The Planters and the Destroyers

As I reported previously, Alsace in France planted a half million trees last year. This is in a rainy part of the world that already has lots of trees. But its residents welcome even more trees, to create shady spots of cool microclimate during the summer, and to remove pollutants from the air. And Alsatians are quite open about their reasons for wanting more trees.

This is in stark contrast to the lone vandal who has recently cruised around Los Angeles on a bicycle and cut down urban trees. One can only speculate on why he did these destructive acts. Who was his enemy? Did he resent the local government for doing something that, he thought, did not directly benefit him? Does he hate Nature and Nature’s God? Does he hate the poor, dark people who live in urban Los Angeles?

Urban trees, on a tree-by-tree basis, have more impact on the world than do trees in a forest, because urban areas (in Los Angeles, or Alsace, or anywhere else) are often devoid of trees. Each tree absorbs pollution, and transpires water vapor which creates little islands of coolness (what the French call îlots de fraîcheur). In a concrete jungle of buzzing air conditioners, urban trees might be the only positive points on the landscape.

More generally, the French value long-term investments in the quality of life as being worthwhile, but many Americans are cynical about a future that contains poor people whom they do not like.

Among the investments in the quality of life in France are days of complete vacation. I am writing this on May Day, which is the French Labor Day. On American holidays, lots of stores remain open. But the French are serious about their holidays (journées feriées). On this particular holiday, even the trams do not run. This is in addition to the fact that most French businesses close on Sunday. May Day is a day for protests in favor of further social improvements, and for spending time with family.

I Love Living in Alsace, A Socialist Paradise

 

I now live in the CeA (Collectivité européene d’Alsace), near Strasbourg in eastern France, just over the Rhine River from Germany. This region, like the whole country, is heavily socialist, which means that taxes are high and life is good. The Alsatian government spends a lot of money on things that make life better for people, including me.

Examples of government spending that makes life better for everyone:

• In 2024, Alsace spent 14.5 million euros on children (enfants);
• In 2024, they spent 28.3 million euros on seniors (aînés);
• In 2024, they planted 500,000 trees including at schools and creating cool, green zones (islands of freshness, or îlots de fraîcheur), which has health benefits and reduces the amount of air conditioning.
• In 2024, they installed 24,000 square meters of new solar cells (panneaux photovoltaïques). They spend a lot of money on energy conservation.
• Right here in the ville d’Hœnheim where I live, they just built a new school building, for 23.4 million euros.
• Every year they add more pedestrian and biking paths, which increase health and reduce the use of cars. As a result, despite high population density, the traffic jams are fewer and smaller than in most American cities.
• They even spend money on bilingual education, which includes, in Alsace, the Alsatian language (which is similar to but not the same as German).

However, these expenditures result in savings over time. The new solar panels will save 3.9 million euros a year, each year, after being installed. The new school building I mentioned above, which cost 23.4 million euros, generates more energy than it consumes.

The French government spends a lot of money to guarantee a minimum income for every citizen (which does not include me). The revenu de Solidarité active (rSa) is a French social welfare benefit that supplements the income of a person who is destitute or has few resources, in order to guarantee a minimum income. Poor people in France do not get project housing built for them; they get supplemental income with which to pay rent to private landlords, who are limited in the amount of rent they can charge.

There is one major difference between French rSa and American welfare. Recipients are required to work as part of their “insertion” into society and the economy. American conservatives starting with Richard Nixon used to call this “workfare” and promoted it, though it does not often occur in America. Well, it happens in France. As a result of expenditure on insertion, the government has reduced its rSa payments by 15 percent.

A lot of the work that needs to be done comes from volunteers. Nine thousand volunteers (bénévoles) collected 70 tonnes of garbage last year in Alsace. In contrast, in Durant, Oklahoma, where I used to live, once a year volunteers would gather for the “Trash-off” and clean up a few blocks, leaving many tons of garbage behind. I think that the retired teachers who run the French language class that I attend are also volunteers. That is, in France, as the Alsace website says, « L’état demande aux collectivités de plus en plus de dépenses sans les compenser » (The state asks communities to make more and more expenditures without compensation.)

Everywhere you look, you can hardly help but see sustainability and preparation for the future. While we were driving through the countryside on our way to visit a castle in the mountains, my son-in-law pointed to a big plastic tarp over a mound in a field. It was a mound of decomposing vegetation. The mulch released methane which is collected by pipes to supplement the natural gas supply (biogaz). As I told him, I think the technology was developed in America, but it is actually being used in France. In America, biogas is not worth it; all you have to do is frack some more. In contrast, in France, fracking is illegal.

France is not really a socialist paradise. I just wanted to get your attention. But it comes pretty close, in terms of environment and education.

Dreams of Peace

Perhaps the most famous piece written by the German composer Robert Schumann (two N’s) was a one-page piano piece, Träumerei (Dreaming).

But there is another Robert Schuman (one N) who was very famous in Europe. He was the principal force behind the formation of what is now known as the European Union. It was his dream to bring the countries of western Europe together to solve their differences peacefully rather than through war and competition, and to speak with a united voice to the world. Ever since Strasbourg was the Roman town of Argenteum, two millennia ago, western Europe has experienced one war after another, big or small, in which millions of people have died miserably. The most recent war in western Europe was World War Two. How could Schuman’s dream of peace ever be achieved, after millennia of war? In particular, how could the Germans, who slaughtered the French, and the French, who dreamed of revenge against the Germans, possibly experience not just peace but unity of spirit and purpose?

Schuman’s dream seemed impossible, according to many newspaper cartoons in the 1950s. Here is one, on display at the European Parliament building in Strasbourg. Schuman, one N, is depicted as Schumann, two N’s, not just dreaming but fantasizing about European unity. This fantasy seemed as impossible as Zeus, in the form of a white bull, carrying off the goddess Europa.

But that is exactly what happened. Europe is so unified that war between its member states is unthinkable. Right in this very building, a unified western European response to Russian aggression against the Ukraine took form. Just the week before I visited, the European parliament had to decide how to respond to Trump imposing tariffs on Europe, for reasons that were never made clear, then how to respond to Trump immediately afterwards removing the tariffs. Things that happen in this building are a major part of world news and, unlike many other major sources of news, the news from Europe is overwhelmingly positive and constructive.

Despite an evolutionary history of violence, and millennia of social history of violence, humans can learn peace. See videos I have posted here and here .

 

Darwin and Ecology

I’d forgotten all about it. Back in 1992 I wrote an article for a minor journal, “Charles Darwin’s Influence on Ecological Theory.” The editor accepted it for publication, but wanted revisions. I was going through a job change right then, and chose to drop the project. The article itself is outdated, and not well written. I am unwilling to revise and post it. But in this essay I will summarize some of its main points.

Here is the abstract:

“Prior to Charles Darwin, ecological relationships between organisms and their environments, and among organisms, were interpreted in terms of the Great Chain of Being, of bidirectional adaptation, and of the Balance of Nature. Darwin made valuable contributions to ecology through his careful measurements of plant and animal populations, and his understanding of the complexity of interactions among plant and animal species. But his major contribution to ecological theory was that natural selection, the evolutionary mechanism he proposed, made the Great Chain of Being and Balance of Nature concepts obsolete.

Many twentieth century ecologists believed that communities of plants and animals were superorganisms and functioned as organisms in their own right. The superorganism concept was irreconcilable with Darwinian natural selection, and only recently has ecological theory come to terms with this. For the Darwinian view of ecology to be fully successful, a response must be made to the recent proposal of a modified superorganisms concept, the Gaia Hypothesis.”

This is all interesting, even though not too original, even in 1992. You can read a lot about pre-Darwinian ecology in Ernst Mayr’s book The Growth of Biological Thought and many essays by Stephen Jay Gould.

Here is a summary of the article, which I have made as interesting as possible, but which remains (fair warning) somewhat heavy going compared to most essays on this blog.

The term ecology was first used, apparently, by Reiter in 1885 and Haeckel in 1886. St. George Jackson Mivart came up with his own version of it, which he called hexicology. (I used to think Mivart was a Catholic saint, but St. George is just his first name. He got in trouble with the Catholic church when he wrote “Happiness in Hell”.)

Even in the twentieth century, ecologists (who, like Frederic Clements, considered themselves Darwinians) thought the natural world functioned as an organism and therefore kept itself “in balance” the way your physiology stays in balance. Another example is Victor Shelford. Arthur Tansley quickly pointed out that an ecological community was a super-organisms but does not resemble an individual organism. Nevertheless the super-organism concept has led to some humorous examples. Some of its practitioners liked to walk through a Pinetum (a pine woodland) or a Quercetum (an oak forest). This approach continued until at least 1991. The idea that plant communities are discrete and nameable like organisms was eclipsed largely by Robert Whittaker’s vegetation studies starting in 1956.

For centuries, thinking about the natural world was constrained by the Scala Naturae and what I call a bidirectional view of adaptation.

First, the Scala Naturae was like a great ladder of life that included not only organisms but was a seamless fabric that included minerals (such as the fibrous asbestos) at its base. Because all of the links in the chain must exist, even pre-Darwinian scientists such as Linnaeus accepted human-ape intermediates such as Homo troglodytes and Homo sylvestris. Darwin’s research shattered the Chain.

Classification schemes were based on almost anything other than Darwin’s branching tree of life. Some were based on mathematical symmetry, such as the quinarian systems proposed by MacLeay in 1819 and Swainson in 1835. Strickland wrote in 1846 that these patterns reflected God’s pattern of thought during creation. Darwin’s research shattered these ideas. These systems had an artistic, rather than functional, completeness: species existed because the symmetry demanded them, not because of ecological opportunity, much less evolution.

Second, by bidirectional adaptation, I mean the idea that organisms fitted their environments, and the environment fitted the organisms. Edward Blyth’s 1837 example (cited in Loren Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century) was that the ptarmigan was adapted to the mountaintop and the mountaintop to the ptarmigan. Blyth’s idea was in such contrast to Darwin that Eiseley’s assertion (Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X) that Darwin got the idea of natural selection from him seems unbelievable. No scientist believes now that the environment adapts itself to organisms.

The Balance of Nature was also an old idea. Herodotus believed that a superintending providence kept predators from eating all of their prey, mainly because the prey had high reproductive rates. Similar ideas are found in Plato, Cicero, and Plotinus. Linnaeus wrote in 1759 that “…all natural things…lend a helping hand towards preserving every species…” Herbivores, for example, kept any one plant species from crowding out the others. Buffon had similar beliefs. Perhaps the most famous and extensive defense of this idea was in Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), one of the most famous pre-Darwinian science books. “Perhaps there is no species of terrestrial animals whatever, which would not overrun the earth, if it were permitted to multiply in perfect safety; or of fish, which would not fill the ocean…” Superfecundity, he explained, had two advantages: “first, that it tends to keep the world always full; whilst…it allows the proportion between the several species of animals to be differently modified …as different situations may afford them room and food…One species of insects rids us of another species…” Anticipating chapter 3 of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Paley wrote, “An elephant produces but one calif; a butterfly lays six hundred eggs…In the rivers, we meet with a thousand minnows for one pike; in the sea, a million herrings for a single shark.” Paley, and most pre-Darwinian scientists, believed that the relationships among species were designed by God just as were their bodily characteristics. You can read more in the Egerton article [].

Darwin not only passed on these concepts of ecological complexity, but painstakingly counted the number of plant seedlings that emerged from a cleared plot of land, and how many of them died. John L. Harper described this as Darwin’s “preoccupation with numbers” in “A Darwinian approach to plant ecology” (1967). Most famously, Darwin linked the abundance of clover to that of house cats, via mice and bumblebees. His metaphor of the Entangled Bank depicted the impossibility of explaining all the ecological interactions. You might as well, he said, throw up a handful of feathers and try to predict where each would fall using only the laws of physics.

Alfred Russel [one L] Wallace found examples in his extensive travels that the world was not made for man’s benefit, for example birds of paradise that live in tropical mountains inaccessible to humans, and durian fruits which can kill people when they fall from the tree. Later in life, during his period of spiritualism, Wallace asserted that the world was made for man, a view ridiculed by (who else) Mark Twain.

Popular nature writing is still filled with pre-Darwinian views. Most people believe that flowers and pollinators help each other out, as a law of nature. But in a Darwinian view, flowers that can trick their pollinators into servicing them without having to provide any benefit might prevail, and pollinators will steal nectar if they can get away with it. Ecologists use terms such as “larcenous” insects and “deceptive” flowers.

And the idea that ecology must have been designed by God persists in creationist literature.

The Gaia hypothesis was not intended to be anti-Darwinian but invokes a planetary-level homeostasis that is difficult to reconcile with Darwinian natural selection. I concluded in 1992, “Thus ecologists are left with the question of whether the earth just happens to remain in apparent homeostasis, because of Darwinian natural selection acting on individuals, or whether the earth keeps itself in real homeostasis…” As I understand, this is still the case.

A Modest Proposal: How Trump and Musk Can Save the World from Global Warming

The only truly effective way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is for all of us to quit producing so much of it: buying less, traveling less. This is my personal solution. But never in all of human history have a large group of people ever cut back on consumption and waste, except recently in the European Union, and then only mildly.

Big-thinking engineers have offered high-tech, expensive, and risky solutions generally called geoengineering, that is, engineering the entire Earth. Two examples are huge carbon-absorption towers and spewing reflective particles into the stratosphere.

The huge towers would collectively breathe in the entire atmosphere, sponge the excess carbon dioxide out of it (leaving only what plants need for photosynthesis), and then exhale the neutralized atmosphere. Such towers, even if there could possibly be enough energy to run them, would have to be huge and incredibly numerous. Proponents of this type of geoengineering are not too clear about what to do with the waste products of these towers. The cost of this kind of project would start in the hundreds of billions of dollars and could reach a trillion.

The other solution would be to inject hundreds of millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it would produce a suspended white haze that would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface. The particles could be released from a fleet of special aircraft. The everlasting gloom might be a small price to pay for release from global warming. This solution would actually not remove carbon from the atmosphere. No one is sure if the toxic particles might settle and pollute the entire planet. Once again, the cost would start at hundreds of billions of dollars and could reach a trillion.

The Trump II administration would clearly be unwilling to spend this kind of money to solve a problem they refuse to admit exists—global warming.

Unless.

If these geoengineering schemes could be proposed by companies owned by Elon Musk, then Trump would be willing to demand a trillion dollars for them, and Congress would not dare to say no. No amount of money is too much for the federal government to give to Musk. He already owns Space-X. All he would need to do is to produce another hundred thousand aircraft to release the sulfur.

Right now, Musk’s companies are losing money, largely because of the overwhelmingly negative image of Musk Himself. There may not be anything wrong with Teslas, as cars, but when half the world starts calling them Swasticars then the company will start to fail. But Musk’s rockets keep exploding also. So it is possible that Musk’s companies would be unable to competently carry out these geoengineering projects.

But that doesn’t matter. Musk does not need to build cars or rockets that actually work. His market is Donald Trump. Donald Trump can get Musk a trillion dollars of federal money, no problem. The cars and rockets themselves do not matter.

And if one of Musk’s aircrafts explodes, it is no matter, since this too would add reflective particles to the stratosphere.

What could possibly go wrong?

Conservative Christians already worship Donald Trump. Any arguments, in this blog or anywhere else, that addresses any other aspect of Christianity other than the Donald are a waste of time. These geoengineering projects would, moreover, demonstrate that the efforts of conservative Christians to worship Trump would prove to have been correct, for, in this way, Musk and Trump could literally save the world.