I’ve told you that the doctors are entertained by my throat cancer because it is exceedingly rare to see tumors like mine in a nonsmoker. Indeed. When you think of smoker’s illnesses, you naturally think of lung cancer and COPD. But smoking is associated with a variety of cancers, from nasal and oral cavity to larynx and pharynx to bronchi and lungs to pancreas, kidney, and bladder [1].
Any way you slice it, breathing sticky goop into your lungs is not a good idea [2], and the chemical components of tobacco are particularly virulent carcinogens.
There are distinct peaks in per-capita cigarette consumption of men in Britain corresponding to both world wars [3]. Women missed the World War One spike, but caught the one for World War Two.
Why should this be? There are reasons bad and (remarkably) good. On the “good” side, it’s a matter of relative risk. As Greaves [1] puts it “tobacco’s narcotic properties could nullify both fear and hunger. The result? Fields full of the dead or addicted”. Smoking among the troops was encouraged by the officer corps from the Thirty Years War, the Crimean War, the Napoleonic Wars, and of course the world wars.
For Americans, during the First World War, Pershing said “You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets. Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration; we must have thousands of tons without delay.
[4]. So tobacco use was not just a cultural phenomenon, it was an officially encouraged part of being a soldier. In 1918, the U.S. government bought the entire output of the Bull Durham Tobacco Company to ship to the doughboys overseas.
During World War Two, cigarettes were included in front-line ration tins for all soldiers, and tobacco companies shipped their entire output of popular cigarette brands—free—to Americans fighting overseas [4]. The “Best Generation” was hooked like a largemouth on a plastic worm, and smoking rates in the developed world peaked following the Second World War.
Oddly, Nazi Germany conducted substantive research on the health effects of tobacco [1]. And acted on the findings [4]. In 1943, Germany enacted a law forbidding public tobacco use by anyone under 18. Weird, huh? For all the bullshit, philosophy-driven fake scientific research conducted under the Third Reich, the one good piece of work they did was to show tobacco as the public health threat it is. Actually, Hitler was a rabid anti-smoker. This may have been just another perverted bit of results-oriented pseudo-science. Except it matched up with the real science being conducted simultaneously in the West.
Put THAT in your Philip K. Dick irony generator and…uh…smoke it!
Fresh material up across the weblog empire. Please surf on over to http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for a festive seafood dinner from the grill, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for some movie reviews, and http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for update on the cancer melodrama. Most of all, remember I love you all, and I’m grateful that you’re taking the time to read this stuff. Thanks!
Notes
[1] Mel Greaves’ Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2000] devotes a chapter to smoking and cancer and recounts the epidemiologic linkage of varied cancers and smoking.
[2] Greaves reports that Chinese cooks who stir fry intensely contract a form of lung cancer unrelated to smoking that is characteristic of inhaling hot cooking oil.
[3] http://www.laia.ac.uk/factsheets/982.pdf
[4] http://www.tobacco.org/resources/history/Tobacco_History20-1.html
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Combat Landscapes and the Long Haul
Easter Island—Rapanui—was deforested a few centuries after wayfarers from islands to the east arrived. The rather dense palm forest (the palm was endemic and now assumed extinct) was cut to the last tree. The timber was put to many uses, and the newly opened spaces may have been used for agricultural. However, armed conflict played an enormous role in the disposition of the Rapanui landscape. The inhabitants divided themselves among a suite of clans, primarily for the purpose of carving, transporting and erecting the giant stone figures—Moai—that still dot the island and watch over visitors. The clans came into rivalry, competed for manufacturing the biggest Moai, and went to war with each other. The palms were instrumental in Moai production (providing, among other things, leverage for moving and erecting the stones), and when Moai competition was intense, it is likely the palm harvest was correspondingly so. In addition, they likely provided weaponry, and did provide raw material for canoes and dwellings, along with food (the endemic palm had a nutritious edible fruit). Ramped-up human activity meant a ramped-down palm population.
Eventually, after canoes were no longer available due to loss of palms, the now stuck-in-place islanders came to accord and substituted a sporting-style competition among champions for deciding annual leadership of the whole human population. Not long after, westerners arrived in sailing ships and the population crashed under the weight of disease and other artifacts of contact. But the impact of the loss of the palms was irreversible. The post-palm landscape remains in place—herbaceous, grassy, and shrubby vegetation on thin soils over the rock substrate, which emerges over large land areas. The original fauna and flora were drastically and permanently altered. All but one of the known bird species found on the island are extinct. The vegetation is less diverse, lacking sources of propagules to rebuild biodiversity. But the habitats in place do, of course, support an ecosystem that reflects current conditions. Life on Rapanui goes on, different from what it was, but flourishing in its own way.
Which poses an interesting challenge. Ecosystems develop and function in landscapes impacted by warfare. The ecology has certainly been altered, but is there any reason for us to value it less than the original? I think in the short term—while the landscape is being impacted and while the ecosystem reorganizes and restructures—that we can say the system is negatively affected relative to what was there before. Once the ecosystem has pulled itself together, though, it is simply the ecosystem in place. If the inhabitants of Rapanui had wiped themselves out and the archaeological clues to their history lost, we would accept the present ecosystem as “valid”. Which, in the sense of providing the breadth and depth of ecosystem services possible in the landscape-as-it-is, is a rational perspective.
We don’t know how much of a role armed conflict played in the denuding of Rapanui palm forests. But it was clearly one factor.
Another place where modern landscapes have been posited to be an outcome of human use, with at least an assist from armed conflict, is in the mountains that ring the Mediterranean Sea. R.V. O’Neill built a case for the alpine environment’s present spotty tree cover, thin soils, exposed rock, and eroded condition being due to non-sustainable use by human occupation from the bronze age forward. O’Neill’s exposition makes sense. However, other investigators like Arthur Rackham (the botanist, not the illustrator) take issue, and believe these montane ecosystems represent the outcome of hydrology, geology, and biology unique to the region.
On Guam, I had the opportunity to observe the aftermath of war in the landscape. The western half of Guam has a central massif that rises from sea level in a huge escarpment (and, in the other direction, drops into the Marianas Trench). Much of these hills is covered with hard, mineral soils, bare in places and occupied by coarse grasses in near monoculture in others. These steep slopes were subject to horrific bombardment in the runup to the allied invasion to retake the island from the Japanese. There was considerable post-landing combat here as well. The original ecosystem of these heights supported high plant diversity on organic soils formed over millennia. When the vegetation was damaged by war, the soils eroded, and the present landscape is the result. It didn’t help that in the postwar period several enormous typhoons (? Word?) flooded the island with intense precipitation [5]. This is also where the last Japanese soldier walked out of the hills to a seaside bar and surrendered in the 1970s. He said he would have kept to himself except his teeth deteriorated to the point that he could no longer eat the freshwater prawns that kept him alive all those years.
A few years ago in the Maas River valley, I spent a day hiking through suburban Maastricht from the Netherlands into Belgium and up the slope of a hill rising out of the muddy floodplain. This hill turned out to be the residual outer ring of an enormous quarry, which had taken the mass out of hill’s center and replaced it with exposed bedrock. The Sint Pietersberg hill is networked with tunnels, which played several roles in World War Two. When I got there via pure serendipity on my hike, I was delighted to find a nice café at the summit, where I could get free wi fi, frites with mayonnaise, and a couple of pints of ice cold cherry kriek. After refreshment, I did a little brush busting hoping to turn up a viper or ringelnatter. What I wandered into instead was a network of trenches and shell holes going back to both World Wars. The forest had recovered and grown over the earthworks, but slopes in the shell holes were very steep and many had bare side walls. At the bottom of one, I found an oddly smoothed chunk of rock that fit almost preternaturally into my hand. The rock had been broken, and the worn hand fitting piece is all there is. I couldn’t help but think that in this landscape, I could possibly retrieve artifacts from World War Two, or stone age tools exposed by the explosive excavations.
In China, near Nanjing, I visited a village inside a massive fortification from the early Ming dynasty. The village was inside the fort wall, which occupied an enormous acreage. The present wall is just a part of the landscape. Locals have built houses and shops into it, and the ancient gates are now busy gravel roads. But the footprint of this fortress is enormous, and the area still reflects the earthworks from the 1300s. The entire area inside the huge fort, now mostly planted in wheat, is clearly disturbed ground. Many hectares outside the walls are also transformed, probably to provide mass for the walls and outside positions to anticipate attack.
In general, it appears that intense combat modifies landscapes for a long time. Even when the ecosystem has recovered to function however it can in the residual environment (in Belgium, the forest recovered just fine from the shell holes and excavations, on Guam, not so much). Given the extent of war in the course of human history, this is a nontrivial aspect of our relationship to the biosphere!
There’s new material up at all the weblog nodes, so please drop by http://docviper.livejournal.com/, http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/. Thanks!
Eventually, after canoes were no longer available due to loss of palms, the now stuck-in-place islanders came to accord and substituted a sporting-style competition among champions for deciding annual leadership of the whole human population. Not long after, westerners arrived in sailing ships and the population crashed under the weight of disease and other artifacts of contact. But the impact of the loss of the palms was irreversible. The post-palm landscape remains in place—herbaceous, grassy, and shrubby vegetation on thin soils over the rock substrate, which emerges over large land areas. The original fauna and flora were drastically and permanently altered. All but one of the known bird species found on the island are extinct. The vegetation is less diverse, lacking sources of propagules to rebuild biodiversity. But the habitats in place do, of course, support an ecosystem that reflects current conditions. Life on Rapanui goes on, different from what it was, but flourishing in its own way.
Which poses an interesting challenge. Ecosystems develop and function in landscapes impacted by warfare. The ecology has certainly been altered, but is there any reason for us to value it less than the original? I think in the short term—while the landscape is being impacted and while the ecosystem reorganizes and restructures—that we can say the system is negatively affected relative to what was there before. Once the ecosystem has pulled itself together, though, it is simply the ecosystem in place. If the inhabitants of Rapanui had wiped themselves out and the archaeological clues to their history lost, we would accept the present ecosystem as “valid”. Which, in the sense of providing the breadth and depth of ecosystem services possible in the landscape-as-it-is, is a rational perspective.
We don’t know how much of a role armed conflict played in the denuding of Rapanui palm forests. But it was clearly one factor.
Another place where modern landscapes have been posited to be an outcome of human use, with at least an assist from armed conflict, is in the mountains that ring the Mediterranean Sea. R.V. O’Neill built a case for the alpine environment’s present spotty tree cover, thin soils, exposed rock, and eroded condition being due to non-sustainable use by human occupation from the bronze age forward. O’Neill’s exposition makes sense. However, other investigators like Arthur Rackham (the botanist, not the illustrator) take issue, and believe these montane ecosystems represent the outcome of hydrology, geology, and biology unique to the region.
On Guam, I had the opportunity to observe the aftermath of war in the landscape. The western half of Guam has a central massif that rises from sea level in a huge escarpment (and, in the other direction, drops into the Marianas Trench). Much of these hills is covered with hard, mineral soils, bare in places and occupied by coarse grasses in near monoculture in others. These steep slopes were subject to horrific bombardment in the runup to the allied invasion to retake the island from the Japanese. There was considerable post-landing combat here as well. The original ecosystem of these heights supported high plant diversity on organic soils formed over millennia. When the vegetation was damaged by war, the soils eroded, and the present landscape is the result. It didn’t help that in the postwar period several enormous typhoons (? Word?) flooded the island with intense precipitation [5]. This is also where the last Japanese soldier walked out of the hills to a seaside bar and surrendered in the 1970s. He said he would have kept to himself except his teeth deteriorated to the point that he could no longer eat the freshwater prawns that kept him alive all those years.
A few years ago in the Maas River valley, I spent a day hiking through suburban Maastricht from the Netherlands into Belgium and up the slope of a hill rising out of the muddy floodplain. This hill turned out to be the residual outer ring of an enormous quarry, which had taken the mass out of hill’s center and replaced it with exposed bedrock. The Sint Pietersberg hill is networked with tunnels, which played several roles in World War Two. When I got there via pure serendipity on my hike, I was delighted to find a nice café at the summit, where I could get free wi fi, frites with mayonnaise, and a couple of pints of ice cold cherry kriek. After refreshment, I did a little brush busting hoping to turn up a viper or ringelnatter. What I wandered into instead was a network of trenches and shell holes going back to both World Wars. The forest had recovered and grown over the earthworks, but slopes in the shell holes were very steep and many had bare side walls. At the bottom of one, I found an oddly smoothed chunk of rock that fit almost preternaturally into my hand. The rock had been broken, and the worn hand fitting piece is all there is. I couldn’t help but think that in this landscape, I could possibly retrieve artifacts from World War Two, or stone age tools exposed by the explosive excavations.
In China, near Nanjing, I visited a village inside a massive fortification from the early Ming dynasty. The village was inside the fort wall, which occupied an enormous acreage. The present wall is just a part of the landscape. Locals have built houses and shops into it, and the ancient gates are now busy gravel roads. But the footprint of this fortress is enormous, and the area still reflects the earthworks from the 1300s. The entire area inside the huge fort, now mostly planted in wheat, is clearly disturbed ground. Many hectares outside the walls are also transformed, probably to provide mass for the walls and outside positions to anticipate attack.
In general, it appears that intense combat modifies landscapes for a long time. Even when the ecosystem has recovered to function however it can in the residual environment (in Belgium, the forest recovered just fine from the shell holes and excavations, on Guam, not so much). Given the extent of war in the course of human history, this is a nontrivial aspect of our relationship to the biosphere!
There’s new material up at all the weblog nodes, so please drop by http://docviper.livejournal.com/, http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/. Thanks!
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Simply Sustainable
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, E.O. Wilson wrote a book called “Biophilia” [1]. His thesis was that human beings have an inherent love of and preference for living things. That we are besotted by life. As Wilson put it, biophilia is “the innate tendency [in human beings] to focus on life and lifelike process. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hopes rise on its currents.”
Apparently lacking the gene for cynicism that might let him see brutal inconsistency in his own thinking, Wilson claimed that our innate love for living things is a foundation for repairing and restoring the biosphere. From the damage caused by…uh…us, despite our deep feelings of oneness with all living things.
Anyway, sloppy rhetoric aside, it is clear from archeological ecology studies worldwide that human beings are very consistent when they move into a previously uninhabited area. First thing we do is start to simplify the biota. We may well be “biophilic”, but if we are, there are limits to the intensity of biodiversity we are prepared to tolerate in our neighborhood. For the millennia that there have been human settlements, wherever the residual evidence is sufficient to answer the question, we find that humans reconstruct their environment to contain fewer species and to be structured in a more-or-less orderly fashion. You can find an excellent disquisition (correct word?) of this effect in Charles L. Redman’s book Human Impact on Ancient Environments [2].
Redman compiles archeological evidence from human settlements worldwide, and conclusively demonstrates the suppression of biodiversity over time. More interestingly, he documents consistent patterns in this effect. By landscape modification (for everything from slash-and-burn agriculture to permanent fields and provision of space for residential and commercial growth), preferential hunting, and replacement of locally indigenous species with those already domesticated, humans reconstruct the environment to a simpler, and similarly structured, pattern wherever they settle.
This may seem like simple coincidence, an artifact of the technological development status of human society when new lands were occupied. I’m inclined to think not. It turns out that early life on earth probably resembled single celled eukaryotes more than bacteria. Eukaryotes carry enormous complexity in their genomes, which gives them tremendous residual flexibility to deal with environmental challenges, particularly in cooler habitats where biochemical processes occur at slower rates. The downside of genetic complexity—of stretches of unexpressed genome, of random pieces of genome flopping off the chromosomes to float in the cellular fluids, of viral DNA inserts, redundant genes within and across chromosomes—makes it very easy for replication to fail. A relatively high proportion of daughter cells of such creatures are too genetically warped to survive. They are victims of a sloppy genetic system. Bacteria, it turns out, don’t put up with all the genetic slop. Bacteria retain a single, clean loop of DNA, genes are not redundant, snippets of unused DNA do not accrue. The current theory [3] is that this an artifact of life moving from cooler shallow waters to warm shallows and more importantly, warm deep ocean vent chemosynthetic environments. The high temperatures of such environs run physiological machinery at a high rate, increasing the proportion of failures. To successfully occupy the hostile warmer and biogeochemically novel environments, and to successfully manage the environment to permit long-term survival, the colonizers needed simpler, cleaner genetic systems.
Human beings, of all earthly organisms, do the most effective job of environmental manipulation. We now, and for all the time that we have lived in settlements rather than nomadic family groups, have managed the environment to do our bidding. I think it is possible that humans restructure the environment in consistent fashion because it is difficult to manage more complex ecosystems. The opportunities for failure are too great, there are too many choices to make to reformulate and operate the regional ecology without life-threatening fuck ups.
There may be a method to our madness. We may not be “biophilic”, but we are also not “biophobic”. We are idiosyncratic, knowing what we can handle in an ecosystem, and working to make it so.
I’ll explore this theme in more detail from here. It seems like an important clue to human interaction with the biosphere. It also may be another driving factor for war, since the invariable outcome of armed conflict is ecosystem simplification both in the combat zone and in the regions that provide the raw materials, logistics, and foodstuffs to wage war.
Anyway, I have new material up at all sites this week, and intend to keep renewing every week from here out. If you have a moment, please visit http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ . Thanks for stopping by!
Notes
[1] Easily available via Amazon and other online sources. No longer routinely easy to find in brick-and-mortar book emporiums. Or is that “emporia”… ?
[2] Redman, C.L. 1999. Human Impact on Ancient Environments. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Widely available in paperback from Amazon and other online purveyors.
[3] Ridley, M. 2000. Genome. Harper Perennial. NY.
Apparently lacking the gene for cynicism that might let him see brutal inconsistency in his own thinking, Wilson claimed that our innate love for living things is a foundation for repairing and restoring the biosphere. From the damage caused by…uh…us, despite our deep feelings of oneness with all living things.
Anyway, sloppy rhetoric aside, it is clear from archeological ecology studies worldwide that human beings are very consistent when they move into a previously uninhabited area. First thing we do is start to simplify the biota. We may well be “biophilic”, but if we are, there are limits to the intensity of biodiversity we are prepared to tolerate in our neighborhood. For the millennia that there have been human settlements, wherever the residual evidence is sufficient to answer the question, we find that humans reconstruct their environment to contain fewer species and to be structured in a more-or-less orderly fashion. You can find an excellent disquisition (correct word?) of this effect in Charles L. Redman’s book Human Impact on Ancient Environments [2].
Redman compiles archeological evidence from human settlements worldwide, and conclusively demonstrates the suppression of biodiversity over time. More interestingly, he documents consistent patterns in this effect. By landscape modification (for everything from slash-and-burn agriculture to permanent fields and provision of space for residential and commercial growth), preferential hunting, and replacement of locally indigenous species with those already domesticated, humans reconstruct the environment to a simpler, and similarly structured, pattern wherever they settle.
This may seem like simple coincidence, an artifact of the technological development status of human society when new lands were occupied. I’m inclined to think not. It turns out that early life on earth probably resembled single celled eukaryotes more than bacteria. Eukaryotes carry enormous complexity in their genomes, which gives them tremendous residual flexibility to deal with environmental challenges, particularly in cooler habitats where biochemical processes occur at slower rates. The downside of genetic complexity—of stretches of unexpressed genome, of random pieces of genome flopping off the chromosomes to float in the cellular fluids, of viral DNA inserts, redundant genes within and across chromosomes—makes it very easy for replication to fail. A relatively high proportion of daughter cells of such creatures are too genetically warped to survive. They are victims of a sloppy genetic system. Bacteria, it turns out, don’t put up with all the genetic slop. Bacteria retain a single, clean loop of DNA, genes are not redundant, snippets of unused DNA do not accrue. The current theory [3] is that this an artifact of life moving from cooler shallow waters to warm shallows and more importantly, warm deep ocean vent chemosynthetic environments. The high temperatures of such environs run physiological machinery at a high rate, increasing the proportion of failures. To successfully occupy the hostile warmer and biogeochemically novel environments, and to successfully manage the environment to permit long-term survival, the colonizers needed simpler, cleaner genetic systems.
Human beings, of all earthly organisms, do the most effective job of environmental manipulation. We now, and for all the time that we have lived in settlements rather than nomadic family groups, have managed the environment to do our bidding. I think it is possible that humans restructure the environment in consistent fashion because it is difficult to manage more complex ecosystems. The opportunities for failure are too great, there are too many choices to make to reformulate and operate the regional ecology without life-threatening fuck ups.
There may be a method to our madness. We may not be “biophilic”, but we are also not “biophobic”. We are idiosyncratic, knowing what we can handle in an ecosystem, and working to make it so.
I’ll explore this theme in more detail from here. It seems like an important clue to human interaction with the biosphere. It also may be another driving factor for war, since the invariable outcome of armed conflict is ecosystem simplification both in the combat zone and in the regions that provide the raw materials, logistics, and foodstuffs to wage war.
Anyway, I have new material up at all sites this week, and intend to keep renewing every week from here out. If you have a moment, please visit http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ . Thanks for stopping by!
Notes
[1] Easily available via Amazon and other online sources. No longer routinely easy to find in brick-and-mortar book emporiums. Or is that “emporia”… ?
[2] Redman, C.L. 1999. Human Impact on Ancient Environments. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Widely available in paperback from Amazon and other online purveyors.
[3] Ridley, M. 2000. Genome. Harper Perennial. NY.
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