Gluten

Food is not benign! It is the most powerful, chemically active material that we routinely put into our bodies, i.e., the biochemical system upon which rides our consciousness order. In fact, all food contains a quantity of risk: just look at the size and function of the liver to prove that.

This essay could go from here in many directions; for example, to the chips and energy drinks that so many, especially the young, abuse themselves with or to the preparations that are used to create eating addictions, but this is about a personal concern suddenly turned timeless and potentially devastating.

Someone dear to me has had continuing depressive symptoms (and I have dabbled in the depression waters for my knowing life). He has tried diet related ameliorators: reducing pesticide in take; getting adequate and balanced amounts of essential amino acids, vitamins and micronutrients; generally recognizing the critical role of intake.

My discussions with him had begun to move more and more often in the pharmacological direction, a “solution” we agreed that was like using a mallet to repair a fine Swiss chronograph. But we had never seriously discussed gluten.

Of course, gluten and celiac disease had come up, but it somehow didn’t seem directly relevant to symptoms of neurotransmitters. However, as I bumped into more and more references to gluten digestion issues, I decided to just stop eating gluten as a self -test before I offered this as a serious option for my son.

I have for many years kept track of my calorie budget and general diet (see first sentence!). When I stopped eating foods containing gluten I replaced (or more than replaced) the calories with other foods (e.g., avocado for bread in some circumstances). And yet, in the first 10 days I lost 7 pounds. Now those who know basic metabolism realize that 7 pounds of fat represents over 25,000 calories and at 2000 calories a day, even if I ate nothing, I would only use up about 6 pounds of fat; ergo the weight loss was from water, more precisely, edema; and even more precisely, the edema of an inflammatory response to gluten was the most likely reason.

I was amazed. As time passed my energy level increased. Walking up steep hills, especially carrying weight, had become more and more taxing for me over the years; I had given this to my age. But, even 3 weeks into the diet change I noticed a reliable difference. And then I began to notice a change in mood. I would call it an improvement, certainly, though more correctly it was a smoothing out.

About a month into gluten-free my car decided to malfunction many miles away from what passes here for civilization; this after I had been walking for some time in the high desert hills. My only choices were to stay overnight or to walk out in the deep dusk and dark. I walked out carrying my camera gear – 2 ½ hours before a road and a car kindly saved me. But I was fine, and fully prepared to walk the next 8 miles to home. This would not have been my condition the month before. My interest was fully piqued.

Gluten: “Wheat gluten was traditionally classified into gliadin and glutenin based upon solubility in aqueous alcohol. Gliadins were thought to be responsible for precipitating coeliac disease; glutenins were thought probably to be nontoxic. More recent classification, according to primary amino acid structure, reveals not only great heterogeneity but also similarities between different gliadin and glutenin proteins. Peptides derived from both groups are immunostimulatory in coeliac disease and it is highly probable that glutenin proteins are therefore toxic. Attempts to breed wheat with satisfactory baking properties tolerated by coeliac patients will be very difficult.” (P. D. Howdle , St James's University Hospital, Leeds, UK. P.D.Howdle@leeds.ac.uk)

This is a stark statement.

Gluten is a water insoluble protein complex found in the family of the grasses; it seems that its properties are useful in protecting seeds in dry conditions. Thus, unlike many of the plant-made chemicals that are toxic in foods as a form of protection from predation, gluten’s consequences come from the unfamiliarity of the protein to the human digestive system, at least, the unfamiliarity of the Caucasian digestive system [1]. In the most extreme form, celiac disease (US spelling), symptoms are dramatic, though often misdiagnosed. But what interested me were the less intense consequences.

Humans have been eating grass-based foods as a major and continuous part of their diet for only about 8 to 10 thousand years. And even then it is only in very local regions that grains have been primary for that long. Most of the world has only been grain-fed for less than a third of that time. Our digestive system and the enzymes that are its tools have been evolving to a reasonably consistent diet for millions of years. Prior to grains, the great change for our genus was the addition of meat and animal fat in increasing amounts over the last 2 ½ to 2 million years. The jump to grains has been dramatic and rapid – far too rapid to allow for digestive processes to adapt fully (or even at all) to new proteins.

The consequence is that gluten can only be partially digested. This is especially true for those with celiac disease. It is now understood that their bodies treat certain of the peptide pieces (break-down products of the partial digestion of a protein) as they would viruses and react by killing their own intestinal lining cells. Some of these peptides get into the blood stream and are attacked at other places in the body resulting in auto-immune disease symptoms.

But what if no one, no human digestive system, can fully cope with gluten? The numbers are interesting: about 1 in 200 Caucasians are said to have celiac symptoms. It has also been suggested that only about one in 50 cases are correctly diagnosed. As I think through the numbers that would mean that about 1 in 4 are actually having symptoms of gluten digestion insufficiency. And then add in my experience. I have had, in any one moment, no set of symptoms that would point to a ‘condition’ worthy of attention, but looking over my years a number of accepted, and therefore, unexplained concerns fit neatly into a gluten response model. I have been vital all my life, mountain climbing, pulling 3 day study sessions in college, seeming strong and effective. Yet, as I aged into the accepted declines, I discover that most likely I have been running my whole life with a sea anchor deployed.

What would happen to the human condition if the world went off gluten? What if almost everyone is being diminished to some degree by an inflammatory response to a food that they cannot fully digest because the food is too new in our dietary repertoire?

My sons are taking this seriously with what seem, to this point, to be good results, but what about the others that we know about, the 50 undiagnosed (crazy word for being poisoned by your food) for every one who is? And if we find that the consequences are more wide reaching, can we eliminate gluten from our food supply (reducing is not an option, it is all or none in most cases)?

It is obvious that the “gluten interests” would fight this even being considered, would fight accurate information getting to the public. And since gluten carrying grains are now half or more of the world’s food supply and since world agriculture is devoted to these grains, it would also be effectively impossible even if the world were to accept that gluten was a serious health issue. For the moment then, I will remain on a gluten free diet and suggest to others that they give it a try.

[1] No blatant racism here: the research has been done on mostly those of European descent and such subtleties of physiology should not be thoughtlessly generalized. Similar frequencies are suspected in other populations.

Change Your Ways

“If’n you want to live in this town, Mister, you gotta change your ways!” Some version of this admonition has long been common in small town life around the world. ‘Critical mass’ population growth and the related anonymity have led to the different strategy of finding others of similar behavior rather than ‘fitting in’ to the more heterogeneous whole. So, rather than individuals adapting to a community whose contact with reality is broadly and environmentally based, individuals adapt to a community of interest representing a point of view and behaviors that are supported within their communities of interest – behaviors thus extended in their range of possibility well beyond the adaptations associated with a heterogeneous community. It is, then, the various communities of interest that must adapt together to form the larger total community that has in our origins been the point or points of environmental relationship. This strains the human capacity to fit into biophysical reality.

Immediate adaptation is always the primary concern. Only a small percentage of people are so composed by their nature and experience to bring consciousness process to longer term views of fitting into the environmental order. This was a very functional design in small communities. A thousand people could have their Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph or Tolstoy plugged into the universe of experience and possibility while they continued to worry about their numbers of horses, getting just the right colors on a war shirt or bringing in a grain crop. But a convention of funeral directors tend to focus on their issues, Wall Street investors on theirs, war protesters on theirs, the LGBT community on theirs, teachers on theirs, politicians on theirs, and so on. Power relations come to dominate environmental relations, and soon enough only the power relations are seen as “reality.”

Once a critical mass is reached there is no limit to the form of the presentment of the community of interest’s idea or ideology. The process of adaptation takes on the perverse character of a positive feedback system rather than a negative one: success in the community of interest comes with increasingly narrow and strident positioning and is not supported by accommodating and inclusive views. When everyone is essential alike only stark differences in the most dramatic directions make one visible. And in such a situation the deviance of the views is measured from the most recent extreme not from some total community standard.

It is no wonder that genetically nearly identical humans, also with the vast majority of their life experience quite similar, can come to an almost total impasse of understanding. We are ultimately limited by our capacity and experience; when our adaptation, from some real perspective, is to madness, then we believe and act in madness. Our present social and political design is created by and supports the creation of social units that adapt into states of madness [1].

I am not suggesting that we can return to small, environmentally based communities (with all their short comings by our enlightened present standards). I am not suggesting that we should return to them. I am suggesting that we must reconstruct the incentive systems associated with such communities. There is no absolute guide to truth, no prefect way to be an animal in the ecosystem, not even a perfect way to be a species of animal in an ecosystem. There is a process of adaptation that brings much of the organism’s actions into some homeostatic relationship with the biophysical space. The human unit of the ecosystem community was in such a state of dynamic equilibrium; that is, the incentives on individuals were such that the community functioned as an adaptive unit in the environment.

Humans today, in large numbers, believe that they are independent of biophysical reality, that we are special in ways that have defeated biology, chemistry and physics: this is, of course, madness. And the many who believe this have come to it by the incentives that have formed along with our great numbers.

There are only two ways to address the fact that: “If’n we all are to keep living here, we gotta change our ways.” First, such changes will not come from the leaders arrived at by the present incentive system – not from presidents, congressmen, coup formed dictators, corporate types or even most activist leaders. This has to come from millions and millions of people who simply can’t see how to go on as we are going.

Much of the world’s population is, in a way similar to keeping of slaves illiterate of written language and geography, being kept ignorant of economics, politics, business and even their best interests. Vast fortunes are being spent to control the flow of information and to maintain an amorphous emotional state of uncertainty and mild desperation. But the fortunes are only a pittance compared to the amounts that can be sucked out of millions and billions of small transactions driven by the incentives created by such control and fear.

The Great Many are, however, fully formed humans with all the capacities therein. Education, real education, so called grass-roots action, is the only way. People speaking to other people with as much honesty as they can muster, people simply letting their worries and concerns be part of a local social context would begin to change our incentives.

This will happen, this has to happen, because nothing else can happen. The madness and the electronic isolation of our lives, the fear of economic insecurity, of accident, of sickness, can only be kept silent so long. Sure, some will die alone in tiny rooms, silent to the end, but we are, finally, a noisy species.

I am calling for and presaging a great and messy time, a dangerous time, when we begin again to adapt to each other and the immediacies of our world, independent of the institutions of madness that have led us so far toward our destruction. I cannot see clearly how we can do this and yet I know that we will have to; no other action, other than individual and personal defeat, is available. This fact is staring more and more of us in the face everyday.

[1] Madness is here defined as the failure to act and believe with an appreciation of biophysical reality. This comports generally with the psychiatric notion of insanity as the failure to function in reality. In my view the biology, chemistry and physics of the planet is the base reality of living existence and must be the base reality of our actions.

Where is the Anger?

Where is the anger that there are people who don’t have time to prepare food from fresh raw beginnings? Where is the anger that people are not receiving education sufficient to allow them to read the labels on the foods that they eat and drink? Where is the anger that people are forced to abandon their children to TV, Video games, peers and gangs rather than walking or driving them to school and greeting them at the door in the afternoon, rather than visiting the schools to see the lives those ‘oh so precious children' are living during the day? Where is the anger that people can work two minimum wage jobs and still not be able to afford a safe place to live or safe and wholesome food to eat?

Where is the anger that other humans have so gamed the economic designs that they collect for themselves hundreds, thousands and millions of times as much of the substance of the world as others of their kind? Where is the anger that the people who do so justify their greed by denying that they are like the rest, justify their accumulation by claims of superiority rather than fortuity (from the root word that gives us ‘fortune’)? Where is the anger that one percent of the world’s people have gathered to themselves, depending on how it is measured, between 50 and 90 percent of the productivity of the planet’s natural systems?

Where is the anger that our media has so distorted the process of reporting to us the events of the world, the very information that allows us to act responsibly and meaningfully, that lies cannot be separated from the truth? Where is the anger that we are ignored by power and denied the information that would inform us sufficiently that we could demand to be heard?

Where is the anger that those with economic and political power can decide that we should live or die for their interests and not for ours? Where is the anger that the US congress is preparing to pass laws that will enrich insurance executives and others in the economic elite by controlling the delivery of healthcare services? Where is the anger that billions of dollars are being lavished on congress to buy a decision that will collect hundreds of billions from us all in tiny life determining bits?

Where is the anger that our sons and daughters are being chewed up physically and mentally in wars for economic domination – our children as foot soldiers for the economic elite? Where is the anger that the human capacity for adaptation and invention is being turned to tools for soulless wars where our children are in spotless rooms driving machines thousands of miles away, delivering dirty and soulless death and maiming for reasons that they and we do not understand, delivering death to people and to lands that we cannot even find on the map?

Where is the anger that thousands of species of living things – living things whose genetic legacy of survival, billions of years of continuity, is the same as ours – are being removed from the universe forever every year as a consequence of our mad expansion into every nook and cranny of the living space? Where is the anger (and the fear) that this will doom us as surely as shooting holes in our lifeboat will doom all therein?

I feel the anger beginning. I see it in the completely insane bigotry of the hard right – beginning to bubble like the first sizzling sound of a heating pot. I can see that mad anger infecting the nascent frustration of the above questions; can see the options clarified to real action rather than hopeful impotence. If it comes as I suspect it will, it will come messy and it will come dangerous, and it will change all that we know: for the better or for the worse; that part will be up to us.

Planning Ahead: smoke signals and cell phones

I once lived, for several years, in a small log cabin in the mountains of northern New Mexico. No running water, no gas. We had electricity and a phone – I had a business in town and these were essential – but cooking and heating were fueled with wood; I cut, hauled and split every cord. Oak, maple, piñon, juniper, and pine mostly, with the occasional fruit wood when an apricot or apple tree died. I also built a room on the cabin, selecting the trees from the forest above the cabin, cutting, hauling, peeling, sorting, stacking and drying them for a year before building.

“A watched pot never boils.” The cooking stove was also the major source of heat. It was a big white Home Comfort stove with warming boxes and a water-heating tank. I had heard that saying applied metaphorically since I was a child, but using a wood stove made clear its origin.

In the winter I would get up at 5 am and light the stove with the coals from the previous evening. A little pile of dried oak twigs and a few splinters of sap-filled pine or piñon were prepared and ready, and several finger sized and somewhat larger sticks of maple were in the wood box ready to bring the stove to life. A few pieces of this year’s oak (a wetter wood) topped off the mix to make a fire that would grow hot and sustain.

It was a way of life that spread its activities and connections across the days and seasons. Unless the woodlot was growing with all the right woods through out the summer and fall, the late winter days would be uncomfortable and rushed. I learned the first winter when I had to cut wood in the dark to stay warm for the evening and the next day: there was no getting ahead. A cold day and cold night demanded its payment of fuel. The next winter the woodlot was tended, saws sharpened and axes ready.

It was a life lived in the moment by planning ahead. The year had a form and a function, and each day was its moment. It was not a world of day-minders and to-do lists (although my business world often slipped into the mountains with its calendars, lists and even computers…), but was, in its very design, its own image and expression of the future. There was no need to write on the calendar, “pick apples”, or “gather raspberries.” The woodpile, to the experienced eye, laid out the year’s work, reforming it exactly with every subtraction and addition. The water in the various gravity flow devices ‘wrote’ the time and amount of the next trip to the spring.

And many other things required a thoughtfulness of preparation for such a life to be comfortable and inconsequential: food, cars, outhouse, medical supplies, tools in general and special tools in particular, protection and all the minor and major emergencies of ourselves and others who came within our region of opportunity and responsibility. Often little things like being able to tell the condition of the fire in the wood stove from the smoke and lines of heat coming from the kitchen chimney helped clarify how a ski trip up the mountain would go.

I am struck by the difference in the construction of experience created by a central heating system, a water heater, running water, paved roads, mechanics and cell phones. I find that I cannot explain the gracefulness of my life in the mountain cabin to young people (I have ‘un-retired’ for a time to teach in high school).

My grown children humor me. I say things like, “I’ll be there at 9 next Saturday morning.”, speaking of some event several days in the future. They play along and show up. But that is not how they do things: much of their world is arranged across town and cross-country in the last 15 to 30 minutes on a cell phone. Even their jobs have flex-schedules that instant-everywhere-communication organizes within a half-day window. The question, ‘What will you be doing in six months?’, is meet with bewilderment by many of the people I know; what they will be doing in the next hour or two requires a little flurry of phone calls.

I can almost hear some particularly precocious student telling me that the immediacy of walking by a ripe raspberry is the same as the immediacy of a cell phone call, and I would certainly see their point: both are cued and happening in the moment. But the raspberry has been growing in that spot year after year; it leafed out in the spring, bloomed in the late spring-early summer and fruited in the late summer. Birds, squirrels, bears and I have been watching. I can’t speak for the bears, but I am reminded by an increasing recollection of a taste sensation as the flowers fall away and the berries grow and ripen. I don’t think that this is how a cell phone is organized in the cognitive space [1].

I find that I really don’t like planning ahead and do much better when immersed in an environment like the mountain cabin where living in the moment is the plan to make a possible, even comfortable, future. The chill of a particularly cold winter night can be viscerally recalled on a warm summer day; a walk with an axe and saw into a beautiful stand of small oaks just seems to happen.

A cell phone seems to serve the same humanly mental need. It helps to avoid planning ahead, but also allows, even encourages, disconnection from the larger experience of the living space. I have seen my daughters decide that they want something to eat, get in a car without any idea of where they are going, call for takeout on the way, arrange to meet a friend, add to their order, change location for the meeting, change which friends they are meeting and then decide to go to a movie all over a couple of hours without anyone (of the now 3,4,5 people) having a commitment to an action more than 20 minutes into the future. This has to influence the shape and form of the cognitive space.

Without judging (though I personally prefer cutting firewood in June for the first fall fires on cool late September mornings), it is still vitally important that we consider the consequences of the objects and functions that we add so quickly into our daily lives. Cell phones are only one example. These things change us, change how we think, change our daily patterns, change what and the way that we believe, change what we hold to be important and ultimate change who we are as a species.

[1] I had a cell phone in the 1990s, a big thing in a carrying bag with a hand set separate from the receiver; so while generally ignorant of the mentality, I am not completely so. I see that some students become visibly shaken and nervous when separated from their phone as though I had turned off their pace-maker. This convinces me that I don’t really have a grasp of the deeper reality of the instrument.

Behavioral Toxicity

Metaphor: We spend inordinate amounts of time detailing and arguing over the nutritional content, both real and imagined, of the several items on our plate... and none to the arsenic being sprinkled over the whole mess. We must, first as the thinkers and evaluators among us and then as a whole community, begin to recognize and seriously respond to the social and behavioral toxicities with which we presently live. But, like a water well poisoned with cholera, the toxicity is carried in forms vital for our needs and has only a probability of terminally infecting each drinker.

In the case of the cholera infected well, the biological toxicity can be exacerbated by the social ‘toxicity’ of the well being ‘owned,’ especially so if the wellbeing (apology) of the ‘owner’ depends of the water there-in-contained being used by the community. This is the basic form of one large category of social toxicity: a required activity carries a toxic element or addition and some segment of the community is committed to the activity’s perpetuation in its exact present and toxic form.

There are many things that we humans do very well, but backing off – slowing down – is not one of them. In fact, in the whole of human recorded history, and apparently beyond, humans have only slowed down when forced by epidemic disease and climatic or geologic process. We have, in almost every moment, increased in number, in consumption, in distribution and in impact on the world around us; albeit very slowly in the beginning but recently with rates of speed that are clearly toxic – at least clearly to an observer with a modicum of historical and biological perspective. It is classic biological understanding that any material in sufficient excess is a poison, i.e., the life sustaining stability of homeostatic order is defeated with dysfunction or death as a consequence. The immense capacity of humans to adapt becomes toxic when our adaptations snowball into adapting to adapting as a necessary part of social design.

This is a second category of behavioral toxicity. Our original adaptation prowess was applied to the environment so that we could reduce its dangers and increase our consumption of its possibilities. In a terrible distortion of that original and “biologically sensible” design, we today all but ignore the holistic presentation of the environment and apply our capacities to the great writhing mass of our previous creations as though the immediately perceptible were reality. I think of occasions when I would visit a great city dump and the accumulations of the discarded made the very ‘land’ upon which to walk – the random collections of lamps, tires, toasters, chairs, mops and other thousands of identifiable and unidentifiable things formed together to make a composite picture of a highly local ‘reality.’ We live on the surface of our dump and call its random presentation an ordered world. The consequence is the toxification of the adaptation process – a process with no capacity for discrimination, a capacity that can only respond as though what it receives is real.

These two forms of behavior toxicity are poisoning our relationship with each other and with the biophysical reality; that is, the fundamental substrate of all life and consciousness. That both forms of toxicity are major parts of the designs of our behavior make them no less devastatingly poisonous to our present and future wellbeing, and only indicates the degree of dedication and effort required to detoxify our actions and beliefs.

This is not a trivial matter that we can ignore or do a ‘work-around.’ These are true toxicities just as damaging to human life and ecological integration on the earth as pneumonic plague or cyanide are toxic to individuals. The latency is longer – more like lead or the AIDS virus – and so are more difficult to see as dangerous: Remember ‘sugar of lead’, a popular Roman beverage?

The political, economic, social and epidemiological events of our world are all either the direct result of these behavioral toxicities or exacerbated by them. The remarkable recalcitrance of what now passes, in the US, for conservatism and Republicanism – anti-science, anti-intellectualism, even anti-thought – puts power over the multitude in the hands of real societal insanity (see Robert Altemeyer’s work on authoritarianism).

So called liberals and progressives, while they take in a greater dose of The Real – incorporating some science and logical reasoning into their process – still form the core of their actions and beliefs from perceptions and experiences marinated in the toxicities of ungrounded adaptation and self-interest emptied of community-interest: ultimately as insane as conservatives (that is, just as free of any clear association with Reality).

The world’s billions are fixed in their trajectory, as are each nation’s millions, but individuals, especially small carefully formed communities [1], can avoid at least some toxic input. This is modeled well by the fact that a dedicated few can eat carefully grown foods, but the vast multitudes must eat what they can get regardless of potential harm.

The key is grounded adaptation, grounded in some source of The Real outside of social product and process – and present religious form is not it [2]. There is only biophysical Reality to perform this role in our experience: it always has and ultimately always will. Not to make this relationship central in the process of adaptation is insanity.

[1] This is a very tricky matter. ‘Change’ communities are almost always driven by the social system from which they devolve and function on some single-purpose principles. There is no growing relationship with Reality in their structure, and thus, no reduction in toxicity.

[2] Religion as hominid process, as a functional part of consciousness order, has been poisoned by being co-opted by adaptations to social process. Religion, in its original form, gave motivational force and duration to complex environmental adaptations and was part of maintaining the practical and spiritual connection to place.

Oh My God! Not Another Poet

I don’t often present these little indulgences, but this one so fit my present mood and mode.

(circa 1976)

GARDENING IN THE FAMILY PLOT

1

I seek no special inspiration

from love or pain or mystery;

only.... Still I seek it.

Language harbors language, words harbor words,

action harbors life, and life harbors poetry.

A polemic: sad as standing on one leg before a city.

Experience, great teacher--my fool --

cuts, then heals

as an aggravated and enraged soul climbing

-- a great candle lighted shadow--

up from my dim past

comes to split my body and the world

like rolls of soft bread

readying them for the sweet cow's butter of love.

Do I need it?

The word harbors the word, and the word harbors

the action, and the action harbors life....

2

My poetry has been lost--shut out--

eaten through my skull and, light as it is,

sprung into the brain of a hummingbird, or

an ostrich;

sent the poor weak brain to dim ancient urgings

for flying, for nesting in trees,

for even having teeth or, as with me,

to be amphibian, fish and worm.

I see it all now: Poor weak worm in the dry of veldt

surrounded by surprised vultures, an unhistoried ostrich

killed to the undeath of original planet dust,

unable to fight off my escaped poetry.

3

I will not seek poetry in language.

Still it is a pretty thing;

waves moving pebbles on the shore.

But even great seventh or forty ninth waves,

striking with the force of inexorable logic

are spent by the beach--it is its nature.

Not the wave, but time is the master of pebbles.

Slap language around as you would an unfaithful mistress,

if that is what you do, or

cry with her and make love some new way

using puppets and #3 wash tubs.

She is still your mistress and you love her.

You only hurt her if you take your love away,

run wild in the land fucking oak stumps and

piles of used bricks;

trying to fuck life into the dead

while letting the living die.

This is why I will not seek poetry in language.

Language harbors words, words harbor action,

action harbors life, life harbors poetry.

4

My many fathers and many mothers

reached out through the dark sky to the moon

and in through the dark womb to the soul.

They strung poetry between shells and bear claws,

wore it in their hair,

and roasted it next to the bodies of small birds.

I've tried praying to soup cans,

gluing feathers on a crew cut,

and making necklaces from

bottle caps and condoms:

It hasn't worked yet.

We Have Lost!

We have lost the struggle for democracy – of, by and for the people -- and equity. We have lost the struggle for social justice. We have even lost not only almost all of the battles, but the war for the future of ecological integrity on our little planet. But that is no reason to quit! It will, however, be much better for us personally to proceed with more reasonable expectations.

We have lost not so much because, in an alignment of opposing forces, some groups and ideas succeeded while others have not. This is more a matter of everyone losing – all ‘sides’ – because the real terms of the struggle were never recognized. As trite as it may seem Pogo pegged it: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” But with that the trivial appearance ends and the truly difficult begins.

All of life depends on physiological homeostatic systems to mediate and regulate the volumes and speeds of chemical reactions so that the right amount of a substance exists at each step of any process: too much acts as a poison and too little starves the process [1]. This same principle applies to ecological relationships and structures. Organisms and biophysical conditions feedback through exchanges of materials and energies resulting in ecological stabilities; environments that, when unperturbed by uncommon dramatic events, change at the typical rates of evolution, i.e., more slowly than generational turnover of constituent organisms.

Humans have been on a 50 to 70 thousand year rampage through the ecologically stabilities. Our nearest hominid relatives began to develop not just tools, but a new way of bringing order to the collecting/selecting of information, to the storing of that information and to the implementing of both directly stored and, even more interestingly, modified information. Homo sapiens has carried this process to the level of a completely new system of ordering information, new to the universe.

I am calling this the Consciousness System of Order (CSO). It creates a new probability structure for what might exist in the world; and thus creates a new world. But the new world of the CSO is still dependent on the Living System of Order and the Physical System of Order. It is just that it is ‘possible’ for the CSO to create the idea that it is not. And so Pogo’s prescience.

Genetic evidence and geological inference suggests that our species has gone from only a few thousand members following the devastation of the Toba volcano in Indonesia about 70,000 years ago to our present world population of 7 billion, about a millionfold increase. We have gone from a negligible impact on the ecology to using about half of the earth’s total photosynthetic production. The consequences of our actions, intended and unintended, are changing many long-standing, primary and stabilizing biophysical cycles and extinguishing species faster than any time other than major extinction events, of which there have only been 5 in the last 640 million years.

Our “problem” is not global climate change; it is global human impact. While the insanity of excess can be blamed in proportion to the excess, still our impact ultimately comes down to the human organism needing 1500 calories (Kcals) everyday to sit around and 3000, up to 5000, calories to do physical work; plus anywhere from a few thousand calories to several hundred thousand calories of energy per day for our tools and comforts. Simply and devastatingly put: it cannot be sustained.

Part of our political trouble today may come from the denial of these realities: “We will get to these ‘long-term’ issues later, but right now Gov. Sanford is screwing an Argentine reporter.” I do the same thing – not the Argentine part. Facing a difficult situation, I will clean corners that I had forgotten existed; amazing how important getting those dust bunnies from under the fridge becomes when I have to go through 5 years of tax records. Amazing how important (and comforting) those tax records become when I have to truly consider changing my whole way of life.

And yet that is where we are. All of humanity, every last one of us will have to change how we live if we are to adapt through the next few decades. The option is to take down the biophysical structures of the biosphere in a convulsive collapse of unprecedented horror. It must have been awful to be a dinosaur in the marshes of New Mexico when the shock wave blew across the mid-latitudes. And it must have been worse to be in the fires in China or part of the starvations that followed, but these were not creatures that had destroyed themselves by their own aware actions.

The arguments that fill our media and our minds are finally distractions from these larger concerns: dust bunnies under the fridge. Of course, we must deal with health care, torture, economic and justice equity, bribery in government, spread of weapons, racism and the thousands of other issues that form our actions everyday. But, and this is a prodigious but, every one of those deliberations must begin to put the maintenance of environmental stability and biodiversity at the front end of consideration. We are quite literally doing the laundry while the muddy floodwaters are rising up fill the washer.

I have wondered out loud if the economic elite might be considering a way to kill off about 5 or 6 billion people as a solution. But, I think that even a well-planned and powerful biological attack on the Great Many would so devastate both the ecological and economic order that such an attempt would prematurely precipitate the kind of convulsive biophysical collapse that is inevitable without great change in how we live. So, we really are ‘all in this together’ to whatever end it is that we either attempt or allow.

I must admit to occasionally being discouraged. In this moment our world is being run by gangs of criminals and madmen (generic term – madwomen happily included). Just listen to the leaders of corporations, churches, government, think (sic) tanks, media and universities! They are like looters trying to grab up ‘everything’, but before the disaster happens. The sophistry is as thick as the shit on an industrial hog farm.

But the Great Many are beginning to understand even as they are being propagandized by multimillion dollar disinformation campaigns. A recent NY Times poll, as much as they tried to spin the public as confused, gave these results:

-92% favor "requiring car manufacturers to produce cars that are more energy efficient"

-75% are "willing ... to pay more for electricity if it were generated by renewable sources like solar or wind energy"

-64% would "pay higher taxes on gasoline and other fuels if the money was used for research into renewable sources like solar and wind energy"

-69% approve of more coal-power plants "if the plants used a new method of burning coal, which would cost more but produce less air pollution." (Otherwise, support for coal was at 41%.)

Similar findings have been made for single-payer health care: when people know what it is, majorities prefer it. For war and peace: people reject gratuitous war. For personal freedom, safety and privacy: people reject institutional spying and support the protections of the Bill of Rights.

So, as an acquaintance maddeningly used to begin almost every thought, ‘Here is the deal:’ We have lost. Just look at the situation. Seven billion. Insane criminals running things. If we can’t work together we are screwed. Asking people to do things that they have historically not done well. The apparent need for vast resources. The opposition of the most powerful forces in society. It does not look good – that is why we have lost.

But if we have lost, then there is no reason not to kick butt. It is becoming more and more clear that the truly crazy people, who for example are letting the insurance companies deny the whole population the only functional design that can deliver the knowledge and practice of medicine to the people in a cost effective way, are willing to let thousands and millions suffer terribly so that they can have a seat in a big wood-paneled room. It is becoming clear that, since we have lost, in not all that many years those who are left will be digging roots to chew on and straining water through their t-shirts.

This country is just about ready to turn the devastation of losing into the desperation of losing. We are the numbers. It is time for the millions upon millions of the losers to speak up forcefully. I suggest the battle cry: “Remember Missionary Ridge!” But any that you like will do [2].

Does this mean that we still might win? Not a chance [3]. But we can be an active part of the adaptation process to whatever it is we will be after and not some stupid lump of protoplasm ground to a pulp by crazy people. We can at least fight to be members of the honorable human species to the very end.

[1] There are many thousands of enzymes. Each one controls the rate of chemical reactions, speeding those that would go too slow in the environment of the living thing and slowing those that would go too fast – by just the amounts needed.

[2] The Union forces were in a valley below Missionary Ridge. The Confederate forces were on the ridge top pouring fire, rifle and cannon, into the valley. The Union troops were in an impossible position with no retreat and only withering fire coming from the ridgeline that they could not possibly assault. No order came from the leaders. In almost spontaneous movement the Union soldiers ran up the ridge. Since they had lost the battle, they did this with no strategic purpose other than to stop the rain of ball and canister on their heads. The character of the war in the south was shifted to the Union advantage.

[3] Creating the belief that you can win is what the crazy people use to take the effectiveness out of your action. If you know that you can’t win, then you can. But if you think that you can, then you are screwed because you get suckered into playing the crazy game.