Wo, I did not take this picture. Wish I had. Check out Gordie’s link at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gordie_broon/8600490014/. Don’t forget to put the http:// in front.

http://23thorns.com/2013/03/28/a-bird-in-the-bush/

Bare Bones Biology 001 – What is Biology

Biology is Not a Confusion of Conflicting Opinions
Biology is the Study of Measurable Facts
About the Natural Laws that Created Life on Earth

Next month will be the third anniversary of Bare Bones Biology. Here we replay the first episode, which is as true today as it was three years ago.

Why not begin with the television where some guy last night spent quite a few thousands of dollars trying to tell me the government should not be spending so much money because job creation comes from what he calls “the real world.” He claims the real world is small business.

Pardon me? I thought we agreed the earth is not flat. If the earth is round, then small business is not at its center. But much more seriously, if we truly believe the wealth of this country comes from small business, or from any other individual human endeavor, we will continue to trash the ecosystem in the name of our own wealth. And when it’s gone, or more likely when we use up the resources that create our wealth, oops, no more small business.

There is no center to the living ecosystem. Everything interacts with everything else. The living ecosystem runs by rules that we, including small business, must learn to understand if we truly want to create jobs. We can not build a healthy culture without a healthy ecosystem. We forget that we live inside the ecosystem. Look out your window. See those trees. They give us life. Without them, literally, we would not exist. The earth would be like Mars. Dead.

Have we forgotten that all money is based in resources? And all the resources of life come from the ecosystem. Or are we confused by the illogical and conflicting claims of the public media — even PBS and the school system? Has it become so complicated that we give up trying to understand? How do we know if all that outside my window is healthy, or if it isn’t?

Bare Bones Biology agrees that life is confusing, but we say it’s not as confusing as the media make it out to be. Sometimes human politics wants us to be confused about things that are very well understood. Certainly details of the ecosystem are more complicated than humans can understand. It would take longer than my life to figure out all the details of all the relationships among all the living things just in my front yard. There are so many interactions, and everything depends on something else, and it’s all changing all the time. True. That’s life. And that’s what it looks like if we continue to look down at all the details, and forget to look up at the bare bones functional framework of the whole system.

I’m a biologist, did I tell you that? And I can tell you that scientists are confused about all the details of the ecosystem. But the good thing about science and scientists is that they usually know what they do know and what they don’t know. And for the most part we are not confused about the bare bones functional laws that drive the ecosystem. The basic laws of nature are as solid and universal and reliable as gravity, and the laws of transfer of energy, that’s thermodynamics, and life on earth — which is the ecosystem — is built around these natural laws.

We need to understand these laws and how they relate to biology if we want to rebuild a healthy human presence within a healthy ecosystem. Biology is not a confusion of conflicting opinions. Biology is the study of measurable facts about the natural laws that permit life on earth. Facts do not change. That’s why we call them facts. And they don’t care about our opinions. I don’t understand why we want to fight over them, given that we all need the same things. We are acting like a bunch of cartoon characters with question marks over our heads, trying to decide whether to swim across the alligator infested river, or take a flimsy canoe, when there is a well built bridge just over on the left side of the picture. It would make a lot more sense, wouldn’t it, to sit back together and figure out how to get across the bridge. To get what we all need by nurturing the health of our ecosystem.

So Bare Bones Biology will focus on the facts and their logic, that shows how everything truly does fit together in the largest unit of life that we know anything about, the whole earth ecosystem.

This is Bare Bones Biology, a weekly production of FactFictionFancy.com, and KEOS radio, in Bryan, Texas. The podcast can be downloaded at:

It’s Really Cold Here

How cold is it?

Pickup wouldn’t start this morning. Two days ago I forgot to take my gallon of coffee water out of the pickup into the house. In the morning, frozen solid, so I brought it in. I also threw out several inches of ice from Bitsy’s water. This morning, two days later, coffee water still has ice floating on it and Bitsy’s chunk of water is still sitting there. Snow has not melted from the peaks to which I am going next Monday.

But we still went out in the 40-50 mph wind to Santa Fe’s amazing four-acre dog park.

http://23thorns.com/2013/03/23/watching-the-grass-grow/comment-page-1/#comment-2304

My readers will like thie above post much more than they like most of mine.

Bare Bones Biology 150 – What Can I Do?

While you pursue your human goals
Believing that you help the suffering,
The butterflies are dying in your own back yard.

You can blame it on karma,
Or God’s will,
Or some evil influence,
And all of that is true.

But the slaughter continues because of the human ego
that can walk across a field of death and destruction
And only see itself.

I wrote this poem last week while watching a fine blazing sunrise that reminded me of a quote from Psalm 89.

“The heavens are yours, and the earth is yours;
everything in the world is yours—you created it all.”

Not thinking about the consequences, I immediately emailed my poem, without commentary, to several friends. Of course the moment I punched the “send” button I realized each of these people probably will assume I was writing about them personally. So then I followed up to explain what I really meant. One friend wrote back the following:

“If people think that it is about them, then maybe it is.

“But what SHOULD I do?” they will ask.
And your answer may seem nearly as difficult to them as the one that went, ‘Sell what you have, and give to the poor.’ Your answer is,

“Change your value system.
Stop listening to advertisements.
Stop feeding your emotions with STUFF; just get what you need, or genuinely want.
Get out, find some natural landscape somewhere. Breathe the air. Notice the rest of life besides humanity.
Discover what that other life needs. As a major item it needs less humans, so your main aim will be to have a small family if any, 1-2 children, and to persuade your friends and relations to do that too.
Your second aim will be to consume less goods (especially from distant places) and less energy, also less meat. There are many ways to do that.
The end.”

Yes indeed, but my answer to the question of what we can do might not seem as daunting as her answer. Mine would be:

Watch the sun rise up and move across the sky as it greens the living earth. Meditate about the laws of nature that God created to generate and maintain Life, the whole earth ecosystem.

As the sun moves down every evening, consider that no opinion or no action of yourself or any other person created Life, and no opinion or no action of yourself or any other person can change how God’s laws of nature function to maintain Life of earth.

Stop wasting your time arguing over opinions and debating fake advertising propaganda that is designed by the corposystem to spread death and destruction to the living earth. Learn to know the difference between opinions, and the created facts of life. Feed your emotions by learning how God’s created natural laws actually do function to maintain Life. Specifically, how does Life stay alive? Without this knowledge, how can you function to protect Life?

Discuss these things as often as possible with other people, including people who are genuine experts. Learn to recognize expertise. (Hint, reporters’ expertise is reporting things, not evaluating them. Technologists expertise is making things and selling them to make money — that is a corposystem value, Life’s value is not to make money. Life’s value is to maintain Life. Genuine experts study how things work.)

And then understand that wise compassion is not that soft-fuzzy feeling that makes us believe we are doing good for other people whenever WE feel good. Real wise compassion is the genuine heartfelt wish and obligation of every human to provide for the welfare of Life “unto the seventh generation” or beyond. It’s our only value on earth, to protect God’s creation, the Life-System, against the evils of human ego and the human corpo-system that deals in death and destruction in the name of fake compassion.

When you do as I suggest, then I trust your good judgment. You will automatically do as my friend suggests. If you do as she suggests, then you already understand much of what I suggest. Keep doing it.

Lynn Lamoreux
Photos by Lynn

This blog is an expanded version of Bare Bones Biology radio program that will play next week on KEOS Radio, 98.1 FM, Bryan, Texas. Bare Bones Biology is a completely nonprofit project. The podcast can be downloaded at:

For the people who read my blog, here’s a quote from The Dalai Lama.
“The model of turning the other cheek or of having an overriding compassion for all beings, however they treat you, is about the elimination of self-centeredness and the cultivation of qualities that – in a theistic tradition – bring the practitioner ever closer to the Creatior, making him or her ever more similar to God, so that life may be lived in the image of God. In a nontheistic tradition like Buddhism, compassion brings its practitioner ever closer to freedom from clinging to the narrow confines of a self-centered way of being and opens a space for the interconnectedness with all beings.”

Suggested References:
Lynn Lamoreux: Bare Bones Ecology Energy Handbook available free under Chapters on right side of blog
The Dalai Lama: Toward a True Kinship of Faiths
The Eagle: Butterflies
http://www.theeagle.com/news/local/article_b2c60ec6-9f82-52c6-9d50-1fd4305da04b.html

Santa Fe

Bare Bones Biology 149 – To Whom it May Concern

I have somewhat reluctantly signed your petition. My reluctance is not because the topic is unimportant, but because I dislike our political warfare of this generation that takes the form of dividing survival topics into smaller bits that seem unrelated and using them to blame the “other guy” for the problem, which is neither logical nor realistic. So, I hesitate to sign for three major reasons.

First – I can’t believe we are ignoring the men, whose future is at stake equally with the women.

Second – If we continue to escalate our arguments over the bits, I doubt we will be able to put the pieces back together. The ecosystem is one whole living thing, not a collection of separate human-specific issues. All of our food, air, water and soil are made by the ecosystem, which I believe is God’s system for the survival of all Life on earth. Our population is threatening the welfare of every corner of the ecosystem, and that affects the welfare of every living entity within the ecosystem, some of which are humans. This is by far the most important reason that we must learn our place in the whole scheme of God’s Creation. Obviously, the human world is not caring for the women and children first — now that food is running out as a result of overpopulation. Money and petitions will not change these facts unless they change the human behaviors that cause the food running out, which is too many people eating it. So I don’t anticipate that conditions for women will improve while conditions for everyone deteriorate.

What we need to do is focus on health of the ecosystem. The ecosystem is a living entity that is deathly ill at this time, and the only way to cure an illness is to remove the cause. Only by reducing the human population can we improve conditions for women and men. Too bad we can’t just agree on this – it is a fact, and facts are things we can’t change. So it would be better to stop fighting over it and face it is a fact and focus on finding a better way to resolve our relationship to the fact – better than just blaming someone else. If we want better conditions, at this point, the only way to get them is to find a method of worldwide population reduction that is better than starvation, war and climate.

However, as far as I know, I have not succeeded in convincing even one person that facing facts is the best way to solve problems, and the matter is of massive importance to every person on earth, so I will honor your way and sign your petition,

Third – I have faith in Mr. Kerry that he will carry his responsibilities responsibly.

So in one sense, on the side of logic, I feel as though I’m contributing to the uproar rather than the solution by signing this, but I also feel, on the emotional side, that whatever works is necessary and you are doing a good job maintaining a balance between logic, reality and need.

I continue to wonder of those who oppose are as (what is the word? Uncaring?) as they seem to be, or is it only that they do not have access to the logical facts – the information about how God’s Creation functions to keep itself alive. Still, we can’t resolve the problem until we are willing to work within the factual reality, so I keep trying.

I have agreed to one more try at discussing some of these relationships by “manning” a booth at Earth Day this coming April in College Station. I agreed to discuss – not to debate. Debate is war, and it’s an un-winable war when both sides are right. There is a better way.

Lynn Lamoreux

Photos by Lynn

 This blog is an expanded version of Bare Bones Biology radio program that will play next week on KEOS Radio, 98.1 FM, Bryan, Texas. Bare Bones Biology is a completely nonprofit project. The podcast can be downloaded at:

http://barebonesbiology.com/bare-bones-biology-149-to-whom-it-may-concern

http://traffic.libsyn.com/fff/bbb149-To_Whom_it_May_Concern.mp3

Santa Rosa Trailer Park

Bitsy lifted her head off my leg and went to sniff around the edges of her window on the passenger side of the truck. My lungs begged for more GOOD air for a good change. The sky gradually changed to a proper sky color, and, avoiding cities, we crossed over into the fresh air of New Mexico.

Next time I’ll avoid Lubbock – got lost in exact same place again, after rattling around city streets for half an hour. Amarillo, a city that I like reasonably well has been under highway construction for so long that I gave up trying to remember what lane to be in, and went via Lubbock instead. What an astonishingly illogical state is Texas. Too bad, too. Texas had everything going for it when I arrived 35 years ago. If we had carried on with Ann Richards’ responsibility to the future, instead of wallowing in yesterday’s old, dry dreams of empire that have proven over and again in human history to be not viable, we in Texas could have led the world toward a future instead of toward its destruction and I would no be driving through the chill northern air.

Anyhow, I can breath in New Mexico, especially while I am not inside an infernal machine made of metal and oil and gas with all the windows rolled up, and the trip through Billy the Kid country is mostly fresh and fine, especially if you like red dirt and blue skies. And it is quite interesting that in the absence of toxic chemicals I lose all cravings for coffee and sugar.

But it is hard work for the truck and for me on a two-lane road with a heavy side wind, and quite a few giant trucks trying to pass without blowing me off the road. I spent the time between excitements imagining Billy, who was part of that frontier dream of yesterday, riding for – well it took us three hours with a truck that has big gas tanks – and he with only a horse for transportation in a land with no grass or water in sight.

We arrived at the Santa Rosa Trailer Park because I already knew it was there, and we stayed for an extra day because they have fixed their internet, access is not rationed, and it’s good to take a rest day whenever possible. And there was a forecast of snow in Santa Fe, which is only about 100 miles away. An easy drive for a last day.

The Santa Rosa Trailer Park is not easy to see or find, because it is relatively quiet. It’s tucked away down from the road, and it’s the OLD road, not the new highway 40. There are more trails around the park than I have the energy to walk. And they have real dinners. I bought dinner for myself two days in a row. A record. All they lack is a dog park for Bitsy, who got bored and grumpy and curled up under the sleep bag in the 50 degree temperature. Who knows what is the chill factor in a 30 mph wind that never stops.

Oh yes, we also gained an hour, which means it is either earlier or later than my body thinks it is, and I overheard someone say we are about to gain another one — or lose the first one – again – tomorrow. No wonder the children of today believe that humans control the universal empire. Or could, if we try hard enough.