Hard to kill what you know

I was out squishing a variety of critters munching on my Brussels sprouts when I stumbled on this fellow.



He's still munching....

Harlequin stink bug eating my food....had Leslie had taken the photos, they would be focused.

Death in a classroom

Is part of a public education reminding a child of her mortality?
And if so, would the task fall upon the biology teacher?

It's not a trivial matter. For all the posturing by folks at the national level about our record college enrollment rates, almost a third of graduating high school senior do not go. Many of those that do go are going to juice up their resumes more than their minds.

Would teaching mortality produce a more thoughtful citizenry?

***

All of this, whatever this this is, cannot last for any individual. The oldest known bacteria survived 250 million years, the oldest plant a mere 43,000 years. We tend to think of ourselves as special, a gift (or curse) of our consciousness.

The oldest animal? Maybe the clam--a quahog made it for 405 years. Alas, it was killed by the same scientists who marked its age.

Oldest conscious animal?

A 211 year old bowhead whale leads the list, roaming this Earth since John Adams was President, finally felled by an Inuit.

And good westerners that we are, we oooh and awwww at the record, imagining a life triple life span we have, again forgetting that we truly only live in moments.

How many Saturdays do you have left in a lifetime?


Would folks behave differently if they accepted mortality, accepted limits? Would we be braver? Would we spend hours inside manipulating artificial universes? Would we accept the culture we have?

***

We are all, in a sense, immortal, or at least as immortal as life on Earth. We all share ancestors. We all come from single celled organisms that continues the spark of life for billions of years, long enough for consciousness to develop.

Or maybe consciousness has been around much longer than we know. Bacteria talk to each other.




Dying, I suspect, is a big deal. It doesn't require a whole lot of practice, and just about every one of us will manage to accomplish it whether or not we have graduate degrees, but still, for each of us, it's the end of a universe (at least among the empiricists).

To be fair, I'm a bit warped. I grew up Oirish Catholic, I practiced medicine in the inner city when poor kids were doing their best to die from AIDS before the middle class even heard of it, and I've lost enough people to accept that maybe, just maybe, this death thing is permanent.

***

We relegate death to religion, and otherwise make it taboo. But we all face it.

Biology is literally the study of life--and life is defined by death, the ultimate limit for those of us who pretend to be conscious. A culture that recognizes limits has a chance to be sustainable.

A chance.

Just a chance. Which is more than we have now.....

The skull is from wikipedia, credited to Bernard Bill5
I've watched a lot of people die, most of them young--you will, too.

Ain't Bonnie Bassler wonderful?

This puts essential questions in perspective

"The higher quality data available since 1950 has allowed the team to calculate that since that time, the world has seen a phytoplankton decline of about 40%."

BBC News, "Plankton decline across oceans as waters warm," July 28, 2020

Uh-oh....

"Phyto-" means plant. Phytoplankton, like all green plants, take in more carbon dioxide than they produce, and release more oxygen than they use.

Phytoplankton produce about half the oxygen available to us.

We have plenty of oxygen, so we're not in Spaceballs territory yet (remember Megamaid?), but if this trend plays out, we are screwed.

So how about this for an essential question? Which organisms depend on phytoplankton to survive?

Yep, we're on that list, too.

"Megamaid" picture is obviously from Spaceballs, and taken from here.

The Business Roundtable teaches biology

Vision: A quality science education fosters a population that...applies scientific knowledge and skills to increase economic productivity.

2009 NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards

I am a science teacher, and occasionally a good one. I am certified by the state of New Jersey (Liberty and Prosperity), and paid by the Township of Bloomfield, which was bought from the Yancetaw Indians. Our first public school opened in 1758.

This makes me a government agent.

Prosperity (from our state motto) keeps getting confused with economic productivity, which smells like part of the Business Roundtable's undemocratic take-over of a public institution.

***

Tonight I made a butter run (salted, of course) to the local A&P; I said hello to Michael, now a man whom I've known since he wore diapers, while he lassoed some carts, working at the same place his brother has for years. While in line at the checkout, a young child, perhaps 5 years old, shyly made eye contact.

I knew the checkout lady, she's been there forever. I've been going there forever. The store has been there forever. My grandfather, born in 1898, used to work at another A&P when he was still a young man. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company has been around forever.

Forever's about to end.

***

The Business Roundtable folks may know how to run a business (though the recent evidence suggests otherwise--we're in for a long slide), but they know jack snot about biology.

All economies are ultimately based on reality, on the natural world. Soil. Water. Wood. Oil. Corn. Cotton. Wool. You can still follow the price of pork bellies in the New York Times business section.

If we continue to define prosperity by growth, even prettied up "sustainable growth," our children will be harmed.

Carrying capacity is the number of organisms of a particular species a given patch of Earth can sustain indefinitely.

In class I try to make connect my lambs to the world, to what's real, to what matters. I do not, however, want to give them nightmares--there's time enough for that in early adulthood.

If the NJ DOE continues to kneel down to the Business Roundtable and Achieve, Inc., and other groups who do not have the best interests of my students at heart, then do not be upset if I start sharing the truth.

Humans are animals. The land, the seas, have limits. The economy cannot (and will not) grow indefinitely. The living world is collapsing, and it's going to get ugly, real ugly, in a generation or two if those with money do not pull their heads out of their collective (and full) sigmoid colon.

The young girl I saw tonight, smiling as the checkout lady chatted in a dying store, does not deserve the education the Business Roundtable wants.

She deserves better. She deserves the truth.

The Business Roundtable lifted from their site.
The Monopoly photo from Life collection at Google.
And yep, I'm serious....we cannot handle the truth.