Lifeboat Foundation

There is green manufacturing, and there is green manufacturing. An ordinary factory can be made more green, but it will never be as environmentally friendly as a real, growing green plant. Green plants have manufactured things for us since the dawn of our species. Green plants manufacture the oxygen we need to breathe and live, from the carbon dioxide they remove from the atmosphere. Indeed without plants, the oxygen in the air would dwindle away and humans (and other oxygen-breathing animals) could no longer survive on Earth. Plants also manufacture food, from grain to veggies to oils to mouth-watering fruits, nuts and spices; wood, from Douglas-fir for construction to beautiful furniture wood to light balsa wood to heavy ebony for piano keys; drugs, from traditional cures to modern pharmaceuticals to intoxicants like tobacco, opium, magic mint, and lactarium; and chemicals of endless variety. Green plants are manufacturing devices – they perform green manufacturing in every sense.

On the other hand, one often hears that such-and-such does not grow on trees. Money, for example, does not grow on trees. Yet numerous solid objects found in everyday life would be relatively simple to genetically engineer trees to produce. A chair for example merely needs a sapling (let’s call it a “front left leg”) to reach the height of a seat, then send out two horizontal branches at right angles. When they grow about two feet long, they send shoots straight down to the ground where they take root. They also send shoots out horizontally at right angles to their current direction, which meet to form the last corner of the seat, whereupon they send down the 4th leg. Similarly, extra branches can grow into a back, as well as arms and various bracing bars if desired. The banyan tree is an example of a plant whose branches send down shoots that turn into extra trunks already, so that part of the general concept is clearly feasible. The chair still needs a seat, which could grow from a network of tough, viny stems that give enough when sat upon to be comfortable. Or add a cushion if you like. Of course, you still have to pull it out of your garden, but that is no more trouble (probably less, actually) than a trip to the furniture store. The entire chair is one piece without fastened joints that could loosen with age or otherwise require maintenance, so it could be long-lasting and strong. How strong? That depends on how long you grow it…for stouter legs and other parts, a chair tree farm would just let the chair tree grow a couple years longer before harvesting to let the trunks and branches thicken.

Various other useful items could grow on trees in your yard or in tree farms, or the seeds might get loose and grow in vacant lots or in the wild. Tables might need a flat top to be added later. Ladders would be a natural. Railings (just turn a ladder on its side!). Marbles already grow on bushes (they’re called “marble seeds”) and plants could be engineered to grow many other small solid toy and light household items as well, from checkers and chess pieces to knobs and knick-knacks.

Here’s another kind of thing that “doesn’t grow on trees.” Gold and silver. But no doubt they could and hopefully they will. Roots are chemical factories. Solar powered chemical factories. They extract raw materials from dirt, using energy captured by leaves from sunlight to convert the raw materials into useful chemicals. Mother nature has caused plants to make chemicals useful to the plant, but humans are increasingly causing them to make chemicals useful to humans. For example resveratrol is a chemical found in red grapes, peanuts, Japanese knotweed and some other plants. Some experiments suggest it increases the life spans of certain animals (and thus, perhaps humans). It can be produced not only by the roots of entire peanut plants, but by the peanut plant root system alone without benefit of light, leaves, or stems – the trick is to keep the peanut root systems properly bathed in a clear nutrient solution in a glass laboratory flask.

References

“The trick is to keep the peanut root systems properly bathed in a clear nutrient solution in a glass laboratory flask.” F. Medina-Bolivar, J. Condori, A. M. Rimando, J. Hubstenberger, K. Shelton, S. F. O’Keefe, S. Bennett, and M. C. Dolan, Production and secretion of reveratrol in hairy root cultures of peanut, Phytochemistry, vol. 68, pp. 1992-2003, 2007.

Global warming is bad. But just how bad could it be, worst case? Could it make the Earth hotter than a self-cleaning oven, like it did Venus? Venus is even hotter than Mercury even though Mercury is closer to the sun, because of Venus’s greenhouse effect. But there seems little reason to fear such a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth. Aside from the fact that it has never happened here before, the Earth may simply not have enough solar energy and greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide and methane) to start the runaway positive feedback process that happened on Venus. Some day that may change, however – the sun is getting hotter as it grows older, and greenhouse gases, perhaps exotic and powerful ones, could potentially be manufactured and released by hostile invading extraterrestrials, robots, or apocalypse-minded humans. But let’s ignore this scenario as unlikely for now (so that we could claim to be optimists, if not for the following paragraphs). Is there any other apocalyptic global warming scenario still to worry about? Something that is not only known to be theoretically possible, but has actually happened? Say, a stinking poison that contaminates the atmosphere and waters of the entire Earth, not only wrinkling noses worldwide but killing off almost all living things? Welcome to the gray, dead plains (often warm and balmy), oxygen-starved waters, green skies and repellent smell of hydrogen sulfide poisoned Earth.

Hydrogen sulfide, H2S, is a gas. Chemically similar to H2O (water) but with a sulfur atom in place of water’s oxygen, it is not a necessity of life like water, but very poisonous. Much less than 1 part per million (ppm) in the air is detectable as an odor like rotten eggs. 10 ppm is a typical occupational exposure limit. 1 part in 1000 in air can cause rapid death. As a young man I kept several 1-gallon milk jugs of green algae-containing water, which I fertilized with vegetable peels and such. It worked great, but there was one slight problem: some vegetables contain substantial amounts of sulfur, which can lead to H2S dissolved in the water especially in the muck at the bottom. I finally dumped all the algae water down the toilet rather than move it to another apartment (a decision with which you are welcome to disagree). Some were smellier than others, and I ended up with a modest case of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Main symptom: a mental “slide show” of colorful crystalline images, presumably the result of H2S-caused inhibition of cellular respiration in the brain. Like humans, most animals and plants are poisoned by H2S.

How might H2S come to poison the Earth? Like it did in the past. The dinosaurs are thought to have perished in a mass extinction event triggered by an small asteroid, several miles in diameter, crashing into the ground near the town of Chicxulub on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, 65 million years ago (mya). But the worst extinction event of all time is believed by many to have been caused by H2S. This was the much earlier Permian-Triassic (or P-Tr) extinction event of 251.4 mya – about 20 million years before any dinosaur was even a gleam in its mother’s eye. The vast majority of plant and animal species then in existence went extinct, both in the sea and on land. The P-Tr event is often called the “Great Dying.” A similar process could play out in humanity’s future, potentially ending it. Here is how.

The causal process begins with global warming. While massive volcanism in Siberia is thought to have triggered global warming by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere back then, human burning of fossil fuel is doing it now. This warming is melting sea ice which darkens the ocean surface, causing more sunlight to be absorbed and worsening the warming trend. As the oceans warm, methane hydrate crystals deep underwater will warm too, which may cause methane to be released into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide, except many times more powerful. Such a release of methane from the ocean floor is a likely though still controversial cause of the global temperature spike called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum of 55.8 mya, during which average global temperatures soared over 10°F.

Heating of the Earth’s surface causes the top layer of the polar oceans to warm disproportionately. Normally, cold air in the polar regions chills and oxygenates the surface waters, and salinates them by evaporating some water and leaving the salt, which makes the remaining water saltier. The cold and extra salt makes these waters denser, so that they sink and flow along the bottom, causing a planet-wide current of oxygen-rich water called the thermohaline circulation that connects the bottoms of the oceans. Global warming affects the polar regions the most, and warmer temperatures there can slow and potentially even halt the thermohaline circulation, thereby slowing or stopping oxygen from getting to the ocean depths.

Back in the Great Dying, it is hypothesized that after the thermohaline circulation stopped, the oxygen in the deep ocean waters was used up by the organisms that live down there. But some microbes don’t need oxygen gas dissolved in the water. Bad news – they get their oxygen instead from oxygen-containing sulfur compounds, and release the villain…hydrogen sulfide (just as they did at the bottoms of those algae water-containing plastic milk jugs). But it gets worse. The hydrogen sulfide slowly accumulated in the ocean waters, poisoning many of the remaining oxygen-breathing organisms. That explains why the extinction event was so devastating to marine life. Things went from awful to even worse. So much hydrogen sulfide accumulated that it started leaking from the water into the atmosphere. Because such a low concentration of hydrogen sulfide is needed to create a bad stink, if this happens during the human era the first blatantly obvious sign will be the smell of rotten eggs. It will be everywhere. Though unpleasant, it is not harmful until the concentration grows. As it accumulates in the atmosphere though, the smell will go from bad to worse, and eventually the increasing amount of H2S will start poisoning land life. And the sky will turn green. That can explain the devastation to land life during the Great Dying. And maybe it could happen again.

Recommendations

No need to buy a gas mask just yet. Thing won’t start getting really bad during our lifetimes. But this could be an existential risk to our species. Thus, scientific study is important. A serious risk is that things we do in our lifetimes may be the trigger for an extinction event later. It should be obvious that it would be the height of irresponsibility to let that happen. Yet there will always be forces of irresponsibility. One may hope that those forces fail to win or their victory may be a Pyrrhic one indeed.

Reference

There is a lot of both popular and scientific literature on this topic. A well-known full length work that bridges the gap between those literatures is P. D. Ward, Under a Green Sky, HarperCollins, 2007.

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Suppose you had two identical dice with sides numbered 1 to 6 as usual. Typically one corner will have three sides numbered 1, 2, and 3 going around the corner in that order clockwise, with a 6 on the side opposite the 1 (because opposite sides add up to 7 on normal dice). Now take one of the dice and change it slightly. Paint a 6 over the 1, and a 1 over the 6. Now the sides numbered 1, 2 and 3 meet at a different corner and, what is more, they are arranged going around the corner counterclockwise instead of clockwise. Although both dice still function identically and may appear identical to a casual glance, in fact they are different: they are now mirror images of each other. In fact you don’t need 6 faces for this mirror image situation. It can also occur with 4-sided tetrahedrons (tetra- means 4), which look like 3-sided pyramids. The 4th side is the triangular base and the top corners of the 3 triangular sides meet at the apex. Similarly, some organic molecules consist of a carbon atom in the middle with 4 different atoms or atom groups sprouting outward. These four branches are like the sides of the tetrahedron: if you switched any two of them you would get a different molecule, a mirror image of what it was, and no amount of rotating it or otherwise moving it around will erase that difference. Mirror image molecules are technically called “enantiomers,” enantio- from the Greek for ‘opposite,’ and -mer meaning member of a group (from the Greek for ‘part’). They relate to plants as follows.

1. Proteins are necessary for all living things, including plants, to make, have, and use. While the earliest life on planet Earth might not have contained proteins (the “RNA world” conjecture), every known life form today contains numerous kinds of protein as a major component.

2. Every protein molecule is made from building blocks, called amino acid molecules, which are connected together end-to-end like beads on a string.

3. There are 20 different kinds of amino acids heavily used in building proteins, of which all except glycine have a central carbon atom with four different branches.

4. Thus 19 of the 20 common amino acids have two enantiomers, called L (for “levorotatory,” levo- from the Greek for ‘left’ because of the direction its solutions rotate polarized light), and D (for “dextrorotatory,” dextro- from the Greek for ‘right’).

5. Organisms generally contain only the L versions of these amino acids. No one knows why. Organisms based on D amino acids could exist, but we don’t see either plants or animals that do. (D forms have been observed in a few microorganisms.)

6. If we engineered plants to be based on D-amino acids, their nutritional value to pests (and humans) would be much lower, because animals can’t build their own proteins from D-amino acids.

7. Such plants would therefore be pest resistant, hence agriculturally valuable – as long as we’re talking about plants grown for purposes other than edible protein, such as vegetable oils, wood, etc. Pest resistance is an incentive that suggests that humans will, in fact, eventually create and grow such plants.

The pest resistance of D-amino acid based plants will give them a selective advantage over normal plants, and they could therefore come to significantly displace normal plants. Call them frankenplants if you like, but the world risks becoming a significantly different place, overrun with plants that resist being eaten, and therefore, able to feed fewer animals of all kinds, from insects to humans.

Next time (part viii): Manufacturing plants
Time after (part ix): Back to gold and silver
Time after that (part x): Power plants
And then (part xi): Greening the desert
And after that (part xii): Phyto-terraforming
Finally (part xiii): Recommendations

The sun moves around in the sky, in many places casting its life-giving rays on different spots throughout the day. A plant that could move to the nearest sunny spot would have an advantage over ordinary plants that are stuck in one place. But plants have it rough. Unlike people, they can’t pull up roots and relocate somewhere else.

Ambulatory plants that simply walk over to the nearest sunny spot would outcomplete regular plants, eventually becoming rulers of the plant kingdom. Unfortunately, it all seems a bit unlikely. Except for some interesting exceptions like species of Tillandsia (the so-called “air plants,” which are discussed below), plants need their roots. And roots are, well, rooted in place. However, while the vast majority of plants do need roots, they don’t need them every minute. As everyone who has experienced the concept of cut flowers in a vase of water knows, plants can go for quite some time without roots. And roots can do fine without the rest of the plant for a considerable time as well – just check your fridge, pantry, or grocery store for an assortment of potatos, carrots, etc., which do just that. In nature, in fact, many plants over-winter with just the underground roots alive all winter long, then grow new above-ground parts come Spring. The trick, then, is to build a plant that can separate temporarily at the base. The above-ground part then wanders off in search of maximum sunlight. As evening approaches, the plant literally returns to its roots, reattaches, and spends the night with its above-ground and below-ground sections in metabolic union.

It is unclear if such a plant variety would ever evolve spontaneously. However, genetic engineering should be able to do it at some point. Moving short distances would be feasible for plants based on their current capabilities – many plants can and do change in shape fast enough over the course of a day already. Flowers open and close, leaves move around, etc. For example the immature flower heads of the sunflower face the sun, tracking it as it crosses the sky over the course of the day. Engineering a plant that can detach at the base, walk off looking for sun, return in the evening and reattach until morning presents a number of varied challenges, all of which must be solved before it can work, including a detachment and reattachment mechanism, a slow but real walking capability, and the sensory capacity to find its way back to its roots. Yet there seems no fundamental reason why it could not be done.

Once such plants are on the march, additional genetic changes will be possible. Plants need not return to their own roots, but could instead return to the roots of another plant, perhaps even of a different species. Animals looking for a nutritious drink might try to suck juice from the exposed detachment point of the roots after the top of the plant has wandered off for the day in search of sun. Plants could evolve or be further engineered to allow animals to suck for juice only if they fertilize the plant as a down payment, by urinating at the base! Plants that can walk around would be strongly motivated (in an evolutionary sense) to develop better sensory systems and faster movements to compete with other plants. Such capabilities are normally associated with animals, not plants, so these plants of the future, as they evolve, would tend to increasingly blur the line between plants and animals. A world with walking plants would be different indeed!

Another strategy for adding walking plants to the biosphere would start with plants like Tillandsia, the air plants, which either do not have roots at all or have small ones used only to hold them in place. The genetic engineering complexities of a detachment/reattachment mechanism and a homing mechanism for finding roots earlier left behind would be unnecessary, simplifying the problem greatly. However as for soil-rooted plants. creating the capacity for locomotion would still be a challenge. Tillandsia plants absorb water and nutrients through their leaves, so an ambulatory version would have considerable advantages. They could walk around (and climb around, since they typically live on trees), looking for sun, taking a dip when thirsty, and loading up on compost (or, predator-like, trimming leaves off of other plants) to absorb nutrients from. Perhaps ambulatory descendants of the Tillandsia genus will one day rule the Earth.

Next time: Plants with Mirror Molecules

All organisms are at least a little “alternamorphic”: their form depends on the environment they grew in. A plant may be bigger under optimal conditions, smaller or even stunted under poor ones. A single cell may be bigger after a meal. A human may be darker or lighter depending on degree of sun exposure. Perhaps more interestingly, some kinds of grasshoppers, when crowded, change strikingly in appearance, becoming…locusts which gather in huge, hungry, migrating clowds, leaving devastated farmland in their paths. These are the locusts swarms of biblical fame.

If properly endowed by natural evolution or genetic engineering, plants could turn the concept of alternamorphism to their advantage in many interesting ways. For example, consider the humble corn (zea mays) plant. It is a staple of the world food supply but is not particularly easy to grow successfully in one’s garden, as many an inexperienced gardener can attest. Now imagine a new kind of corn plant that, after bearing its ear of corn, alternamorphically either dies or sinks a taproot that lasts the winter and then, in its second spring, sends up a new shoot that grows more slowly than before, but more sturdily. That grows, in fact, without producing any ear of corn that year but rather is built to last the following winter, so that it can build on that growth with further development in its third spring – eventually turning into a large corn tree that produces dozens of ears every year, and with far less work than farming an equivalently productive corn patch.

But what would determine which alternative the corn plant chooses, dying off as happens now, or beginning the process of turning into a corn tree? A reasonable genetic code for this would be to opt for the tree strategy if the ear is destroyed early in its development or fails to develop properly for whatever reason. In that case it makes sense for the corn plant to devote its energy to something else, such as trying to grow into a tree. Indeed, any excess of vitality would be a good reason to pursue the tree strategy, even if the initial ear is growing well. Perhaps the corn plant is simply experiencing highly favorable growth conditions and has the werewithal to both produce an ear, and grow the required large taproot. Similarly, any annual crop or other plant could potentially alternamorphically become a tree. Farmers and gardeners would be delighted. On the other hand, hundred foot ragweed trees would be bad news for many an allergy sufferer. Alternamorphic trees are just a start. The reader may enjoy dreaming up other kinds of alternamorphisms. In a number of years it may be possible to actually create these in a do-it-yourself basement bio lab.

Black salad grows faster, looks funny. Most plants are green, and most people can appreciate the healthy green glow of a vigorous plant. Would you say that plants like green light? Not so – green plants are green because they reflect green light, while absorbing red and blue. Consequently the green light goes into the eyes of the viewers, who thus see plants as green. By reflecting green light, plants are rejecting it. They use light that they absorb as solar energy, powering a process that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air and converts it, ultimately, into plant contents using a process known a photosynthesis. Perhaps weirdly, it now appears that photosynthesis, the biological process that terraformed the Earth in the distant past, creating and now maintaining at 21% the oxygen in the atmosphere so necessary for human life, uses the esoteric physics phenomenon known as quantum entanglement to do its work. A green color may be a sign of health, but it is also a sign of inefficiency. If the could only absorb and use green light better, it would be using solar energy more effectively and could grow faster, for either its own or human purposes. If a plant absorbed and used all light falling upon it, it would be black, not green, because black is what we see when all colors are absorbed and not reflected into our eyes.

If black plants would be better, then what are the prospects for mountains, plains, and rolling hills of deep black instead of striking green? Plants absorb light using special pigments which begin the solar energy harvesting process. Well-known and prevalent pigments are chlorophyll, of which there are several varieties named chlorophyll a, b, c, c1, c2, and others. Different chlorophylls (chloro- from a Greek word for green, -phyll from the Greek for leaf) are of varying shade depending on the type. However there are also other pigments useful for photosynthesis. Various xanthophylls (xantho- from the Greek for yellow) are also used. Carotenes, which make carrots orange, are another. There are hundreds of them. Opsins (ops- from the Greek for sight, as in ‘optical,’ and -in which indicates a biochemical substance) are not only used for sight in the human eye (namely rhodopsin, rhodo- for rose-colored, also named “visual purple”), but for photosynthesis (using bacteriorhodopsin, a misnomer since the organisms using it are archaea, not bacteria). Bacteriorhodopsin preferentially absorbs green light and reflects red and blue, thus appearing reddish-blue (that is, “purple”). Bacteriochlorophylls are related to chlorophylls and can be greenish or purplish. Phycobilins are used in photosynthesis in certain microorganisms and come in a variety of colors, from red to blue. Phycocyanins are another category of pigment used in photosynthesis (cyan meaning blue-green). Phycoerythrins too, which are red (-eryth from Greek and meaning red, as in erythrocytes – red blood cells).

Even invisible light is important. The water-dwelling microorganism Acaryochloris marina contains chlorophyll d, which is particularly good at absorbing infrared light for photosynthesis. On the other hand, some plants reflect infrared light. But they could reflect more, enough to actually change the world’s climate significantly. It seems that leaf hairs can help reflect infrared while allowing visible light through for photosynthesis. By breeding plants with leaves that are quite hairy, more infrared could be reflected back into space, with a cooling effect on the climate. Extra hairy soy varieties have already been bred such that if they and other crops similarly bred were grown extensively enough in temperate regions, the average temperature of those regions would decrease by about 2 degrees F. It is a tough call which would be better, crops with pigments that use infrared light for photosynthesis, or crops that reflect as much of it as possible away from the Earth.

Be that as it may, a plethora of pigments exist to support photosynthesis and there seems no intrinsic reason why a plant could not eventually evolve naturally or be genetically engineered to mix and match the pigments so as to absorb and use nearly all light. Such plants would potentially have an evolutionary advantage over other plants that waste resources by taking the trouble to grow leaves and then not use all the light that falls upon them. Thus future plants that solve this problem would tend to take over, both in nature and in agriculture. Though the real action would be at the biomolecular level, visually such plants would be near-black, not green. Would black salad taste better than green? Only a future taste test will resolve this important question!

Next time: Alternamorphs: plants with options.

References

“Perhaps weirdly, it now appears that photosynthesis…uses the esoteric physics phenomenon known as quantum entanglement to do its work.” M. Sarovar, A. Ishizaki, G. R. Fleming and K. B. Whaley, Quantum entanglement in photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes, Nature Physics, vol. 6, pp. 462-467, 2010, executive summary at http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2010/05/10/untangl.....anglement/.

“Acaryochloris marina uses chlorophyll d, which absorbs infrared light for photosynthesis”: R. Mohr, B. Vosz, M. Schliep, T. Kurz, I. Maldener, D. G. Adams, A. D. Larkum, M. Chen, and W. R. Hess, A new chlorophyll d-containing cyanobacterium: evidence for niche adaptation in the genus Acaryochloris, The ISME Journal (27 May 2010), http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2010.67.

“Extra hairy soy varieties have already been bred such that…the average temperature of those regions would decrease by about 2 degrees F.” C. E. Doughty, A. McMillan and M. Goulden, Climate Management Through Agricultural Albedo Manipulation, Eos Transactions of the American Geophysical Union (2007), vol. 88, no. 52, Fall Meeting Supplement, Abstract GC52A-10, http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm07/fm07-sessions/fm07_GC52A.html. See also: Super-hairy plants could battle global warming, New Scientist, issue 2637, Jan. 9, 2008, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726370.700-superhair.....rming.html.

Posted by Dr. Denise L Herzing and Dr. Lori Marino, Human-Nonhuman Relationship Board

Over the millennia humans and the rest of nature have coexisted in various relationships. However the intimate and interdependent nature of our relationship with other beings on the planet has been recently brought to light by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This ongoing environmental disaster is a prime example of “profit over principle” regarding non-human life. This spill threatens not only the reproductive viability of all flora and fauna in the affected ecosystems but also complex and sensitive non-human cultures like those we now recognize in dolphins and whales.

Although science has, for decades, documented the links and interdependence of ecosystems and species, the ethical dilemma now facing humans is at a critical level. For too long have we not recognized the true cost of our life styles and priorities of profit over the health of the planet and the nonhuman beings we share it with. If ever the time, this is a wake up call for humanity and a call to action. If humanity is to survive we need to make an urgent and long-term commitment to the health of the planet. The oceans, our food sources and the very oxygen we breathe may be dependent on our choices in the next 10 years.

And humanity’s survival is inextricably linked to that of the other beings we share this planet with. We need a new ethic.

Many oceanographers and marine biologist have, for a decade, sent out the message that the oceans are in trouble. Human impacts of over-fishing, pollution, and habitat destruction are threatening the very cycles of our existence. In the recent catastrophe in the Gulf, one corporation’s neglectful oversight and push for profit has set the stage for a century of clean up and impact, the implications of which we can only begin to imagine.

Current and reported estimates of stranded dolphins are at fifty-five. However, these are dolphins visibly stranded on beaches. Recent aerial footage, on YouTube, by John Wathen shows a much greater and serious threat. Offshore, in the “no fly zone” hundreds of dolphins and whales have been observed in the oil slick. Some floating belly up and dead, others struggling to breathe in the toxic fumes. Others exhibit “drunken dolphin syndrome” characterized by floating in an almost stupefied state on the surface of the water. These highly visible effects are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the spill’s impact on the long term health and viability of the Gulf’s dolphin and whale populations, not to mention the suffering incurred by each individual dolphin as he or she tries to cope with this crisis.

Known direct and indirect effects of oil spills on dolphins and whales depend on the species but include, toxicity that can cause organ dysfunction and neurological impairment, damaged airways and lungs, gastrointestinal ulceration and hemorrhaging, eye and skin lesions, decreased body mass due to limited prey, and, the pervasive long term behavioral, immunological, and metabolic impacts of stress. Recent reports substantiate that many dolphins and whales in the Gulf are undergoing tremendous stress, shock and suffering from many of the above effects. The impact to newborns and young calves is clearly devastating.

After the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound in 1989 two pods of orcas (killer whales) were tracked. It was found that one third of the whales in one pod and 40 percent of the whales in the other pod had disappeared, with one pod never recovering its numbers. There is still some debate about the number of missing whales directly impacted by the oil though it is fair to say that losses of this magnitude are uncommon and do serious damage to orca societies.

Yes, orca societies. Years of field research has led to the conclusion by a growing number of scientists that many dolphin and whale species, including sperm whales, humpback whales, orcas, and bottlenose dolphins possess sophisticated cultures, that is, learned behavioral traditions passed on from one generation to the next. These cultures are not only unique to each group but are critically important for survival. Therefore, not only do environmental catastrophes such as the Gulf oil spill result in individual suffering and loss of life but they contribute to the permanent destruction of entire oceanic cultures. These complex learned traditions cannot be replicated after they are gone and this makes them invaluable.

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which acknowledges basic rights to life, liberty, and freedom of cultural expression. We recognize these foundational rights for humans as we are sentient, complex beings. It is abundantly clear that our actions have violated these same rights for other sentient, complex and cultural beings in the oceans – the dolphins and whales. We should use this tragedy as an opportunity to formally recognize societal and legal rights for them so that their lives and their unique cultures are better protected in the future.

Recently, there was a meeting of scientists, philosophers, legal experts and dolphin and whale advocates in Helsinki, Finland, who drafted a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans a global call for basic rights for dolphins and whales. You can read more about this effort and become a signatory here: http://cetaceanconservation.com.au/cetaceanrights/. Given the destruction of dolphin and whale lives and cultures caused by the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf, we think this is one of the ways we can commit ourselves to working towards a future that will be a lifeboat for humans, dolphins and whales, and the rest of nature.

Ever eat pumpkin or other winter squash seeds? They are both delicious and nutritious, roasted or just placed raw into foods before cooking. You can buy pumpkin seeds in small snack bags. The problem for many people is the coverings, which are challenging to bite off because there are so many of them, as the seeds may seem relatively small. Genetic engineering to increase the seed size could solve that problem, since genetic engineering of size is probably easier than a lot of other generic engineering goals. Instead of a pumpkin with a couple hundred or so small seeds, it could grow 5-10 large seeds. Or just one, as big as an avocado seed but a lot better tasting… delicious. Speaking of seed size as a critical factor, sunflower seeds present a similar situation. You can get packages of them in the supermarket as a snack, but the ones with the seeds still in their shells seem less popular because they are harder to eat. You have to tediously bite off the shells to get to the seed inside. They taste good once you get them out though. And you get a lot of hand and mouth activity per seed, slowing down the intake of calories and making them a nutritious and satisfying snack for dieters. Yet the sunflower seed market would almost certainly grow dramatically if the seeds were 10x larger or more. Imagine eating an enormous sunflower seed the size of an egg…hefting its weight in the palm of your hand…cracking off its shell to reveal the rich, tasty meat within…and finally sinking your teeth into it to savor its nutritious and distinctive flavor! Hmm. A future sunflower could produce a seed like that, if it wasn’t spending its energy growing dozens and dozens of smaller seeds instead, like current sunflowers.

Fruits form a ready target for genetic engineers. Fruit is healthy and has near-universal appeal. Even people who have never eaten fruit in their lives rapidly develop a taste for it (who are these people, you ask? “Babies are puzzled by fruit… . But within a day or two practically all of them decide they love it.” – Baby and child care icon Dr. Spock). To plant the seeds of some ideas for such babies and others who will become the next generation of genetic engineers, consider the following possibilities.

• Fruit transgenic hybrids that taste like apple and pear at the same time (pearapples?), or perhaps peach and cherry (peacherries?) together instead. Watermelons that taste like nectarines (nectarmelons). And so on and so forth. If you can dream up the flavor, size and texture, it will be possible.
• Fruit with calorie-free sweetness, instead of high sugar content. They could be engineered to contain aspartame (“Nutrasweet”), sucralose (“Splenda”), cyclamate, or benzoic sulfimide (saccharin) instead (or all four). This would taste good while lowering the caloric content of the fruit (and thus the metabolic cost to the plant of growing the fruit, so it could afford to grow more or bigger fruits).
• Fruit with a high alcohol content, enough to enhance the taste but not intoxicate those eating it. Fruit with M&M-sized lumps of chocolate in them. Fruit containing a little brandy and a chocolate lump or two, and at a price anyone could afford (or grow).
• Fruit that tastes like ice cream…whoops, not necessary, it already exists! Some varieties of durian fruit are likened to  ice cream or custard. Others are quite strong in odor. Banned from the premises of some hotels, it is reputed to be the only fruit that tigers eat. Surely if nature can conjure something as remarkable as this heavy fruit, covered with spikes, genetic engineers could cook up the things in this list.
• Fruit with intense flavor. People love flavorful foods and some fruits are mild, currently, though some are quite strong (citrus, for example).

Next time: Black Salad Grows Better, Looks Funny

References

“Babies are puzzled by fruit…the first time they have it. But within a day or two practically all of them decide they love it”: B. Spock and M. B. Rothenberg, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, revised edition, 1985, Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-73965-4.

Beans use a biological strategy that may be only beginning to play out. This strategy may ultimately change the biosphere radically, enabling considerably more living biomass and thus increasing the profusion and exuberance of life. The strategy is nitrogen fixation, which is the ability of a few plants (notably beans) to get their nitrogen directly from the air. The vast majority of plant life relies for nitrogen on decaying vegetable matter, lightning strikes whose concentrated heat forces nitrogen in the air to combine with oxygen to put it into bioavailable form, and other processes not under the plant’s control. In the ocean, however, some species of cyanobacteria (“blue bacteria,” commonly if problematically called “blue-green algae” since algae are plants, and cyanobacteria are technically not) can fix nitrogen from the air. Beans (more generally, legumes) do not actually fix nitrogen themselves but instead rely on bacteria that they shelter in root nodules.

Once the idea of fixing one’s own nitrogen directly from the air takes hold in the plant kingdom, nitrogen need never be a bottleneck again. Then the Earth will be able to support a thicker, heavier, and more diverse blanket of vegetation. Since the animal kingdom ultimately depends on plants, the Earth will also then support more animal life (and potentially human life) as well. Fertilizer manufacturers may have one less component to worry about including in their products, but on the other hand might find less demand for their products. You might not have thought of beans as the vanguard of a new paradigm of domination among plants. But beans and many thousands of species of their descendants might take over the plant world analogously to how flowering plants began their ascendancy starting more than 100 million years ago.

At least they’ll taste good. The idea of beans as masters of the Earth may be tough to swallow if you’re not crazy about bean dishes. But maybe genetic engineering will change your mind and those of future generations. Genetically engineered crops will become increasingly important, accepted and desired, because there is little chance of stemming the coming tide of crop plants engineered to produce new and delicious foods at reasonable cost. Flavorings are metabolically cheap for plants to produce compared to soil fertility-draining and solar energy-intensive metabolic products like oils, proteins, and carbohydrates. Thus, there is no downside to major changes and improvements in plant product flavors. And it is relatively easy to do compared to some of the genetic engineering goals mentioned earlier. Even old-fashioned selective breeding, the “low tech” approach to genetic engineering, has produced such familiar taste-enhanced foods as sweet corn that is much sweeter than the corn eaten a couple of generations ago. Take beans, for instance (please don’t tire of my discussing them – as future monarchs of the plant kingdom, they are entitled to some respect!). They are already a nutritious protein source, like meat but with less fat. Yet they don’t taste as good as meat to many people. There is no reason they can’t be engineered to taste like small chicken nuggets. Processed fungus mycelium (i.e., roots), sold in grocery stores, taste like chicken already. Try it if you don’t believe it. Yum!. We could make chickpeas that taste like chicken, and rename them “chickenpeas.” But why stop there? Potatoes with small hamburgers in the middle sound good (let’s call them “hamburgatoes”), and there is no reason they can’t be grown once genetic engineering gets a little further along. Carrots are crunchy, as are potato chips. So why not grow carrots that taste like potato chips? Or like Cheetos or other crunchy, cheese-flavored snacks. Kids would want to eat more veggies, and carrot sales would skyrocket.

Speaking of cheese flavor, consider the pits of avocados. They are so large that it seems a waste to just throw them out, as we do now. Avocados already contain lots of fats in the edible part, as cheeses do, so genetic engineering to put more fats in the pit would help make them edible and even taste like a hard cheese, say romano or parmesan. Then grate the pit it on food to taste! Avocado pits are a specialty item of course, but just a start.

Next time: New Plant Paradigms (Part III: Giant seeds taste better)