The Other Side of 71

It's now the 28th and I'm two days into my 71st year.  My mathematically-inclined nephew Peter assures me that 71 is a "prime" age.  

I've had a gentle landing with nothing special planned for the entire weekend.  Yesterday I started out with coffee and a King Arthur Flour recipe for sandwich bread baked in my new Pullman loaf pan.  

The bread turned out excellent.  

Then to take things up another notch, we made panini on my new panini iron.   

Not a bad way to start off 71.  Today the plan is to take advantage of the warm weather and go for a walk along some acequia here in the North Valley.  Although it's still cold at night, the days have been pleasant.  Inside the cold frame, a Delphinium is about to bloom. 

At the Botanic Garden last week, there were snowdrops pushing up and blooming.  Winter jasmine is breaking bud.  Lenten rose is happily going about its business.  I suspect I'll see the first sprouts of Sisymbrium tomorrow in some sunny microclimate.  Somewhere upwind, juniper is shedding pollen, much to the dismay of my allergies.  

Monday starts with Nature's Notebook.  Tuesday will have us at the ABQ Art Museum for their new exhibit of Canadian indigenous art.  Wednesday will have us at St. James Tea Room.  Probably on Thursday, a bike ride is in order.  Then there's rain and wind forecast for Friday.  With luck, things will be pleasant for the Bonsai Club meeting on Saturday.  Sometime this week I'll need to move some of the hardier bonsai trees out of the garage and back onto their display benches.  

And there we have it--in my mind, already a week into 71.  

Countdown to 71

 

Seems appropriate to write about soil (aka dirt) today.  Such a complex yet under-appreciated world beneath our feet.  

One of my favorite stories is of Rapamiacin.  A team looking for antibiotics in soil samples found a novel one when then tested material from Easter Island, aka Rapa Nui.  Hence the name Rapamiacin.  It was found to successfully treat some common fungal infections in AIDS patients in the 1980s.  Later, it was discovered that mice treated with Rapamiacin lived longer.  Diving into that detail turned up a protein called mTOR, mechanistic Target of  Rapamiacin.  mTOR is the mysterious factor that controls some large part of aging in mammals.  Yes, a bit of dirt from a remote Pacific island may hold the secret to longer human life.  

This story speaks to me about conserving biodiversity.  Living systems are complex chemical factories and you never know what value will turn up in the most trivial organism.  You don't have to be an aspect-dominant tree or a keystone animal species to have value.  But you'll have no value if you're extinct.  

So this year I'll focus on telling the best stories I can to BioPark visitors, trying to keep Democratic political enthusiasm up, and making a spiritual pilgrimage to England.  Kew Gardens is high on my list.  Maybe I'll get to see their herbarium and some of Linnaeus' sheets?  

Global Risks

The World Economic Forum released its 2024 Global Risks Report with this warning about biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse:

"GRPS respondents disagree about the urgency of environmental risks, in particular Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse and Critical change to Earth systems. Younger respondents tend to rank these risks far more highly over the two-year period compared to older age groups, with both risks featuring in their top 10 rankings in the short term. The private sector highlights these risks as top concerns over the longer term, in contrast to respondents from civil society or government who prioritize these risks over shorter time frames. This dissonance in perceptions of urgency among key decision-makers implies sub-optimal alignment and decision-making, heightening the risk of missing key moments of intervention, which would result in long-term changes to planetary systems."

https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2024/

 

A Quiet Saturday

Having an unspecified day after a busy week (for a retired guy).  Been reading a variety of interesting papers and I'll list them here so I can find them again.  (Funny thing how bookmarks don't help me that much, now that I have so many of them.)  Been trading these with McGoey and that's always good for reciprocal infobricks.  

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biad108/7486329?login=false

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad059e

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00368504231201372 

The weather in ABQ is chilly but gradually warming over the next week.  If it stays sunny with no wind, I might manage a winter bike ride in the bosque.  Otherwise, it's walks in the Botanic Garden, at the Nature Center, or on the treadmill.  

Which brings up the rationale for exercising:  England.  Plans are rapidly forming for a multi-week trip to the U.K. this fall.  Probably close to 3 weeks long in September.  Initial thoughts are to follow the pattern we used successfully in Scotland--fly in to London, stay a few days to get past jet lag, take a train out into the country, move on to a second rural destination, take the train back to London to finish up whatever we missed earlier.  Here's the link to the UK rail map, since that's a key ingredient.  https://assets.nationalrail.co.uk/e8xgegruud3g/1eaveB2ciZEVT5uBiavJBC/a589d57c574579b0ac430a3111be8c58/Blue_route_AS_Metro_map_v26.pdf

As for a photo for the blog label, here's yesterday's attempt to get in the British culinary spirit with a London Fog Tea Loaf.  I managed to get it mixed, baked, cooled, and frosted yesterday before meeting up with Janine at Town & Ranch for an early happy hour. 

 

Go Dark Brandon!

With the new year, it's refreshing to see President Biden give an impassioned speech from Valley Forge.  It certainly resonates with me.  A friend sent me a link -- https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/27/2214142/-Unequal-Presidential-Expectations -- to an article in The Daily Kos.  Spot on.  

Without going into U.S. and global politics, let's just review what a return to The Former Guy's environmental policies would mean.  

• Pulling out of the Paris Accords
• Reversing the gains of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
• Gutting the EPA, OSHA, the Interior Department, and others
• Killing any chance of climate change reparations (nationally or internationally)
• Resumption of fossil fuel exploration and drilling 

Need I go on?  Vote Blue no matter who.  

Meanwhile, in NM environmental stalwarts are once again pushing for a green constitutional amendment.  That would bypass the governor's desk and provide protections like the ones in Pennsylvania and Wyoming.  

I'm not optimistic considering that it's a short session.  It's crazy to thing a 21st century state can be run on 30+60 days of legislative activity every year along with a volunteer legislature.  

Nuff said. 

Happy New Year!

With 2023 in the books, it's time to reflect on 2024.  Foremost in my mind at a macro scale is the U.S. presidential election.  At the micro scale, I'm thinking about a trip to England in September.  In between, there is the BioPark.  

Were Trump to become the GOP nominee and then win the general election, we'd be cast back into the dark days of 2016, except with better planning and experience on their part.  Retribution in the form of a politicized DOJ and reinstituting Schedule F for federal employees would be a horrible start.  Pulling out of NATO and cozying up to Putin would doom Ukraine and destroy American foreign influence.  Isolationist immigration policies would starve us of much needed labor for agriculture, construction, and others. 

But rolling back environmental progress would doom us all to unsustainable climate change.  Extinctions would soar, agriculture would suffer dramatically, and climate refugees would surge.  The crisis over western water would be exacerbated.  Oil and gas would continue to be pumped, EV's production would be reduced, and solar/wind projects would languish.  U.S. participation in international climate affairs would all but stop.  American influence would be destroyed on this front, too.  

Bottom line:  Vote Blue no matter who.  We desperately need to hold the White House, keep the Senate, and regain the House.  Not to mention state and local government offices.  

On a lighter note, I continue to consult a small amount at Sandia, provide docent services at the Botanic Garden, and still manage to put some time in for plant labels.  Very enjoyable and therapeutic.  It's been 9 good years.  

Tomorrow (a Tuesday) is the first observation session for Nature's Notebook.  Should be cold, but the forecast for next Monday (our usual day) shows an inch or two of snow.  If it really happens, the Japanese Garden will be stunning.  

Snow lantern, 27 Feb. 2015

As for the trip to England, there's guaranteed to be a visit to Kew, possibly a canal boat ride, a pilgrimage somewhere, a grand hotel in London, and a quaint seaside cottage somewhere else.  Stay tuned.