quantities and breakdowns of numbers but mostly different species are under
the scope, again mostly undescribed and hitherto completely unknown.
Systems analysis is the only tool I have to examine such numbers of
simultanious unknowns, which is a series of approximations, testing to obtain
data points, refining approximations, testing, more data points, in cybernetic
feedback loops. For all the technobabble "cyberspace", "cyber-this", and
"cyber-that" people seem to have forgotten what cybernetics means -- both the
word and the process. Too bad for them. It's a tool for finding out where
you are -- in real-time, when the number of unknowns is unknown.
At a first approximation is the limitations on the cell. Any cell, every
cell. The microherd is made of cells, as are you and I. Under some
conditions there are more of them, and under others there are less. This
being a "sustainable agriculture" network, the cells of primary interest are
those interacting with domesticated plants and animals and their immediate
environment. Also (should be) of interest is upstream and downstream
pollution factors. Prairie and woodland adds unnecessary additional factors
to mull over, needlessly introducing distractions of little interest to the
mainstream. I decline to take the bait. Let's stay on the subject of human
intelligence enhancing selected ecologies for this go-round.
Again, those devoting their lifetime before the microscope claim that
there are microscopic species particularly evolved to co-exist with each
different type of plant, and generalists who exploit many opportunities.
Using a specific legume innoculent of beneficial microbes who colonize the
root nodules is well known to agriculture. Differing innoculents are sold for
annual and perennial clovers and are different from the innoculent sold for
peas and beans. Soil innoculents are traded on the open marketplace for
specific species of free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mixtures of
multiple species are also sold.
My thrust is not to discuss these facts, but to point out that knowledge
exists in improving soil habitat conditions for the general prosperity of
these beneficial organisms. In other words, I want farmers to farm the
microherd as intelligently as they ought to farm the macroherd. The microherd
can double in population in thirty minutes time given conditions appropriate
to do so, and this is faster than any cash livestock crop, so it pays profits
if farmers can grow their own fertilizer.
What is known about cells, all cells, every cell, is it dies if its own
waste accumulates too much. Artificial fertilizers simulate microbe cell
wastes, and kills many of the microherd. It especially kills those most
wanted, those most adapted to co-exist with the plants, because it is
specifically their wastes which are being simulated by synthetic fertilizer
application. Undesirable (from a farmer hoping to make a living) are those
other members of the invisible hordes who are adapted to survive under these
toxic conditions and keep on preying on both microherd and plants. When the
microherd is depleted the plants are their only food supply left.
It is well known by farmers that legumes given fertilizer will not
develop root nodules and make their own nitrogen. What is less known is the
microherd is not there to colonize the nodules and exchange services of
nitrogen in exchange for sugars and starches. The chenical nitrogen killed
the beneficials. They sufficated in artificial (from their point of view)
sewage.
The microherd wastes would be taken up by plants just as the artificial
wastes (synthetic fertilizer) are if the farmer orchestrates the process
intelligently. Natural organic farmers have been doing this intuitively for
millenia. It can now be done better. It can be done far far better.
Buckminster Fuller was wrong on two counts: (1) he claimed that physical
wealth never diminishes (E=MC^2), and (2) metaphysical wealth (knowledge) only
increases. Number (1) is wrong, as man is capable of turning wealth into
garbage at incredible rates of accelorating speed, and he was wrong on number
(2) as the quantity of noise is increasing exponentially while knowledge is
increasing arithmatically.
The foregoing paragraphs are not the words of the illuminati from ivory
towers but the voice of a steward of the earth. I evolved out of the same
earth alongside with and from these other living beings of myriad species.
They are flesh of my flesh, and my kindred and family. I exchange services
with them so I may live graciously as long as I get to live. They teach me
daily. What they teach me is real, important, and worthwhile. They sustain
my life, and in exchange I work for them in the councils where their voice is
not heard. Biosphere 2 sought only to exploit the lives, with insincere
delivery of essential services, and the humans fled from the septic tank
atmosphere they had orchestrated into existence. There is no place to flee to
when Biosphere 1 (planet Earth) becomes uninhabitable.
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with "unsubscribe sanet-mg".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".