Plants, People, Planet

Well, back at it again with too long off in between. This is going to be a rant post rather than a plant post but I’m sure we can all handle. Well, not exactly a rant more of a rave.

Anyway, had two friend from Hawaii come and visit last week. Was really good to see them. I met them on the big island and ended up staying with them for about three weeks. It was great to see them in Darwin and have a bit of an ethnobotany holidy.

But before that could take place I had to fix my car. The 84 landcruiser I bought got a crack in the radiator and the engine cooked. I was too poor to pay the mechanics and needed the car for the trip so I got a manual and some tools and took it all apart and put it all back together with new working pieces. Took me a whole week and I was covered in grease and petro-chemicals but I fixed it and its running like a dream. It made me think alot about how lots of things are analogous but we only understand one however if we can relate the system we understand to another it makes sense. I understand (supposedly) how plants work and now how cars work and there are more similarities than you would think. Both need power, both need to be cooled properly, both need the right inputs to get the correct outputs. It reminded me of something I read somewhere about how much the mechanics of nature contributes and influences our perception of how nature works. Enables us to get an understanding about the mechanics of the natural world. But as always, our understanding is only as good as our models and so we view the natural world in an industrial mechanical sense and miss the sight of the less mechanical workings of the world. The industrial model is still useful but it is incomplete. Because we didn’t make the natural world, we can’t comprehend it like a system we built.

Well, I’ve wasted the day so the report on the holiday and such will have to wait.

PG

Well as usual I haven’t been staying on top of my blogging. Funny that. Things are interesting here in Maningrida but not plant-y enough. My work has been desk focused for the most part which is really frustrating but weekends are spent in the tranquility of Djjinkarr with Books and Bikes and Uke. However, while I love the bush and the slower pace, a big part of me really wants to go dancing and get wild in the city. The grass is always greener I guess.

My dilly bag is 2/3rds complete. May even showed my how to dye the gulwirri. We used the red roots of a local sedge and mashed them up in a billycan before boiling with the gulwirri for about 15mins. This gave teh fibre a deep brown color. No-one in Arhnem land dyes fibres until missionary contact in the early 1920s. Because these items were wanted for trade and sale to Balandas in the cities it was thought that the artefacts should be prettied up. 4 or 5 dye plants were discovered and continue to be used today.

Outside of plants and the town I got out most of last week on Rembranga country to help do cultural site recording with the mob from Bulhajadaru, an outstation about an hours drive from Maningrida. I wrote a sequence for cybertracker that allows people to record the site name, its company clans, take pictures, record the dreaming associated with it. This was pretty great. We went to a number of different dreaming sites and sacred law areas with an elder called Robert who is the traditional owner for the area. I’ve spent the last few days making up a map in Cybertracker which we can print and put at the outstation so that kids can see their country and where the sites are and their significance. This is with the eye of enabling the rangers to properly care of the country in keeping with the land owners wants and responsibilities.

My car has shit itself. The roads and weather out here really take their toll on vehicles. I just spent all last week ordering a recon engine and a new radiator so I’ll have it all pumping in the next few days I hope, which should be an interesting learing curve as I try (with some assistance) to fix it up.

My friend from Hawaii is coming to visit me in Darwin next week so thats going ot be fantastic. She was the one who inspired me to make tinctures and she recently sent my a batch of tinctures and salves she had made to get me through till christmas.

If she wasn’t coming I’d be headed to the ethnobotany meet in Victoria EGA. It is a fantastic gathering and I encourage anyone with an interest in plants, people and culture to get along if they can for 4 days of amazing fun and interesting discussion.

Aloha, stay herbaceous.

Harris

well, its a pity that this has all been so belated. When I started up this plan blog I wanted to retrospectively post about my ethnobotany experience in Hawaii before writing about some of the stuff I am seeing in Arnhem land. However, I’ve not got the internet connection required to upload my Hawaii photos yet or often the time to sit down and do a good write up. Hopefully my journal will suffice and I can retrospectively post up some of the Arhnem land stuff to if it gets ahead of me.

Anyway, I arrived in Maningrida 6 weeks ago after a four week stint in Canberra photographing leaf lips and measuring leaf veins. It was a good four weeks, cold and blustery but great to spend time with my family and catch up with friends. All up it felt too short I think, had lots on and heaps happening. After a final all night music session around the fire on 67 I was up at 4:45 bleary eyed and packing onto the plane for Darwin. I visited a friend in Darwin for a few days and acclimatised before flying into Maningrida.

The first few weeks were quite rough, I was out of my element and suffering culture shock. However, as time has gone by I’ve overcome the culture shock to a large degree (yet still making loads of mistakes and errors) and I’ve settled into the job a bit more (post on that latter).

A large part of this settling in is I’ve been taken in by the mob that lives at the outstation next to me. I am at Djinnkarr and they live at Nunguk. These areas are hills on the Thompkinson river floodplain. Two other hills, Borbodborr and Djelk make up the four significant land features of the country. It is Gurgoni landand was one of the first outstations following the outstation movement where people moved away from town camps to outstations to stem the social problems developing in the towns.

Work has been ok, I’ve been spin doctoring for the ranger coordinator to generate an annual report about the great land management we  do and how we care for country. Meanwhile money from the same government is funding mine explorations in the region and generally participating in not giving a damn. I feel a little unclean. Also been working on a database tool for land management that the ranger’s use called Cybertracker. I’m helping to reorganise the data capture process and program so its easier for the rangers to use and more helpful in finding out the effect of indigenous land management on landscape health. I always feel compromised doing work like this because its funded by the government and philanthropy groups who either made their money being environmentally and culturally destructive or are the same government  encouraging an endless growth economy and giving mining companies tax concessions.

Anyway, work is not the reason I am here. Outside of work I’ve been going fishing and fibre collecting with the Nanguk mob. We caught a big mob of rajarra (barramundi) and catfish on the weekend down at first landing where people used to live on country before being corralled into schools and houses about 13 years ago. I harvested Corypha palm for the women at Nanguk  which we striped and twined. This is one of the plants used to make Dilly bags.

The leaf is pressed between the thumb and forefinger and rubbed to release the outer skin from the leaf. The leaf is held with the toe to keep it tight and stripped down. The liberated fiber is then held between the toes and bunched up. Once all the fibres are stripped a few are held and pulled tight and rubbed between the palms to fray the fiber.   This is then rolled on the leg at the knee to twine up and then folded in half. Twining is continued but then the top is released so it bind up as a string. The fiber is extended by twisting in new fibers in at the base, holding tight at the tip and rolling as before. I’ve started making a string bag, probably not correctly but its a start. I’ve made over 4m of string and three rounds of knot tying. I want to go collect banyan roots where are smashed up like kapa cloth (a polynesian fiber technique) and twined in a similar manner. Banyan or Marnu is made into fish traps that are placed in the rivers to trawl fish and are more “Male” than dilly bags which is seen as women’s work.

I’ve also been out harvesting Pandanus with the women. We went to a fresh water creek and cut down a hooked stick with which to pull the central core of the pandanus towards us for yanking out. The youngest leaves have the best fibre and the least thorns. These are bundled and wrapped in Paperbark until processing. Leaves are stipped similar to the other plants mentioned above except that only one side is stripped. Also, the edges are stripped off to give long firm fibres that are used in coil basket weaving. This is not a traditional arnhem land weaving technique but was introduced by missionaries from South Australia where it is a desert weaving technique. I’ll post about those ones once I begin doing them, gonna concentrate on my bag for now.

Live Aloha

PG

From boingboing again. Engineers have begun to measure the electrical pulses of trees, I see this as the first step in wider recognition of the much closer similarities between plants and animals than is often recognized by science. To this end there is also a society of plant neurobiology who are working to show that plant function is very much like a nervous system just one that is decentralized and adaptable.

Engineers have run an electrical circuit using the power of tree, seemingly the first demonstration of its kind. The University of Washington researchers determined that bigleaf maples on the school’s campus generate up to few hundred millivolts. (The current is not mentioned.) So they built a low-power sensing circuit that could scavenge enough juice from a tree to operate. From UWNews:

The tree-power phenomenon is different from the popular potato or lemon experiment, in which two different metals react with the food to create an electric potential difference that causes a current to flow.

“We specifically didn’t want to confuse this effect with the potato effect, so we used the same metal for both electrodes,” (electrical engineering professor Babak) Parviz said.

Tree power is unlikely to replace solar power for most applications, Parviz admits. But the system could provide a low-cost option for powering tree sensors that might be used to detect environmental conditions or forest fires. The electronic output could also be used to gauge a tree’s health.

“It’s not exactly established where these voltages come from. But there seems to be some signaling in trees, similar to what happens in the human body but with slower speed,” Parviz said. “I’m interested in applying our results as a way of investigating what the tree is doing. When you go to the doctor, the first thing that they measure is your pulse. We don’t really have something similar for trees.”

“Electrical circuit runs entirely off power in trees”

I came across another example of science telling us what many people have known intuitively for years. Neuroscientists have found that soil bacteria increase seretonin levels in mice and rats.

Aparently mice seretonin levels are tested by getting the mice to swim. Under the influence of antidepressents mice can swim longer before passivly floating. After the exposure to the bacteria from injection mice swam as long as mice given selective seretonin re-uptake inhibitors, common anti-depressants. The bacteria “had the exact same effect as antidepressant drugs,” explains ((Lowery)).

This means that exposure to these bacteria in humans from activites such as gardening, playing in the dirt, tree planting or even sitting outside on the earth may lead to similar elevation in happiness through a similar mechanism.

If there was going to be a language which we could use to communicate more effectivly with other species on the earth, it would be the chemical language. This lingo is already in use between millions of species already living on the earth.

For example, when plants want to form a symbiosis (mutually beneficial relationship) with a nitrogen-fixing bacteria (plant nutrient producers) the plant sends chemical signals through the soil that the bacteria recognise. They then respond with a differnt signal that causes the plant to let its immune system let them pass as they establish root nodules to live in. This cross-species communication is extreamly effective. Plants that form this symbiosis include Acacia (wattles), peas, beans and other legumes.

This plant signalling phenomena is not just found in the soil. Plants release heaps of chemical compounds known as VOCs. Volitile Organic Compounds. This is basically science speak for natural compounds that you can smell because they disperse into the air. Think of the smell of cut grass or rosemary or walking through a gum forest or across a hot arid mallee. This sea of chemicals in the air then leads to some very interesting ecosystem happenings. In certain plants, botanists have observed that when under caterpilliar attack the plant emits certain volitile organic compounds. These are then detected by a predatory wasp which goes to the plant and eats the catapillars.

It is foolish to presume that plants are not interacting with all organisms that they function with. Why would we be excluded from this sea of communication? Well, we are not. From fruit color to flower scents to perfumes to flavours to medicines and drugs plants connect with us in order to generate and potentiate beneficial relationships. This has often been written off as not possible becuase plants are too simple but the picture is changing. More on that next post.

Mahalo

PG

Injections of soil bacteria make mice happy

I found this Scientific American Podcast with an interview with Nat Bletter who is doing a Doctorate at the New York Botanic Gardens, a world leader in ethnobotanical studies. A great talk about plant physiology, plant chemistry and culture.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=1E5B6D81-E7F2-99DF-3A1431B73A41F3B9

We have a lot in the world to thank plants for, that which is the product of phytogenesis. Food, Fiber, Medicine, Oxygen, shade, shelter, aesthetics. But more often than not we don’t give plants the love they deserve. The whole worlds plant resources have been exploited, particularly in the last 200yrs and continue to be despoiled and degraded today. In Australia, where I am based, 70-90% of the country has been deforested and the myriad environmental problems we are facing can probably be ameliorated with plants and a concerted effort on our part to rebuild ecosystems and demonstrate reciprocity with the earth.

I am profoundly interested in all aspects of plants and the relationships between plants and people and ecology. From an airy-fairy science perspective, down to the nitty gritty of seed collection and food preparation. Expect varied posts on a range of plant topics. I will also be working on my science communication skills and trying to make this accessible to all, especially when I’m dealing with important issues that scientist have squirreled away in jargon.

Today I was reading about the environmental problems that Australia is facing due to deforestation. When trees are removed from an environment it drastically changes the whole ecology. Some examples of this are with keeping the salty water table at bay. After the second world war vast tracts of land in Western Australia were cleared for farming. However, the bushland that grew in these areas had extensive root systems that worked year round sucking up and transpiring (tree sweating) the water up from the ground. This has the effect of keeping the water table low as the water is wicked up from the ground and into the atmosphere and stored in the plants. Which wheat planted on the land much less water was wicked away because it is an annual and so dies each year rather than growing year after year like Australian perennial trees and grasses. When the water table rose it brought with it the salts and minerals that had pooled in the lower aquifer and this makes the land unusable for nearly any plants. CSIRO land and water estimate that we need to plant 7 billion trees in this region by 2020 to stop the land crossing a tipping point and becoming too salty for any plants.

In addition to keeping water tables low, forests alter the amount of water entering and ecosystem and moderate the temperature. Having a stand of forest with leaves provides a cool surface which water vapour in the air can condense onto, causing rain. In addition, plants like the blue gum, release compounds into the air that cause precipitation. Once trees have caused it to rain once, the same water is transpired by the plants and then precipitates again, with about 20% less water. Given the large scale tree clearing on this land is it any wonder that its drying up?? However, the good news is if we can begin land revegetation we can rebuild ecosystems and this will have benefits for everyone. Jobs for tree planting, products from the polyculture (many different organisms in the plantations, rather than the monoculture tree farms we have now) including wood, oils, fibres, biomass, environmental benefits for everyone. Hell, we might even be able to get the murray flowing again.

I invite questions, comments, criticism and whatever else you wanna throw this way. Aloha and Mahalo.

PG