New Blog Launched

I'm launching a new blog on the politics of agriculture as The Scientist Gardener.

The arc of a blog

a final soliloquy

Like thousands of its contemporaries, this blog has slowly wound down, predictably and inevitably, and now officially freezes as long as the cache remains.

I began this blog as a grad student, encountering and turning over many new and exciting ideas faster than I could find other bodies to discuss them with. Writing helped me to organize and coalesce my thoughts on topics that I felt passionate about yet often failed to articulate.

I imagine it's no surprise that my motivation has slide from excitement to obligation as I worked through the main themes I was interested in. I'll probably start another blog sometime in the future, but Notes from a Gene Safari has outlived it's purpose.

If I do this again, I'll focus more on what I want to get out of it, what my niche will be and what online forums already exist. I imagine reading and commenting on other people's blogs is probaby one the best ways to draw people into yours.

There are a lot of blogs out there that do a good job of communicating day-to-day science to a general audience, but I've found I'm not very interested in this.

I've increasingly found academics blogging about their professional interests within the same communities in which they attend meetings, make collaborations and apply for funding. I think blogs could serve young academics well in developing and advertising their brand within these existing communities. As academics largely function as independent contractors, I imagine having a strong online presence would be an important part of your resume.

There also seems to be a lot of room for blogs that take curious readers into some esoteric corner of the world. I think my postings about modern agriculture would have been a lot more interesting within the context of the daily account of a more boots-on-the-ground agriculturalist (e.g. an extension agent) - especially with all the recent public interest in the aesthetics and philosophy of farming (in addition to knowing where food actually comes from!). I think this would be a fun blog to write.

In hindsight it's pretty obvious that the success of a blog comes from its interactions with a community. I like writing, and I wouldn't mind starting from scratch, but I need a good idea first. We'll see where I end up after my postdoc. If nothing else, I'd like to get involved with my future home's community (e.g. through wildlands conservation and sports or the arts)...
maybe I'll blog about that.

_______________________________________________________________

I bet someday I'll hear someone on NPR promoting their book, a collection of final blog posts. I'd read it. I bet it would be full of funny, self-indulgent hand wringing over why no one was interested in what he/she had to say.

So for one last time, I sort out my thoughts. bye!

Global warming and paleoclimatology

One of the recurrent themes in this blog has been my dissatisfaction with the availability of accessible (yet convincing!) data on global warming.

I've come across some references that state that some of the recent ice age transitions occurred over a few to several decades (regionally, if not globally). It's pretty much become a cliche to me that geologists (alone among scientists) are skeptical of global warming. If these references are accurate, it certainly seems to put contemporary anthropogenic climate change well within the norm for prehistoric climate change.

Were these previous abrupt changes accompanied by significant extinction events?
If not, would they be today?

Maybe if there is so much unknown, we should shift our resources into a more generally adaptive strategy instead of just focusing on reducing greenhouse gasses...

What should we focus on? I think I vote for:

Business policy that encourages translation of cutting edge agriculture and energy generation
More research funding for applied ecology/conservation biology and meteorology
Wildlands conservation!
- more protected parks (with different levels of permissible activities)
- targeted conservation + restoration of biodiversity hotspots and charismatic organisms
- local networks of functional urban ecosystems

Intuiting Science

I've come to appreciate recently how subjective and intuitive the process of science really is. It's often emphasized that science is this big, objective machine, but there really is a lot of art in it (along with quite a bit of luck!).

These ideas were simmering in my head as I was reading a library book, Data Analysis and Graphics Using R. One of the chapters on preliminary data analysis emphasized that humans are really excellent at picking out patterns in the seemingly random. I'm used to thinking about this idea when it comes to people imagining connections where they don't actually exist (e.g. superstitions based on selective memories or the very human ability to see "faces" in all manner of everyday objects - clouds, wood grain, floor tiles...). This chapter emphasized though that this ability/handicap is really central to science because it inspires people with hypotheses about how the world works - that can then be tested with objective sampling and statistical methods.

Many of the greatest discoveries in science began with luck and hunches. With people noticing funny things and imagining incredible, unique possible explanations for these observations - followed by careful objective methods to filter reality from imagination. I've started to notice and appreciate this a lot more in my own work. I've always been very focused on the objective, deductive side of science - often associating scientific musings with naivete. I think I underestimated just how open your mind should be at the front end of a research project.

I think I can be better at what I do by more fully embracing the creative aspects of my work.

wiki RNA

This article in Nature describes how the journal RNA Biology will now require authors of accepted (peer-reviewed) papers to submit summaries of their research to be added to Wikipedia. The first article to be translated into a Wikipedia page is titled "A Survey of Nematode SmY RNAs."

There's a nice discussion under the Nature article about the pros and cons of such a strategy and I agree with what appears to be the majority opinion - that any effort to make cutting edge science accessible to the people is a good thing.

Aware citizens already know that a site like Wikipedia can never be trusted to be 100% accurate (even when it comes to dry, supposedly apolitical topics like SmY RNAs!), but I've frequently found that Wikipedia pages serve as an excellent introduction to foreign topics that give you enough of a cursory understanding to allow you to process more scholarly sources.

"Clean" coal

I just saw an interesting commercial asserting that the frequently used phrase "clean coal" is an oxymoron. It appears to be run by Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.

It's nice to hear the facts occasionally cut through the noise of misinformation.

Against Organic

Periodically, I feel compelled to reiterate why I'm against organic agriculture.

This post will be one of those times, as I've run into this anti-intellectual strain of environmentalism a lot recently.

Bottom line:
1 - chemicals are everywhere in nature, not just in glass tubes in laboratories
2 - chemicals have incredibly diverse properties and need to be evaluated on a case by case basis
3 - the same chemical synthesized in a lab is identical to its counterpart synthesized by an organism

I'll give you two examples of how organic agriculture is not green.

The Gulf dead zone is caused by fertilizer runoff from the Midwest.
The fertilization paradigm of the past several decades (thanks to cheap synthetic nitrogen) has been to pour tons of nutrients onto fields. Crops were bred to thrive in an environment with profuse nutrient availability, yields went through the roof, poor people could afford good food and huge quantities of runoff flowed into the waterways.

Switching from synthetic nitrogen to manure tomorrow would fix none of this. The correct solution is to breed crops that thrive under lower nutrient conditions, to precisely apply the minimum amount of fertilizer required and to apply conservation ('no') tillage - all three of which are being accomplished by mainstream agribusinesses, not small organic farms.

Topsoil erosion and the nutrient runoff that accompanies it is pretty hard to limit when you plow up your fields every year, leaving bare soil that is easily washed away. Traditional Western agriculture (e.g. Medieval/organic practices) relies on tilling to control weeds and other pests. The current push towards no-till agriculture is possible only because modern chemicals allow farmers to control pests without plowing up the land.

Many of the pesticides used in the past were extremely dangerous and did plenty of damage to people and the environment. As it's a pretty bad strategy to allow your customers and their communities to be poisoned, chemical companies have made great contributions to creating more effective and safe pesticides.

One of the highlights is glyphosate. This chemical kills plants but is pretty much harmless to animals (e.g. farmworkers) and breaks down quickly after application. The best thing about glyphosate is that many of our crops today have been genetically engineered to be resistant to glyphosate. In the past, if farmers were going to apply weed killers at all, they usually had to do it before they planted - and as long as they were investing in this expense, they needed to spray a lot to be sure they'd get their money's worth in crop protection. All of this left the fields temporarily bare, and vulnerable to erosion and runoff.

GMO glyphosate resistance changed this. Now, farmers often don't need to spray herbicides until they actually see weeds pop up, they can spot treat only certain areas of their fields, and they can use a fraction of the herbicide they'd otherwise spray. All while the crops are in the ground, mitigating runoff!