Beer and Civilization—Who Knew?

This will be in tomorrow’s today’s Record-Bee in the Green Chain column. It is also cross-posted on my Batch-22 blog.

 

I hope you had a happy Earth Day. It happened, thanks to beer.

Fermentation First

Evidence mounts almost daily that beer started humans on the path to civilization even before the invention of agriculture some twelve thousand years ago. A recent paper in Evolutionary Anthropology says that, based on tests of artifacts, cereal grains were collected (sometimes from areas as far as sixty miles away) “for the purposes of brewing beer” to be used in feasts, which then “led to domestication…” That is, brewing led to the collecting of seeds for cultivation. And, feasts in prehistoric times were given for much the same reasons as they are today: to mark religious events or to impress others and also to make social, political, and commercial connections.

Edited copy of Image:The Brewer designed and e...
Edited copy of Image:The Brewer designed and engraved in the Sixteenth. Century by J Amman.png (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In “Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages,” Dr. Pat McGovern says, “Wherever we look…we see that the principal way to communicate with the gods or the ancestors involves an alcoholic beverage…” As examples, he mentions “the wine of the Eucharist” and “the beer presented to the Sumerian goddess Ninkasi…”

Fermenting Agriculture

Eventually, people decided planting and tending was easier than going long distances to get the needed grain. Agriculture raised the density of the desired plants in an area and the people as well. Farmers stayed in one place for a while and had an affinity for places that had settlements since they could sell or trade their surplus grain there. In the settlements, people specialized at particular jobs and purchased or traded for goods and services they wanted. (See: “How Ancient Trade Changed the World“)

Grain (and beer) had the advantage of being storable: it would last for relatively long periods, and as a result, could be transported. That meant farmers could bring their grain to market and make a profit, and others could profit from shipping it abroad. In many ways, globalization occurred during the Bronze Age and probably earlier in Neolithic times.

Bar Tabs, Invoices, And The Tax Man

Because people were now living in greater concentrations, the amount of stuff around became more than what one person might be able to remember—it had to be written down. Pictures of goods soon became stylized symbols, which could be made faster and got the point across. Sumerians (in what is present-day Iraq) started making notations for bookkeeping about 5,000 years ago. “The first examples of writing,” Heather Whipps says in an article on LiveScience.com, “were pictograms used by temple officials to keep track of the inflows and outflows of the city’s grain and animal stores which, in the bigger Sumerian urban centers such as Ur, were big enough to make counting by memory unreliable.”

Then, just as in today, taxes on alcohol provided revenue to the ruler, so reports had to be submitted. One of our oldest examples of writing is a receipt for beer. In 2050 BCE, a scribe named Ur-Amma accepted about four and a half quarts of the “best beer” from a brewer named Alulu.

The Rest, As They Say, Is History

The advent of farming was both helpful and harmful depending on where you looked. Farming massively disrupts the landscape (often through deforestation) to grow food or fiber. Yet, compared to a nomadic or hunter-gatherer lifestyle, farming used much less land, freeing the rest to revert to a more natural state. “The remarkable thing about farming, when it was invented 10,000 years ago,” says science writer Matt Ridley, “was how much smaller its footprint was.” According to Ridley, the first farmers needed about one percent as much land as the hunter-gatherers needed.

Civilization Is An Enormous Improvement On The Lack Thereof. – P. J. O’Rourke

So, to recap, civilization came about because of agriculture, and agriculture happened because humans chased a beer buzz. As poet John Ciardi said, “Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.”

Civilization, and its improving living standards, means we have time to do something besides just toiling to stay alive. Civilization, and its specialization of labor, allows us the time to set aside a day to remember the world on which we depend: Earth Day.

Cheers! Prost! Salud!

Related articles

Enhanced by Zemanta

Weekend Postcard: Economics at Work

“Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want…”

Adam Smith

This picture is of sheep grazing (and resting) at a local winery‘s vineyard, Vigilance Winery and Vineyard (which, by the way, has a great sunrise picture).

This shows economics at work. The rancher obviously thought it worthwhile to transport the sheep (someone let me know if these are actually goats. UPDATE: Those are definitely sheep. Goats, apparently, will eat anything that doesn’t move and a few things that do. We suspect that having the vines demolished is not in the owner’s financial interest.) to the vineyard to graze down the cover crop, and the vineyard owner thought it worth the compaction cost to save on fuel and labor by not having to mow.

Sheep in the vineyard of the Vigilance winery.
Sheep in the vineyard of the Vigilance winery.
Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Managing That Wild Natural Look

English: This picture if of a Golden Trout fro...
A  golden trout from French Creek in the French Canyon. Located within the John Muir Wilderness in California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1978, I was just beginning my career with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). I worked in the southern Sierra Nevada range as the Assistant Forest Manager at Mountain Home State Forest. The federally managed 1.2 million acre Sequoia National Forest surrounded the 4800-acre state forest. On most of the state forest’s eastern boundary Mountain Home abutted the newly designated Golden Trout Wilderness.

Our neighbor, the United States Forest Service, was struggling to transform the Golden Trout Wilderness Area from primitive to pristine.

The Wilderness Act of 1964 required that the GTWA would be “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man.” Well, many thought that man had pretty well trammeled the area. Quite a few high country lakes and streams had been “coffee can stocked” with rainbow, brook, and brown trout. The native golden trout had crossed with many of the rainbow (golden trout is a sub-species of rainbow) to produce a hybrid trout that looked just like a golden until you drilled down to the chromosomal level.

The question was, then, how to make the wilderness into wilderness, to resemble a time before man changed it. Drumroll please…

The answer was to destroy the fish population, using the poisonous insecticide rotenone, to “save” it.

The strategy was and is to “chemically treat the headwaters of drainages with rotenone above fish barriers to remove non-native trout species that compete or hybridize with native trout,” a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brochure [PDF here] notes, “After that, native trout are reintroduced to the reclaimed habitats.” Many of the high country lakes were left sterile since the agency experts decided that was their natural state before European or Indian contact.

Some of the Forest Service’s people thought that was a crazy idea, saying, “If it looks like a golden trout, why not call it a golden trout?” After all, golden trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss aguabonita) is a sub-species of rainbow trout (O. mykiss).

But, why destroy a vibrant fish population? In her book, Rambunctious Garden, Emma Marris explains, “For many conservationists, restoration to a pre-human or a pre-European baseline is seen as healing a wounded or sick nature. For others, it is an ethical duty. We broke it; therefore we must fix it.” The pre-human or pre-European state thus becomes “the one correct state.”

The irony, of course, is that pristine areas are illusions; people have to work hard to make them to look how people think “pristine” ought to look. Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, along with his two co-authors, argues that the great lengths we go to “removing unwanted species while supporting more desirable species,” such as drilling wells to provide wildlife with water and manipulating the land through “fire management that mixes control with prescribed burns,” we “create parks that are no less human constructions than Disneyland.”

So, oddly, the more natural we want a place to look, the more human management it needs.

 

Further Reading:

 

What happens when we can find traces of everything everywhere?

It is easy to get worked up about toxic substances (especially, it seems, synthetic ones) being in our bodies, yet as Brian Dunning at Skeptoid notes, it is natural to have toxic substances there. He points out that plutonium is “one of the most dangerous substances known.”  But because we live on a planet with plutonium that occurs naturally, “…every person and animal that ever lived has an average of about 20,000,000 plutonium atoms in their bone marrow, simply because we live on this planet.”

So, if you knew that a synthetic chemical from a product (or products) was in your body, is that something that your government or the company should have warned you about? Andrew Maynard (@2020science on Twitter) talks about “The ethics of being able to measure everything – an ethical perspective on the measurement conundrum.”

http://youtu.be/SfmX1hPUnyQ

Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Taking the Romance out of Environmentalism

Cover of "The Skeptical Environmentalist:...
Cover via Amazon

My latest Green Chain column for the Record-Bee.

Just after 7 p.m. on Sept 5, 2001, Mark Lynas, a writer and a member of the Green Party in Britain stepped into the Borders Bookshop in Oxford and “pied” former Greenpeace member Bjorn Lomborg with a sponge cake topped with whipped cream.

Lomborg was at the bookstore to talk about his just completed book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. The general thrust of the book was that environmental problems are highly correlated with poverty, thus making people wealthier and healthier would mean fewer environmental problems. This finding did not sit well in the green community.

“Pies for lies,” said Lynas as Lomborg wiped whipped cream out of his eyes.

Last month, Mark Lynas, the righteous green, did something extraordinary. He apologized for being wrong about genetically modified (GM) crops.

He did not apologize half-heartedly as you or I did when our mothers made us say we were sorry to our sisters for putting their Barbie dolls in the toilet. No, he meant what he said and he said it quite publicly in a speech to the Oxford Farming Conference:

“I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

“As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.”

So, he and his cohort—and there is no use sugar-coating this—spread lies. “This was also explicitly an anti-science movement,” he said. “We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag…”

He admitted assuming using GM “would increase the use of chemicals.” What he found instead was that “pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.”

He believed “[T]hat GM benefited only the big companies.” He discovered “billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers” because of what they did not need to use.

He had heard GM seed contained “Terminator Technology” to keep farmers from saving seed for the next crop. He discovered that hybrid crops “did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.”

He had assumed that poor farmers did not want GM. What he found were farmers breaking local laws to get GM seed “because farmers were so eager to use them.”

He had “assumed that GM was dangerous.” When he looked into it, “It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding…”

The path Mark Lynas took to embrace GM (and nuclear power) is similar to the one Bjorn Lomborg took.

Lomborg, an associate professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, turned against the shibboleths of the green movement as the result of a project he began with his students to disprove Julian Simon. Simon, an economist, argued that the environment was on the whole getting better. Knowing that simply could not be true, Lomborg and his students gathered data. The more sources and statistics Lomborg and his students combed through, the more they found themselves agreeing with Simon’s heresy, and less with green dogma. The book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, was the result; it had 2,900 references to allow others to check the work.

These heretics, and others such as Patrick Moore and Stewart Brand, looked at their beliefs, weighed those against the facts and changed their minds. Such thinking marked the philosophical movement of the 18th century, which we now call the Enlightenment. It emphasized using reason to scrutinize previously accepted doctrines and traditions.

Others, the Romanticists, responded to the Enlightenment’s reason by emphasizing emotion over rational science and rejecting its search to understand the workings of nature. Romanticism placed the individual’s perceptions at the center of the universe and Nature was, according to one textbook, “a revelation of Truth, the ‘living garment of God’…” Little wonder that primitivism, worship of nature, and mysticism were hallmarks of Romanticism.

Who knows, with these defections we may be seeing a new Enlightenment.

 

Related articles

 

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Weekend Postcard: The Napa Valley Palisades

The light struck Mount St. Helena the other day as I drove north on California state route 29. The light and shadow played on the rock palisades at the north end of Napa Valley. The moments of beauty, where the light and shadow take your breath away last less than a minute it seems. You have to steal the moment and remember to treasure it.

IMG_0609
Light and shadow on the face of Napa Valley’s Palisades.

It’s Not Easy Being Green: The Top Five Green Stories for 2012

This has been submitted to the Lake County Record-Bee

 It’s Not Easy Being Green: The Top Five Green Stories for 2012

Tis the season for looking back on the previous year; here are my picks for 2012’s top environmental stories plus a bonus story:

1. California’s Cap and Trade Program Begins.

Global Warming
Global Warming (Photo credit: mirjoran)

As U.S. CO2 emissions hit a 20 year low, the California Air Resources Board began its cap and trade program by auctioning off allowances of one metric ton of CO2 equivalent (greenhouse gas – GHG). The goal of the California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32), signed by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2006, was to bring statewide emissions down to its 1990 levels by 2020. Depending on who spun the story, the first auction, which raised significantly less revenue, than projected, was a qualified success or a fool’s errand.
There are two more auctions to go, but the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that the state may expect less than one-third of lawmakers’ budget projections.

 2. California’s Proposition 37 Ballot Initiative to Label Food Developed Using Transgenic (Genetically Modified) Methods Defeated.

While Europe looks longingly at the U.S. for our lack of labels on genetically modified crops, a ballot measure was solidly defeated that would have legislated more stringent requirements than Europe. Still, groups continue to fight to have labels placed on food that the Food and Drug Administration maintains is virtually identical to food that was developed through crossbreeding methods.
In other news, in October, Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad whose regime has slaughtered more than 33,000 people, issued a ban on GM food “to preserve the health of human beings.”

3. Earth Summit – Rio + 20.

Some 50,000 people including world leaders, bureaucrats, non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and others converged on hedonistic Rio de Janeiro last June to consider how to “reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection on an ever more crowded planet to get to the future we want.”

Since the data show those things happening without them, they cancelled their trips and did things that were more productive. Not.

4. Italian Scientists Sentenced for Failing to Predict Earthquake.

Rubble on a car
The Italian courts sentenced six Italian scientists and a civil servant to six years in prison and $10 million in fines for failing to communicate the magnitude of risk before the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake that ultimately killed 309 people. The prosecution contended that people were ill prepared due to the seven downplaying earthquake risk following several minor tremors in the area.

Expect scientists and civil servants now to err with reports of direr consequences for any and all events. One-tenth inch of light rain predicted? Close all roads and evacuate the county. We cannot be too cautious now can we?

5. Extreme Weather Events.

From the U.S. drought to megastorm Sandy, it was a year of proofs in the media that catastrophic global warming is occurring due to our releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. BusinessWeek ran an article, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”
Time magazine had an article that said, “In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. [Recent] record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries.”
The Time article was written in 1974…about a coming Ice Age.
“Extreme events, like the recent U.S. drought, will continue to occur, with or without human causation,” John R. Christy, PhD, Alabama State Climatologist stated in testimony to congress. Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies, notes, “Flooding has not increased [in the United States] over the past century, nor have landfalling hurricanes.” Pielke adds that, even with this year’s drought, droughts have decreased over the past 100 years.

Because our climate and our earth’s weather have always been in flux, preparedness is our best strategy. Just like earthquakes, extreme weather events happen from time to time. We have seen them in the past; we will see them in the future.

6. Bonus story: December 21, 2012 – The Mayan Apocalypse.

The Mayan calendar ended on the winter solstice in 2012, which, naturally meant the world was ending then. Did you really think that a people who did not predict the conquistadors’ invasion could predict the end of the world?
See you next year.
Sources/Further Reading:

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

The True Cost of Lumber Substitutes

Lumber and building material can be replaced with look-alikes made from non-renewable materials but it may not be wise.

One example, a U.S. National Science Foundation panel analyzed the amount of energy necessary to extract, transport, and convert various raw materials into finished products found that substituting other materials for wood products comes at a higher cost in terms of energy. Koch (1992) estimated that for each 1 cubic meter of wood replaced with manufactured substitutes, energy consumption increases by about 477 liters of oil.

Lippke (1992) noted:

“Logic and maybe even intuition would suggest that using renewable resources rather than nonrenewable resources would better protect the environment.”