Blue Wild Indigo, a novel by Stan Rice. Part one: Disruptive Discoveries

 

Stan Rice has just published another novel Blue Wild Indigo in the series Under the Sun, which explores what, if anything, God is doing in this world under the sun: first, from the viewpoint of the poet who lived at the time of King Solomon, and wrote Ecclesiastes (Among the Lilies); next, from the viewpoint of the woman who loved the prophet Jeremiah (The Almond Branch); next, from Heloïse and Abélard in medieval France (Paraclete); finally, this novel, set in modern rural Oklahoma.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon:

All her life, Sophia is inconvenient. She thinks too much and everybody knows it. She escapes twice from her Amish community in rural Oklahoma and discovers how dangerous and costly love and wisdom can be. The first time, she leaves with Clay. They find that the outside world is worse than their Amish community and they return, join church, and marry. Sophia’s second departure—with its risk of shunning—is not so easy. She takes refuge with Gil, a famous, lonely theologian, who is escaping his own past. But by hiding in Gil’s house, Sophia has exchanged one set of restrictions for another. Sophia’s brilliance shocks Gil into rethinking everything he thinks he knows, as he helps Sophia recreate herself. Their love grows as deeply as the roots of the blue wild indigo, a long-lived prairie flower. As Clay stalks Sophia, she and Gil discover that love is worth even the risk of death. Only after this experience are Sophia and Gil free.

This is how the novel begins:

Her eyes. It was her eyes that shot out at me, barbed me, and reeled me in. She made me feel like a fish who thought that because he understood the water he understood the world, only to find that he did not even understand the water. She left me flopping on the floor. Even now I do not know whether she intended to capture me or if I just blundered into the circle of her light.

This is a book for which the author chose not to seek commercial publication. The reason is obvious. There are thousands of works of fiction about the Amish, but almost all of them are written by Amish for Amish, which means the plot is almost the same for all of them: young Amish people experiment with the outside world, during their period of rumspringa, and find out that life is better back home. Almost nobody outside the Amish religion wants to read fiction about Amish, unless it depicts them as ignorant, backward, stupid people. But there is not even very much published fiction about this, because a reader grows weary of a writer that just heaps abuse upon people he or she considers boring.

What Rice has done is to write a novel about a brilliant, therefore inconvenient, Amish woman, who needs to leave her community even while she continues to love it.

The format of the book includes chapters written from first the viewpoint of Sophia, then of Gil, filling in their background stories—the stories that were too sensitive for them to actually tell one another about, so they wrote them down, often in the second person. The whole book has passages of very creative format. Chapter 4 of Part one consists of a shopping receipt, which reveals Gil’s mental struggles as he prepares for Sophia.

The first thing to note, regarding Sophia and Gil, the main characters, is that their meeting brings disruptive discoveries. Scientists and theologians alike must be ready for disruptions to come along. Perhaps Gil thought he was living in peace away from religious and academic strife in a country house, but he had all of his assumptions challenged when he met Sophia (from the Greek word for wisdom). She is a fiercely intelligent Amish woman, who grew up in central central Oklahoma. She had chosen a life (fundamentalism) that Gil assumed people only got forced into by their circumstances. And then, when she walked all night to find his house and simply assumed that he was going to let her move in with him. Two disruptions to his thinking. Gil assumed that the Amish were not too smart; but then again, natural selection favored their mild way of thinking, which spelled social and family success for them, so maybe it was an intelligent choice on their part. Sophia wandering into Gil’s life disrupted him forever.

But Sophia was not mindlessly fundamentalist. She chose her life after constantly challenging the assumptions of her family and church, about history and science. Church leaders know this is going to happen, and they allow a period of rumspringa in which Amish youths can try out the sinful world in order to find out for themselves that a life of family and church love is much better. But the running and springing around of rumspringa did not include freedom of thought. The young folks could smoke and drink, but they were not allowed to freely read or to go to college. Sophia had to go out into the world with her boyfriend Clay, and they both found out how the sinful world can degrade you.

Sophia experiences disruption when she, by chance, meets Gil. The more she does things with him, such as an environmental protest, the more she finds that her previous experiences have prepared her for him. She was already an environmentalist without realizing it. Organized environmentalism gives her a new purpose in her life. She finds a mental soul-mate in Gil and her life, also, is disrupted forever.

Gaia Save Us! Not So Fast, part two. Oxygen blast

This is the second in a series of essays about Gaia.

One of the great insights of modern science has been that the ecosystem of the Earth as a whole might be self-regulating, that is, it regulates its systems (temperature, geology, atmospheric chemistry, biology) the way a body regulates itself. It adds a new dimension to the meaning of Mother Earth. This is an insight usually attributed to James Lovelock, who called the Earth Gaia, and extended by the late, great biologist Lynn Margulis. Neither one of them intended to imply that the Earth was a goddess; Lynn Margulis particularly told me so. Gaia is a self-regulating systems, not a goddess.

In this series of essays, I wish to explain that Earth has a regulatory system, which you can call Gaia if you like. But this system is very unresponsive except on the largest scales of time and space. Don’t trust Gaia to solve any of our current ecological problems.

Perhaps Gaia is the reason Earth’s climate has been stable for over 500 million years? No, because the climate and atmosphere have not been stable.

The Earth has had five major extinctions (not counting the sixth, going on as we speak) and several minor extinctions. Gaia was, apparently, unable to prevent those from happening.

When plant life started covering the land surface, over 400 million years ago, photosynthesis increased dramatically, removing a lot of carbon dioxide from the air. Forests covered much of the land surface. These forests would not have looked like the thick modern tropical jungles; there was apparently space between the trees, making them more of a woodland than a forest. But there was an even more important difference between the forests 400 million years ago and today. Back then, when trees died, they fell into shallow water and piled up in mass graves, eventually becoming coal. Today, when trees die, they seldom form coal. Instead, they decompose. The reason appears to be that fungi, the most important modern decomposers of wood and other plant tissues, had not yet evolved the ability to digest wood. Coal—that is where the Carboniferous Period of Earth history got its name.

Photosynthesis removed a lot of carbon from the air, and it got stored underground in coal seams. Meanwhile, where did the photosynthetic oxygen go? Into the air, of course. Today, the air is about 21 percent oxygen; during the Carboniferous it got as high as 35 percent. If you had been there, you would have hyper-oxygenated. With that much oxygen, fires would have been widespread, even on wet plant tissue. Evidence from the fossil record suggests that this was what happened.

The oxygenated atmosphere was also very dense. That is why giant insects, such as giant dragonflies, which today would not have been able to get off the ground, could fly. Insects, moreover, breathe through little tubes in their abdomens. Today an arthropod that is too large could not breathe, because its breathing tube surface areas would not have grown as much as its metabolizing volume. There was so much oxygen that the giant dragonflies could fly and there were giant millipedes.

Gaia did not prevent this oxygen buildup, nor the removal of carbon dioxide which might have led to global cooling. Carbon dioxide was running out, and one of the evolutionary responses was that plants increased their carbon-absorbing surfaces: they evolved leaves for the first time, instead of just absorbing carbon through green stems. This only made the decline in atmospheric carbon more dramatic.

The oxygen buildup would not have occurred forever, because with too much oxygen, life would have risked extinction, including plant life, almost the sole source of oxygen in the atmosphere. In this way also, Gaia regulated the atmosphere, but only within very broad bounds, careening toward disaster without actually reaching it.

Gaia has no mind and is slow. It may have saved Earth from becoming an ice planet or a hellish one. But on a day to day, or million year to million year, basis, it is of little help to the planet.

Gaia Save Us! Not So Fast, part one. Global warming

One of the great insights of modern science has been that the ecosystem of the Earth as a whole might be self-regulating, that is, it regulates its systems (temperature, geology, atmospheric chemistry, biology) the way a body regulates itself. It adds a new dimension to the meaning of Mother Earth. This is an insight usually attributed to James Lovelock, who called the Earth Gaia, and extended by the late, great biologist Lynn Margulis. Neither one of them intended to imply that the Earth was a goddess; Lynn Margulis particularly told me so. Gaia is a self-regulating systems, not a goddess.

In this series of essays (Gaia Save Us! Not So Fast), I wish to explain that Earth has a regulatory system, which you can call Gaia if you like. But this system is very unresponsive except on the largest scales of time and space. Don’t trust Gaia to solve any of our current ecological problems.

This essay is the first of the series: about global warming, which is nothing new in the history of the planet.

On an overall scale, the idea of Gaia seems to be correct. Currently, the Earth’s temperature remains relatively stable, because the atmosphere has just the right amount of carbon dioxide, which holds in the heat. That is, when there is too much carbon dioxide, Earth processes remove it from the atmosphere. Over a very long scale, the silicates in the minerals of the crust react with carbon dioxide, removing it from the air. This takes millions of years. On a shorter time scale, the photosynthesis of plants and the respiration of all organisms regulates carbon dioxide. These processes can react to changes in carbon dioxide, therefore global warming, in just a few centuries. If there is too much carbon dioxide, photosynthesis uses it up; if there is not enough, photosynthesis declines and respiration of all cells produces more carbon dioxide. Photosynthesis reduces global warming, respiration increases it, thus stabilizing the temperature, over the course of centuries.

Not only that, but billions of years ago when the Earth had atmospheric carbon dioxide levels thousands of times higher than at present, the sun just happened to be dimmer. The sun is the only source of warmth on our planet. In some way I do not understand, the sun grew brighter just as chemical and biological processes started removing carbon dioxide. Or perhaps the timing was just due to chance.

So far so good. Given enough centuries, photosynthesis will remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But we don’t have centuries. Global warming is already developing into a disaster (I originally wrote this during a French vague de chaleur, heat wave, which is becoming the new normal in the French summer). Whole areas of the Earth, currently home to millions of people, might become so hot as to be uninhabitable in a few decades. Meanwhile, Gaia seems to be still snoring, and is just waking up. It won’t get hot enough to kill the Earth—you can trust Gaia on this—but the Earth might get hot enough that human societies will not survive.

Still, it is conceivable that global warming might occur fast enough that the plants would not have time to recover, photosynthesize, and save us. Could the Earth become hot, forever, like Venus? When somebody in the audience mentioned this possibility to me, during a public lecture, I dismissed the idea right away. But maybe the guy had a point.

Another example of the failure of Gaia to save the Earth from temperature change is the exact opposite of global warming. During the middle of the Precambrian time, the Earth was covered with ice, apparently on three separate occasions. This has been called Snowball Earth. There was apparently more than one cause, but one of the causes was that the photosynthesis of single-celled algae in the oceans (there was not yet any life on land; there wasn’t yet even very much land) scrubbed carbon dioxide from the air so much that it led to global cooling. The Earth might have looked like an ice planet at those times. No one is sure if all of the tropical oceans froze over, but some of them did. Photosynthesis also filled the air with huge amounts of oxygen gas, regarding which there is also some evidence.

The reason the Earth did not slip into a permanently frozen state was because the crust of the Earth fractured into plates. Some of the plates started moving away from, and others toward, one another. At these plate junctures, known as fault lines, volcanoes frequently erupted, putting carbon dioxide back into the air and melting at least the nearby ice.

But it is conceivable that this might not have happened. Just a few fewer volcanoes along the fault lines, and the trajectory of the Earth toward being an eternal snowball might have been unstoppable.

I am thankful for Gaia, but it might not have saved us from unstoppable global warming or cooling. It was mainly luck.

But maybe, we think, Gaia might help us on shorter time scales. Gaia might not have prevented Snowball Earth, but it might be the reason that the Earth’s climate has been stable since life exploded in the oceans and later on land. Can we trust Gaia to maintain this kind of stability? I wouldn’t bet on it, as I explain in a later essay.

Paraclete, A Novel by Stan Rice, part two. Science in Pre-Scientific Days

 

This essay follows up on a previous essay about Stan Rice’s novel Paraclete, about Heloïse and Abélard in medieval France. The question I want to focus on in this essay is, Abélard was a priest and Heloïse a nun, but were they also scientists?

Abélard held most of the beliefs of his fellow scholars. He probably thought the Earth was fairly small and probably flat and looked mostly like Europe. This viewpoint is expressed in the crowning mechanical achievement of ancient times, the astrolabe, which looked like a big wristwatch and was used to keep track of the movement of stars, planets, and the moon. Heloïse and Abélard admired this invention so much that they named their love-child Astralabius after it.

Science, as we understand it today, was very uncommon and hidden before early modern times in Europe. Many textbooks have lists of early scientists, all male, with the acknowledgement that some of the Greek and Roman philosophers had started the process of science. As far as ancient and non-European scholarship was concerned, scholarly thought consisted largely of “I am the Great Conqueror, I say the world is flat, and if you disagree, your head will be on a platter.”

But the “scientific method” is more of an attitude, of seeking evidence to test our beliefs. Not just to confirm them, but to give these ideas a real chance to be wrong, and then if they pass the test, we can honestly believe them. People have always done this, and sometimes have gotten away with it. Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Roman philosophers such as Lucretius even speculated about evolution, and they sought evidence for it. You can do science too, even though you may not consider yourself a scientist. See my book, Scientifically Thinking: How to Liberate Your Mind, Solve the World’s Problems, and Embrace the Beauty of Science.

In Abélard’s time, scholars were not allowed to disagree with church doctrine. What Abélard insisted on over and over and over was that scholars ought to be allowed at least to question the authoritative doctrines. Just ask about them, that’s all. This was an essential first step. If scholars ended up confirming the doctrines, then our ability to worship God would have been magnified. Whaddaya say to that, Uncle Fulbert? You afraid we might find evidence against those doctrines?

The Almond Branch: A novel by Stan Rice. Part three. Prophets and Scientists

Stan Rice has recently published another novel, The Almond Branch, in the Under the Sun series. This series poses the question, what is it that God is doing in this world under the sun? The phrase comes from Ecclesiastes, which is the almost-agnostic book in the Old Testament. Rice speculates on answers to this question: in the time of Solomon (Among the Lilies); in the last days of Jerusalem (this novel); in the Middle Ages of Europe (Paraclete); and in a modern Amish community (Blue Wild Indigo).

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon:

In Jerusalem, immediately before its conquest by Babylon, Jeremiah is on his way to succeeding his father as a priest. Even when they are children, Miriam loves Jeremiah, but Jeremiah is clueless about human love even when he grows up. He is borderline crazy and keeps alienating himself from his society. He thinks God speaks to him through puns. Jeremiah’s father has pagan images in addition to Jewish ones, to appease Jebusite neighbors, but Jeremiah destroys them. And it keeps getting worse, until Jeremiah has to live in a cave with the other prophets. Miriam is torn between a marriage proposal from an older but very good man, Saad, and Jeremiah’s invitation for her to join the prophets, though not as his lover.

Even after Miriam marries Saad, Jeremiah still seeks her comradeship. The king counts on Egypt’s help against Babylon, only to be disappointed. A wealthy businessman and his grim brother, modeled after Trump and Pence, cannot save Jerusalem either. While Jerusalem suffers starvation and cannibalism during the Babylonian siege, the king throws Jeremiah into a cesspit, from which he is rescued by a steward modeled after Obama and a court jester modeled after Biden. Jeremiah rejoices when the tension is broken and Jerusalem falls, and all the skilled people, including Saad, are deported. Miriam stays behind and rescues the Old Testament wisdom literature—which is still an embarrassment to conservatives—from being lost.

 

What could Old Testament prophets and modern scientists have in common? I have two answers for you.

First, both have to be observant of everything, all the time, and to ask questions about why things are as they are. When Miriam and Jeremiah are at a little waterfall, where the water drops create a rainbow, they think about why there are water drops. That is, why does water form into drops rather than just falling down to the earth as lots of individual little packets? This is a question that may never have even occurred to you to ask. You have to watch nature very closely and think about it. Jeremiah’s explanation is definitely pre-scientific, saying that almost infinitely small angels are holding onto one another, and they create the rainbow colors. Before you laugh, consider substituting “molecules” for “angels” and “hydrogen bonds” for “holding onto.” Jeremiah’s theory (as invented by Rice) is more like Newton’s theory (as accepted by modern science) than it is like Goethe’s theory.

But, maybe, Goethe might turn out to be partly correct. To Newton, colors were physical properties of light of different wavelengths, period. To Goethe, there was a psychological component, in which human perception made the colors different. We now know that the stimulation of the three kinds of color receptors in the retina sends signals to the brain to create the illusion of color. There actually is such a thing as psychological color!

Also, when Miriam and Jeremiah were out at the swamp, they saw a bittern camouflaged in the reeds. They almost didn’t see it, until Jeremiah told Miriam what to look for.

Second, a scientist can be a prophet if s/he explains the political and social consequences of scientific discoveries.  Not every scientist does this. Thousands of scientists studied nuclear physics, but only a few (such as Andrei Sakharov and Albert Einstein) have spoken out to political leaders about the dangers of atomic weapons. A prophet might predict, wrongly (so far) that the world will be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. If prophecy is mere prediction, then Sakharov and Einstein were wrong. But prophets open out minds to recognize the possibilities. In this sense, Sakharov and Einstein were true prophets, and though their predictions were wrong their prophecies helped to save the world, at least so far, from nuclear disaster.

Many prophets, ancient and modern, have been hated by political leaders. Those of us who are prophets about environmental disaster are hated by conservative politicians and by the corporate leaders who support them. Though the attacks sustained by Michael E. Mann have been much more mild then what Jeremiah experienced, they were inspired by the same moneyed interests that drove rich Israelites to hate Jeremiah.

The Green, Green Coast of France, part two: Piles of Green Algae

As described previously, I wanted to go to the north coast of France to see the symbiotic Symsagitiffera flatworms. They should be hard to miss: green worms in shallow water against light brown sand. And, at the time H. G. Wells wrote The Science of Life, maybe they were easy to find. But since Wells wrote the book in 1929, world agriculture, including the agriculture of Bretagne in northern France, has undergone a revolution, about which I read in a French book Algues Vertes: L’Histoire Interdite by Inès Léraud and Pierre Van Hove. Released about 2018, it is a non-fiction BD (bande desinée, or comic strip) book.

In 1929, Brittany consisted mostly of small farmers using manual tools and horses, raising small quantities of food mostly for their local communities. Since World War Two, French agriculture has become intensely productive and they now export a lot of food, especially grains and pork. This was a deliberate part of the post-war Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. But the millions of dollars available to France were not entirely a gift. France was expected to rebuild their agriculture along American lines, using inputs such as intense cultivation, fertilizers, and pesticides. They were to buy these inputs from America, and sell some of their food to America. By the 1980s, most of the Bretagne landscape was corn and hog confinement facilities.

What was there to not like about this? The French were getting rich and helping to feed the world. The authors identified two things in particular that were a negative impact of this intense agriculture.

First, most French were not getting rich from it. The corporate executives of large farms, food processing and distribution companies, and financial corporations were getting very rich, while most farmers got poorer. This was exactly the same thing that was happening in America at that time. The people getting rich included nearly all of the government supervisors, all the way up to several prime ministers and presidents.

Second, a lot of fertilizer was draining into the coastal waters of Brittany, causing massive blooms of green algae, a process known as eutrophication. Some of it was runoff from fertilizer used on cornfields, while much of it was from hog wastes from confinement facilities. The rich executives and government supervisors did not want to reduce the amount of fertilizer in the runoff, because this would eat into their profits. The result was massive piles, sometimes meters in thickness, of the green seaweed Ulva amoricana, known as sea lettuce. The only way to control the green algae was to bulldoze it away and bury it somewhere; or to reduce the use of fertilizer and the production of hog wastes. But this latter solution would reduce the profits of the executives, so it never happened. The massive piles of seaweed were driving away tourists who wanted to see the picturesque north coast of France. But the French government would not, apparently, allow journalists to tell the public about the disgusting piles of seaweed, which would die and rot, and in the process release foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas. This link includes a photo.

Occasionally, when the hydrogen sulfide accumulated inside the dry crust of the piles of seaweed, the gas could reach deadly concentrations: to dogs, to wild pigs, and even occasionally to people. In particular, French regional governments would refuse to investigate the deaths, saying that the human victims had heart conditions or were heavy smokers, just as they fell into and suffocated inside of massive piles of seaweed or died right after hauling a truckload of seaweed. Blame the joggers and truck drivers, not the executives. This was the clear viewpoint of the artists, who made the “bad guys” as disgustingly ugly as possible.

The powerful rich insisted that the seaweed was natural (which is true) but refused to address eutrophication, which caused a natural and usually harmless seaweed to form huge piles. Rich people causing pollution that burdens the lives and health of the poor is a story that has been repeated thousands of times in hundreds of places. It is a forbidden story (histoire interdite).

The explosion of Ulva seaweed is getting worse and worse, and some northern French beaches have been closed as a result even in 2026.

One small consequence, for me, is that if I went to Roscoff to look for green flatworms, I would probably see only massive piles of sea lettuce, especially this year (during a drought) when there is less rain water runoff to dilute the fertilizer. One more thing to strike off of my bucket list because of human pollution.

The Green, Green Coast of France, part one: Green worms

 

I have a relatively short bucket list. It used to be longer, but my health will not permit me to visit every place I have dreamed about. Only two major sites remained: Down House, where Charles Darwin lived and worked; and Roscoff, on the north coast of France, where you can find the famous green worms.

I first read about these worms (called, at the time, Convoluta roscoffensis) in the kind of book that would probably not get published today: The Science of Life (originally published in 1929), the lead author of which was H. G. Wells, known primarily as a fiction writer and secondarily as an historian. Way down the list was his reputation as a scientist. His experience as a fiction writer was supposed to make this book more interesting than the conventional biology textbooks, but I question this opinion.

On France’s north coast, there is a town called Roscoff. If you walk along the beach, says Wells, and you come close to a patch of what appears to be green slime, you will be amazed to notice that this green slime disappears down into the sand.

What you might have thought was microscopic green algae turns out to be tiny worms. Unlike other flatworms, this one (now called Symsagitiffera roscoffensis) does not have a mouth. It does not eat little bits of food from its environment. Its caloric needs are entirely met by the little green alga Tetraselmis convolutae that lives inside the worm’s skin. The algae get the carbon dioxide and minerals that they need from the wastes of the worm itself. The worm makes sure the algae get exposed to sunlight, for photosynthesis, and stay wet.

This is a perfect, and inspiring, example of mutualism, in which two species work together (or in this case merge together) for their mutual benefit. All my life, I have wanted to see these worms, and more recently to make a video of them. I now live in France, and I can get to Roscoff from my home in Strasbourg by train. I just need to avoid the peak tourist season, when the beaches are covered with humans and the train fares expensive.

However, I have given up on this idea, for reasons I will explain in the next essay.