Future shock, redux
A well-known term for the phenomenon I discussed in a post I made yesterday is future shock, which can be functionally defined as "too much change in too short a period of time in terms of its impact on the organism." One possible result of these rapidly accelarating ongoing changes in our world and our lives could be the human equivalent of something like colony collapse disorder.
Colony collapse disorder (CCD) isn't just a metaphor for the possible results of future shock on the human world; it and its underlying causes, whatever they may be, are actually part of the phenomenon I described in that earlier post, and serve as an accurate mirror of the sort of damage that have been appearing in our world on greater and greater scales in a sort of fractal version of Apocalypse since the beginning of the 20th century.
CCD involves the abrupt disappearance of worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony. While such disappearances, or absconscions, have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, the term "colony collapse disorder" was first formally applied to a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honey bee colonies in North America in late 2006. From 1972 to 2006, there was a dramatic reduction in the number of feral honey bees, which are now almost completely absent, in the U.S., and a significant though somewhat gradual decline in the number of colonies maintained by beekeepers. This decline includes cumulative losses from all factors, such as urbanization, pesticide use, tracheal and Varroa mites, and the retirement of commercial beekeepers, who have then gone out of business. However, in late 2006 and early 2007 the rate of attrition reached new, far higher proportions, and the term "colony collapse disorder" began to be used to describe this sudden rash of disappearances, which are sometimes referred to as "the Mary Celeste Syndrome" in the United Kingdom.
There has been a lot of speculation about the underlying causes of CCD, but without going into the biochemistry, ecology, and genetics of the problem, functionally speaking, the following analogy from neurobiology may be useful. Imagine a large vertebrate organism -- a human being will do -- whose brain is impacted by a large number of serious stressors over a relatively long period of time. Each of these stressors are applied over and over, on a random basis; the occurrence of the application of any one of them has little or no correlation, either positive or negative, with any of the others; and they take any number of forms, from chemical and physical to informational and biological, such as severe sleep deprivation, malnourishment, lack of nourishment, dehydration, high noise levels, physical impacts on the skull and thus the brain, strange chemicals in water and food, air pollution, heavy-metal poisoning, social rejection, loss of loved ones, physical abuse at the hands of others, you name it, that individual experiences such stressors over and over and over, without let, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Every one of those stressors is capable of seriously stressing the brain of that organism, hence the organism itself. The constellation of them is highly unusual, and may never have been experienced before by that organism, adding to the stress.
As a result, not only is the organism's brain stressed overall, but every single neuron in it is highly stressed, and, furthermore, is stressed randomly and unpredictably in ways that may not be characteristic of the ways in which other neurons in the brain are stressed. Like every other cell in the body, neurons must deal with any problems in their immediate environment before they do anything else if they are to function properly, so every neuron in this organism's brain is having to deal with a long, continuous series of biochemical and, in some cases, mechanical problems, which takes up most of the neuron's time and resources, leaving not enough to enable it to carry out its primary function, i.e., interacting with other neurons in a coordinated fashion by which the brain does its job of perceiving, thinking, planning, overseeing motor and sensory coordination, etc. In other words, because the neurons of this organism's brain are all terribly stressed, each in somewhat different ways than its fellow neurons, communication among them rapidly goes to hell and stays there, and as a result, the organism simply begins to fall apart.
Now, scale that up and imagine it happening to a human family, community, society, or even an entire civilization. When aeverything at every level of our world, from atoms and molecules in the soil in which our food grows, the water drunk by us and the creatures whose flesh we eat, and the air all of us breathe to the cells, tissues, organs, and organ-systems of our bodies, to the information taken in by us and exchanged with others on a moment-to-moment basis, to the physical plant of our villages, towns, and cities, to everything else in our world is changing at a faster and faster rate, the impact on the world and all its life -- and thus on us -- could well have exactly the same impact on us as endless, severe, and continuously changing stress would have on the brain of any vertebrate, as described above.
How could you test any of this? If a theory or idea can't be tested, then developing ways of dealing with what it concerns can present serious problems.
Well, one thing that comes to mind right off the bat is, of all things, dandelions. Dandelions are hardy little plants, so much so that the great likelihood is that you've never in your life seen a sick one. Their ancestry may go back very nearly to the origin of flowering plants 140 million years ago, during the Lower Cretaceous, when the first simple angiosperms appeared. The thing about dandelions is that they are even more hardy and tenacious than crabgrass, a bastard whose removal, once it is loose in your yard, may require judicious use of a great number of offensive expletives mixed with large amounts of C4 or even a backpack nuke (a few whiskey sours afterwards may help get you over the resultant case of egregiously jangled everything).
If crabgrass presents that kind of problem, you can imagine what dandelions are like: so tough and resilient that even an all-out attack at oh-dark-thirty with flamethrowers, uzis, a couple of planet-busters, and an audit by the IRS won't do much more than make them yawn.1,2 Dandelions can be found just about everywhere that open fields, however small, exist. They propagate both by seed and by self-cloning, i.e., by putting forth runners from which new plants can form. The individual plants set seed and/or put forth runners, then die back, providing more room and nutrients for baby plants to get well-started. They spread and spread and spread in all directions with zeal and gusto until everything is dandelion as far as the eye can see.
As you can imagine, getting rid of dandelions isn't just a bitch, it's the whole damned canine species. Trying to pull them up by the roots runs into problems all its own; their taproots go straight down to the Earth's mantle, make a right turn, and head for Beijing at warp speed, and you have to get the whole damned thing, or the plant will regenerate from the root and start the process all over again. And once you've finally managed, with the help of a couple of platoons of US Marines and a whole lot of dynamite, to clear your yard of the little bastards, you have to watch like a hawk for their reappearance, because they will come back -- you must pounce on them as soon as they raise their little yellow heads above the ground and grub them out of their with a gardening fork right here, right now, if you don't want to have the entire course of evolution of flowering plants occurring in your back yard all over again.
Conclusin" As hardy as dandelions are, if you see one that is obviously sick, that's a signal that something's gone very wrong in its world. Maybe its soil is so full of weird chemicals from industrial runoff that it just can't cope. Maybe it was irradiated by an excursion from a nuclear reactor. Something.
But that's just one dandelion. One sick dandelion among a bazillion gajillion of its identical cousins means absolutely nothing. What you want to look for is a whole countryside full of sick dandelions, millions of wall-to-wall sick dandelions. If you find such a thing, you've found support for the idea that since the opening guns of the 20th century3 the world and all in it have been changing, changing, changing evermore rapidly, mutating and permuting in every conceivable way until we're all on the verge of catastrophic meltdown. Dig up some of those dandelions, complete with a large block of the soil in which each one grows, and test everything in the plants and their soil matrices to see what's wrong. The great likelihood is that the soil chemistry is so far off from what dandelions and, indeed, living things in general need for their growth and development that even the creatures from Monster Island would be hard put to survive in that environment.
Okay, that's enough for now. I'm sure I'll have more to ramble on about this matter in a future post, though. MuAHahahahah!
**************************************************************************************************
1I am informed that my remarks about dandelions are not funny, and I should immediately cease and desist from them OR ELSE. By the dandelions across the street. (The crabgrass, which has been cowed into quivering silence by the dandelions, has chosen not to participate.)
2Actually, there is a non-violent way to get rid of crabgrass, if you're patient and willing to invest the work in doing so. Crabgrass not only prefers slightly alkaline soils, it will die off rapidly in even mildly acidic soils. Furthermore, its soliphilic -- a sun-lover, hating shade and prolonged cold. On the other hand, dichondra, a lovely clover that makes for beautiful lawns, loves slightly acidic soils. So, armed with good advice from your area's professional nurserymen (you can get books and flyers on the subject in the racks near the checkout stands at any good nursery) and a pH tester, add whatever you need to your yard to bring the soils to the right pH; put in some nice shade trees (for that, you want to obtain trees that are close to maturity, say, a few years old; you may be able to dig these up, roots and all, in wildlands that aren't under federal or state jurisdiction, or buy them from a good nursery or from a homeowner who wants to get rid of his but doesn't want to kill them); plant dochondra in quantity; and stand back and watch the fun as the new dichondra stands advance ferociously on the crabgrass, savaging them root-by-root and grabbing every last damned nutrient from them. (You may want to wear earplugs to shut out the screams of the dying crabgrass, though -- don't want to come down with a good case of Rave Ear, you know.)
3Literally. Think World War I, and you've got it.
Colony collapse disorder (CCD) isn't just a metaphor for the possible results of future shock on the human world; it and its underlying causes, whatever they may be, are actually part of the phenomenon I described in that earlier post, and serve as an accurate mirror of the sort of damage that have been appearing in our world on greater and greater scales in a sort of fractal version of Apocalypse since the beginning of the 20th century.
CCD involves the abrupt disappearance of worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony. While such disappearances, or absconscions, have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, the term "colony collapse disorder" was first formally applied to a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honey bee colonies in North America in late 2006. From 1972 to 2006, there was a dramatic reduction in the number of feral honey bees, which are now almost completely absent, in the U.S., and a significant though somewhat gradual decline in the number of colonies maintained by beekeepers. This decline includes cumulative losses from all factors, such as urbanization, pesticide use, tracheal and Varroa mites, and the retirement of commercial beekeepers, who have then gone out of business. However, in late 2006 and early 2007 the rate of attrition reached new, far higher proportions, and the term "colony collapse disorder" began to be used to describe this sudden rash of disappearances, which are sometimes referred to as "the Mary Celeste Syndrome" in the United Kingdom.
There has been a lot of speculation about the underlying causes of CCD, but without going into the biochemistry, ecology, and genetics of the problem, functionally speaking, the following analogy from neurobiology may be useful. Imagine a large vertebrate organism -- a human being will do -- whose brain is impacted by a large number of serious stressors over a relatively long period of time. Each of these stressors are applied over and over, on a random basis; the occurrence of the application of any one of them has little or no correlation, either positive or negative, with any of the others; and they take any number of forms, from chemical and physical to informational and biological, such as severe sleep deprivation, malnourishment, lack of nourishment, dehydration, high noise levels, physical impacts on the skull and thus the brain, strange chemicals in water and food, air pollution, heavy-metal poisoning, social rejection, loss of loved ones, physical abuse at the hands of others, you name it, that individual experiences such stressors over and over and over, without let, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Every one of those stressors is capable of seriously stressing the brain of that organism, hence the organism itself. The constellation of them is highly unusual, and may never have been experienced before by that organism, adding to the stress.
As a result, not only is the organism's brain stressed overall, but every single neuron in it is highly stressed, and, furthermore, is stressed randomly and unpredictably in ways that may not be characteristic of the ways in which other neurons in the brain are stressed. Like every other cell in the body, neurons must deal with any problems in their immediate environment before they do anything else if they are to function properly, so every neuron in this organism's brain is having to deal with a long, continuous series of biochemical and, in some cases, mechanical problems, which takes up most of the neuron's time and resources, leaving not enough to enable it to carry out its primary function, i.e., interacting with other neurons in a coordinated fashion by which the brain does its job of perceiving, thinking, planning, overseeing motor and sensory coordination, etc. In other words, because the neurons of this organism's brain are all terribly stressed, each in somewhat different ways than its fellow neurons, communication among them rapidly goes to hell and stays there, and as a result, the organism simply begins to fall apart.
Now, scale that up and imagine it happening to a human family, community, society, or even an entire civilization. When aeverything at every level of our world, from atoms and molecules in the soil in which our food grows, the water drunk by us and the creatures whose flesh we eat, and the air all of us breathe to the cells, tissues, organs, and organ-systems of our bodies, to the information taken in by us and exchanged with others on a moment-to-moment basis, to the physical plant of our villages, towns, and cities, to everything else in our world is changing at a faster and faster rate, the impact on the world and all its life -- and thus on us -- could well have exactly the same impact on us as endless, severe, and continuously changing stress would have on the brain of any vertebrate, as described above.
How could you test any of this? If a theory or idea can't be tested, then developing ways of dealing with what it concerns can present serious problems.
Well, one thing that comes to mind right off the bat is, of all things, dandelions. Dandelions are hardy little plants, so much so that the great likelihood is that you've never in your life seen a sick one. Their ancestry may go back very nearly to the origin of flowering plants 140 million years ago, during the Lower Cretaceous, when the first simple angiosperms appeared. The thing about dandelions is that they are even more hardy and tenacious than crabgrass, a bastard whose removal, once it is loose in your yard, may require judicious use of a great number of offensive expletives mixed with large amounts of C4 or even a backpack nuke (a few whiskey sours afterwards may help get you over the resultant case of egregiously jangled everything).
If crabgrass presents that kind of problem, you can imagine what dandelions are like: so tough and resilient that even an all-out attack at oh-dark-thirty with flamethrowers, uzis, a couple of planet-busters, and an audit by the IRS won't do much more than make them yawn.1,2 Dandelions can be found just about everywhere that open fields, however small, exist. They propagate both by seed and by self-cloning, i.e., by putting forth runners from which new plants can form. The individual plants set seed and/or put forth runners, then die back, providing more room and nutrients for baby plants to get well-started. They spread and spread and spread in all directions with zeal and gusto until everything is dandelion as far as the eye can see.
As you can imagine, getting rid of dandelions isn't just a bitch, it's the whole damned canine species. Trying to pull them up by the roots runs into problems all its own; their taproots go straight down to the Earth's mantle, make a right turn, and head for Beijing at warp speed, and you have to get the whole damned thing, or the plant will regenerate from the root and start the process all over again. And once you've finally managed, with the help of a couple of platoons of US Marines and a whole lot of dynamite, to clear your yard of the little bastards, you have to watch like a hawk for their reappearance, because they will come back -- you must pounce on them as soon as they raise their little yellow heads above the ground and grub them out of their with a gardening fork right here, right now, if you don't want to have the entire course of evolution of flowering plants occurring in your back yard all over again.
Conclusin" As hardy as dandelions are, if you see one that is obviously sick, that's a signal that something's gone very wrong in its world. Maybe its soil is so full of weird chemicals from industrial runoff that it just can't cope. Maybe it was irradiated by an excursion from a nuclear reactor. Something.
But that's just one dandelion. One sick dandelion among a bazillion gajillion of its identical cousins means absolutely nothing. What you want to look for is a whole countryside full of sick dandelions, millions of wall-to-wall sick dandelions. If you find such a thing, you've found support for the idea that since the opening guns of the 20th century3 the world and all in it have been changing, changing, changing evermore rapidly, mutating and permuting in every conceivable way until we're all on the verge of catastrophic meltdown. Dig up some of those dandelions, complete with a large block of the soil in which each one grows, and test everything in the plants and their soil matrices to see what's wrong. The great likelihood is that the soil chemistry is so far off from what dandelions and, indeed, living things in general need for their growth and development that even the creatures from Monster Island would be hard put to survive in that environment.
Okay, that's enough for now. I'm sure I'll have more to ramble on about this matter in a future post, though. MuAHahahahah!
**************************************************************************************************
1I am informed that my remarks about dandelions are not funny, and I should immediately cease and desist from them OR ELSE. By the dandelions across the street. (The crabgrass, which has been cowed into quivering silence by the dandelions, has chosen not to participate.)
2Actually, there is a non-violent way to get rid of crabgrass, if you're patient and willing to invest the work in doing so. Crabgrass not only prefers slightly alkaline soils, it will die off rapidly in even mildly acidic soils. Furthermore, its soliphilic -- a sun-lover, hating shade and prolonged cold. On the other hand, dichondra, a lovely clover that makes for beautiful lawns, loves slightly acidic soils. So, armed with good advice from your area's professional nurserymen (you can get books and flyers on the subject in the racks near the checkout stands at any good nursery) and a pH tester, add whatever you need to your yard to bring the soils to the right pH; put in some nice shade trees (for that, you want to obtain trees that are close to maturity, say, a few years old; you may be able to dig these up, roots and all, in wildlands that aren't under federal or state jurisdiction, or buy them from a good nursery or from a homeowner who wants to get rid of his but doesn't want to kill them); plant dochondra in quantity; and stand back and watch the fun as the new dichondra stands advance ferociously on the crabgrass, savaging them root-by-root and grabbing every last damned nutrient from them. (You may want to wear earplugs to shut out the screams of the dying crabgrass, though -- don't want to come down with a good case of Rave Ear, you know.)
3Literally. Think World War I, and you've got it.