How Cultures Can Unite without Domination

Part of the message of the Christmas season is “Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men.” But is this even remotely imaginable?

Yes, it is.

As shown in a video [https://youtube.com/shorts/D4GB35JCuzE?] I have just posted, war raged between what is now France and what is now Germany for millennia until 1945, when Nazi Germany was defeated. Today, no two countries are as closely allied with one another as are France and Germany. Today, war between them is unthinkable (as well as illegal). How did this happen?

First, the country (Germany) that wanted to conquer and assimilate the other (France) had to be humiliated into abject surrender. Second, the two countries had to make the deliberate decision to cooperate, and to resolve any and all tensions through constructive negotiation rather than war. And that is what France and Germany have done. Not only them, but all of the other couple of dozen nations that make up the European Union, which is a unique accomplishment of the work of peace in human history.

The result of the European Union has not been assimilation. Neither France nor Germany assimilated the other. The French still have their own language and culture, and the same is true of Germany. As shown by the statues in the video, France and Germany are saying the same thing (“I give, you give, we live”) in their own languages. They have the same objectives, each in their own cultures.

As I also explain in the video, this has not been the case in the United States, with regard to the Native American nations. The white culture of the United States has conquered the Native nations and imposed its culture and language on them. There is no mutually respectful meeting of cultures. Many tribes, such as the Cherokee tribe of which I am a member, maintain cultural identity, but it has little practical meaning in governance or the economy.

Two cultures can mutually benefit one another if they cooperate and share objectives, while maintaining their distinction. This happened with the European countries, but not with white and Native America.

Donald Trump has declared that Europe is weak, Putin is strong, and that it is stupid for America to help Ukraine remain independent. Putin represents all the worst in assimilation; he wants to obliterate Ukrainian culture and identity, and make Ukraine into a colony that provides cheap goods and labor to Russia. And, according to Trump, it is stupid for us to help Ukraine to resist this. Putin wants to do (as Russia did under the communists) to Ukraine what white America has done to the Native nations. But it is Europe that is strong, because a Union of proud nations has come together to defend its common interests.

The New World of Mega-fires

Mega-fires! Or, megafeux in French, as in the book Quand la Forêt Brûle: Penser La Novelle Catastrophe Écologique by Joëlle Zask (Premier Parallèle, 2019). (When the Forest Burns : Thinking about the New Ecological Catastrophe.)

Through much of my professional life, I have considered fires (in forests, prairies, and chaparrals) to be ecologically beneficial. Where to begin with the ecological benefits of fires? Fires clear away underbrush and release nutrients in the dead litter into the soil where new plants can grow back and use them. The sunlight can now reach the soil surface, warming it up earlier in the spring than would have been possible with a thick litter layer still in place. In many cases, the perennial plants that were present before the fire grow back, more vigorous than they were before. This is the case for hundreds of species of prairie plants, which maintain their thick sod of roots and underground stems. It is also true, as I have seen for the cross timbers forest of Oklahoma. As for the plants that grow back from seeds in the soil, the seeds germinate profusely, as I have seen Phacelia strictiflora do in cross-timbers forests after fires. So frequent are these fires that many plants have adapted to them even to the extent of requiring the fires to maintain their populations. My research has shown that Phacelia seeds require smoke chemicals in order to germinate; the same is true for hundreds of species around the world in fire-prone habitats such as chaparral. How can fire, which has so many ecological benefits, be bad?

Fire has long been a tool of habitat management. The whole landscape evolved with wildfires. Since the spread of western civilization, wildfires have decreased, mostly because people do not like to have their homes destroyed by fire. Ecological landscape managers have to set control burns to compensate for the decline in wildfires. This photo shows a control burn near Lake Texoma in Oklahoma in 1999.

In the absence of natural fires and control burns, dead biomass builds up under the trees and virtually assures that a fire will break out soon and be very big.

White landscape managers were not the first to use fire as a management tool. All over the world, native peoples have set fires to forests and fields to renew their growth. This was nowhere more true than with the Native peoples of North America, as I describe in my book Forgotten Landscapes.

But times are changing. In particular, global warming is changing the landscape. As Naomi Klein said in the title of her book about the economics and politics of global climate change, This Changes Everything. It has certainly changed the scientific way of thinking about fire.

Global climate change includes not only hotter temperatures but less rainfall and more wind in many areas, such as southern Europe during recent long, hot, dry, windy summers. This is not a prediction; it is something that has already happened in many parts of the world. Some of these forest fires have flames almost a hundred feet tall and that spread faster than anybody can run. The fires consume houses, including outdoor free-standing barbecue grills which are built to withstand fire: the grills simply melt.

Other human activities promote the spread of large fires. All around the world, not only in rainforests but even where I used to live in Oklahoma, native forests are cut down and replaced by tree plantations such as loblolly pine. Tree plantations, with breezy understories and with flammable, fast-growing trees, burn more readily than native forests.

The result is that, right when we need control burns more than ever, we do not dare to conduct them. There is a tremendous liability cost associated with a control burn that gets out of hand. If a private citizen loses so much as a shed to a government control burn, the land-owner will sue for lots of money. As global warming progresses, almost any control burn is guaranteed to escape and become a major fire.

A mega-fire, unlike most smaller fires, can and do sterilize the soil, so that there are no roots, stems, or seeds to grow back. The resulting moonscape will recover, but it might take many decades and suffer uncontrolled soil erosion in the meantime.

The time is coming, and in some places is already here, when there will be no such thing as a little control burn. There will be only mega-fires.

I have retired, so it is too late for me to tell my classes, forget everything I said about control burns.

Darwin and Fall Colors

In eastern France, one of the first plants to have red leaves is Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia). As the name suggests, the plant is originally from North America. Someone brought it from America and planted it in a European garden, and it spread widely from there, either by its vine branches, or by its seeds, which resemble grapes and are eaten by birds. Another plant species that has bright autumn leaf colors, including red, is another woody plant from North America: the sweetgum tree (Liquidambar styraciflua). This essay accompanies a YouTube video.

Leaves changing color in the autumn is part of a process known as senescence. It is part of a perennial plant’s way of getting ready for winter. It is a long, slow process. It must begin in late summer, before the temperatures even get chilly. The only way a leaf can “know” that autumn is coming is by measuring the length of the night, which gets longer every year starting on June 21 no matter what the temperature might be. Leaves use the pigment phytochrome to measure the length of the night.

Part of senescence is the formation of an abscission layer. This is essentially a layer of scar tissue at the base of the leaf that allows it to easily break off and blow away when senescence has finished. By the time this happens, the abscission layer has already healed up what would have been a gaping wound. As the abscission layer forms, the ability of the leaf to export molecules gradually declines. One of the reasons an old leaf is less valuable to a plant than a young leaf (as I will explain in a separate essay, with its own video) is that a young leaf does not have an abscission layer, and it is able to export sugar and other molecules rapidly to the rest of the plant. In an old leaf, there is some resistance to exporting photosynthetic products such as sugar. An old leaf produces less sugar, and in addition is less able to export that sugar to the rest of the plant.

Why do leaves turn yellow and red in the autumn? Let’s start with yellow. The yellow color is carotenoid pigments, which were present in the leaf throughout its life. In this photo, the non-water-soluble leaf pigments have been separated by a process of chromatography [ref]. You can see two green bands (chlorophyll a is emerald green, chlorophyll b is olive green) and yellow bands of carotenoids, including one faintly visible at the top. These pigments came from fresh young leaves of supermarket spinach.

Carotenoids are not directly photosynthetic, but they assist the chlorophyll in the process. When the plant recycles its chlorophyll—including the valuable magnesium atoms in the chlorophyll molecules—the yellow color that was there all along is revealed.

But why do leaves often turn red in the fall? The red color is anthocyanins. Of course, most of them do not. But in hundreds of woody plant species, autumn leaves turn red. The reason this happens is that a leaf in autumn has little photosynthesis, but it does have some, and it produces sugars, which are difficult to export. The leaf uses these sugars to manufacture anthocyanins. This especially occurs on crisply chilly but sunny autumn days.

It seems likely to me that the anthocyanins are the chance result of sugar buildup. That is, they do the plant no good, but just happen to be beautiful to us. But studies have shown that lots of woody plant species have independently evolved the ability to produce red leaves in the autumn. If something evolves over and over again, there is likely to be a good evolutionary reason for it. But what is that reason? It’s hard to say and impossible to prove.

One suggestion is that the red anthocyanins protect photosynthesis from ultraviolet radiation. When I first heard it, this explanation made no sense to me, since by the time a leaf turns red most of its useful life is past. But not quite all of it. Perhaps the red pigment protects the leaf cells from ultraviolet damage during the very important process of senescence itself.

Human plant breeders have selected many species that have bright red leaves even in the middle of the season. These plants do not grow as well as the ones with solid green leaves, but that does not matter. Their success depends not so much on growth and seed production as upon their ability to please human tastes.

We still do not know why most of the tree species that produce red leaves in the autumn are in northeastern North America and Asia. This photo shows bright autumn colors, due mostly to sugar maple (Acer saccharum) in New York.

In Europe, most native species just turn a dull yellow or maybe just degrade directly to brown. When American painters used bright red on their canvases, European painters thought they were just making it up, since there is nothing like it on the native landscapes of Europe.

If Darwin walked around his estate at Down, outside London, he would have seen red leaves in the autumn. The Down House website boasted about these colors earlier this year (the photos will probably be gone by the time you visit the site). But most of the plants with red leaves were Virginia creeper and sweetgum that were planted there.

Serious about Energy Efficiency, part three. Elon Musk's carbon footprint

Try putting “Elon Musk carbon footprint” into a search engine. You will find plenty. This is, you realize, the world’s richest man, who just managed to talk his company into giving Him a trillion-dollar pay package. This is all money that Tesla is not going to spend on making their products innovative and safe (hint to investors).

You will get an answer right away. According to PC Magazine, “Elon Musk's two private jets alone—not including his emissions from other sources—generate 5,497 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or an average of 15 tonnes per day. This is equal to 11 average people's emissions in their entire lifetimes.” A tonne is a metric ton, that is, a thousand kilograms. Then you can click on a Guardian article that explains, worldwide, “Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1 million homes.” And that article is even out of date; it has gotten worse.

As if you did not already have enough reasons to hate Elon Musk. Imagine him trying to tell a government how to be more efficient.

But we will get nowhere complaining about how the richest people not only waste money while millions of people suffer, or complaining about how the rich do not deserve to be millions of times richer than the average person. Maybe a little, but not a million times. There is a serious point here.

The fault for global warming, caused by carbon emissions, is primarily due to rich nations (like America) and rich people in those rich nations. China emits more carbon than America, but it has over a billion people. The average Chinese person does not emit, directly or indirectly, as much carbon as an average American. I drove a small car when I was living in America, and my “guilt” was much less than an average American, certainly a rich American.

It is clear that one major contributor to global warming is that so many Americans are so rich and wasteful. You knew that. I just want to give you a couple of numbers to consider.

In France, where I now live, the richest ten percent are responsible for 31.2 percent of carbon emissions. But in America, the richest ten percent are responsible for 84.5 percent of carbon emissions. What this means is that rich Americans are really, really rich and wasteful. America needs to become more like France, in which the rich people (at least, the ones who live around Strasbourg) have only moderately showy wealth and are only moderately wasteful.

As long as rich Americans continue to be joyously wasteful, then there will be no solution to the problem of global warming.

Serious about Energy Efficiency, part two.

One of the major sources of greenhouse gases is automobiles. In America, in 2022, there were 283,400,986 automobiles registered in America, including corporate and government vehicles. Clearly, as we all know, Americans rely heavily on automobiles to go everywhere. Only in certain urban areas, and not even very many of these, have usable public transit. Also, much of America is simply not walkable for everyday purposes. To go to a large store, an American usually has to drive. Americans who have given up the use of automobiles have had to prepare carefully and greatly alter their daily schedules. I have known exactly one such person outside of New York City. But in urban areas in France, it is not unusual for people to simply not own cars.

And American cars are big. The average fuel efficiency in America is 6.7 liters per 100 km (35 mpg), down from 905 in 2004, which is an improvement, but is still less efficient than the 4.1 liters per 100 km in Europe. There are all kinds of consequences for this. In America, we have to have wide lanes and multiple lanes to accommodate the numerous big cars and pickup trucks. In Strasbourg, France, where I live, even major streets usually have just one lane each direction, and the lanes are narrow. I have seen five pickup trucks in two years in Strasbourg. Even panel trucks used for repair and delivery are smaller than those in America. In France, bicycle parking lots are larger, and every urban area has well-developed, reliable, and cheap public transit. People in France without cars, like me, can save the money and inconvenience of car payments, licenses, registration, driving school (mandatory in France), finding parking spaces, etc. That adds up to a lot of time and money.

One result of excessive car ownership in America is traffic jams. Most major cities, and even minor ones, have huge traffic jams at certain times of day. Even Tulsa, where I used to live, which is far from being among the largest American cities.

Traffic jams cost a lot of money for cars idling, and create headaches for governments that feel the obligation to build new roads. At least in America.

The traffic problem in Strasbourg seems ridiculously small to me, who has just moved from America. But the government of the Eurometropole of Strasbourg sees traffic as a problem. Too many cars? In America, no level of government would think that there are too many cars. A few American cities have provided incentives to not drive downtown. But in Strasbourg, there are incentives to actually get rid of your car.

According to the municipal website, if you sell your car (and can show the city officials your paperwork), you can receive a debit card (from MasterCard) with between 2,000 and 2,500 euros of funds, depending on your income. You can only use these funds for certain things. You can get tickets for buses, trams (trains within the metropolitan area), trains (between cities), official car-sharing services, or to rent, buy, or repair a bicycle. It would take a lot of tram rides (over 1,300, in fact, or 650 round trips) to use up 2,500 euros.

The trams in Strasbourg are quite efficient. They almost always run on time, and at intersections the trams get the right of way. Cars (and municipal buses) must wait for the trams to pass.

In America, municipal governments might try to encourage people to take public transit. But in France, they will pay you to do so. It seems like a good deal to me.

Suppose Tulsa, my previous home, checked into building a tram service. It would be so expensive that it would not get seriously considered. But most cities in France have had tram service for decades and have simply maintained and expanded it.

It is a nice day today (rare enough in the rainy, chilly autumn of northeastern France). I think I will take a hike in one of the forest preserves. If I had a bicycle, something I’m still working on, I could ride there safely on paved trails and dedicated bike lanes. But instead I will take the tram to the bottom of the hill in La Robertsau, hike into the Parc de Pourtalès, then on the paved walking/biking trail to the Cascades, and back. Or I could walk all the way to the Rhine River and look into Germany. Suppose I had more time. I could take the tram to the train station, and take a bus up to a medieval monastery in the mountains, where I could look across the Alsatian plain to the Rhine River, and hike back down to catch a train home.

When I retired to France, I said there were two things I would not do: drive a car, or tie my shoes. They have both been equally easy investments: walking shoes with straps, and tram/bus tickets. Life is good in this socialist paradise.