Arbor Day, April 27, is nearly upon us. Many of us are receiving solicitations in the mail about ordering trees through the National Arbor Day Foundation. But you should think carefully about what trees to order.

The Arbor Day Foundation remains behind the times when promoting tree-planting, because they barely mention problems with invasive trees on their site, and in none of the junk mail literature I have received. Although an entire page is devoted to invasive species that harm trees, the only reference to invasive trees is buried its FAQ:

10. Are the trees offered by the Foundation invasive?
The Foundation follows the guidelines of the National Invasive Species Information Center. Plants found to be invasive or problematic by this agency are removed from the lists of trees and shrubs offered by the Foundation. In addition, we take into consideration recommendations found in the publication entitled, Invasive Plants, Changing the Landscape of America, by the Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds.

Naturally I'm not complaining about their policy, it shows they are at least paying some attention to the problem of invasives. What I object to is that the NADF, throughout the web site, promotes and sells trees purely by horticultural zone, as does every gardening catalog. The gardening catalogs, though, are about business, and up to this point, businesses spreading species around have not been held accountable for invasive outbreaks, so in their case this policy is understandable.

However, the NADF promotes itself as an organization that cares about ecology and the environment. Aside from fortunately not selling nasty invasive trees such as Russian olive and saltcedar, they do absolutely nothing to promote the idea that we should be cultivating local species, which is by now a standard ecological concept. Even if your exurbian front yard is hardly definable as a natural habitat, NADF should be attempting to instill in you the idea that what makes ecology important, and sustainability possible, is the recognition that certain species of trees belong in certain areas because they are used to interacting with the other species found in that area. Such a visible organization could be making great strides in promoting local habitat ecology, but they are making absolutely no effort to do so.

What difference does it make, if none of the trees they sell will become invasive? First of all, every time we move a species, or even an individual, around to where it doesn't belong, we are conducting an biological experiment. Maybe there are no problems 9,999 times out of 10,000; but the more often we do this, the more often number 10,000 comes up.

In addition, the homogenization of the planet comes with several costs. One cost is giving up the buffer that having millions of species across hundreds of ecosystem provides against our own foolhardy exploitation of resources. The honeybee "crisis" everyone is clamoring about now is a perfect example of this. Bring an alien species to a large region to replace hundreds of native species that could do the job, albeit less efficiently from a human perspective, and one disease, one environmental problem, and you are in trouble.

Another cost is to our own human sense of place. When distinctive plants and animals disappear from places - a good example here is of pacific islands, whose endemic plants and animals have been decimated, and replaced with a few ubiquitous species now found on nearly all the islands - we lose some of the wonder we have for the natural world. In fact, each successive generation has less appreciation its own corner of the planet, because fewer species remain to distinguish it from anywhere else on earth.

Perhaps these issues are just too abstract for an organization that wants to promote one simple idea, that "trees are good" - not even always true, in an ecosystem that was historically treeless, another distinction NADF fails to make in its black-and-white view of ecology. Perhaps there's no point in anything but pooh-poohing those of us who wish for a different ethic - many of these have been cultivated for generations, and some are human-created hybrids, so really what difference does it make where we plant them? I argue only that these are minor points in the greater struggle to convince humanity, especially that small portion of humanity that has the time and money to support any sort of environmental ethic that it chooses, that ecology and biodiversity are not actually words that can describe numbers of species over an entire planet. They much more aptly describe the mosaic of species assemblages that found a way to evolve in every possible environment that is found on earth. If we lose that idea, then biodiversity itself is a meaningless concept.

Labels: biodiversity, ecology, invasive species, nature

Apparently some women are actually outraged that there is finally a birth control pill that does not force us to have a period, supposedly because it is somehow "unnatural" not to have one every 28 days of our non-pregnant lives. And yet it is only due to a bizarre historical artifact that for the nearly 50 years that the Pill has been available, those of us using it have been forced to have our period thirteen times a year, even if we didn't want to.

Here's a brief summary of the human female menstrual cycle:
The first day of menstrual bleeding is arbitrarily designated as the first day of the menstrual cycle. During the first 4-5 days, during bleeding, hormones are at their lowest point. Over the next 10 days or so, an ovarian follicle develops, and once the follicle is mature, ovulation occurs. At this point, estrogen is peaking. Then, estrogen drops after ovulation and progesterone, which stimulates the uterine lining to develop in anticipation of receiving a fertilized ovum, increases. If the ovum is not fertilized, progesterone levels drop, which means the enriched lining of the uterus is not sustained, and menstrual bleeding occurs.

The birth control pill mainly contains progesterone. If you become pregnant, high levels of progesterone are maintained, which prevents further ovulation. Thus, the artificial introduction of progesterone essentially causes your body to behave as if it were pregnant, which inhibits ovulation. The traditional Pill introduces one progesterone-free week out of every four, so that menstrual bleeding will be simulated. It isn't true menstrual bleeding because we are never actually allowing our bodies to go through the cycle, we are just turning progesterone levels on and off like a switch to manipulate it.

If you ever thought about your reproductive cycle for ten minutes and asked your doctor why on earth you should be compelled to go through this ritual despite the fact that you have not even ovulated, you got some vague response about how it was not 'healthy' not to have periods. But women have been systematically misled for decades; there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that there are health risks associated with the absence of menstruation. Certainly the lack of menstruation can be an indicator of some further health problem (such as abnormally low body fat), but it actually serves no function other than your body saying "whoops, not pregnant this time."

What furthers the outrage was the assumption that women must have 13 cycles a year to be "normal." I personally had about a six-week cycle before going on hormones, but at the time, I thought it was a reasonable trade-off to have more "periods," given that they were significantly less debilitating (of course, since I was not having natural periods). But this New Yorker article from 2000 pointed out that there is evidence that menstruating more often is a product of industrialized society, and that in pre-industrial societies, it is normal for women to menstruate as few as four times a year. The article further shows the positive correlation between lifetime number of menstrual cycles in women and cancers of the reproductive organs.

So why on earth does the traditional birth control pill force us to simulate menstruation, when for so many of us, it is a miserable few days?

Perhaps at the time the Pill was being researched and developed, in the late 50s-early 60's, people knew that the primary force behind that research and development was Dr. John Rock, who happened to be a devout Catholic. In fact, he pursued this line of research precisely because he was a Catholic, and wanted to give Catholic women more control over their reproductive lives without violating their church's rules. He reasoned that if the rhythm method was acceptable to the church, surely intervention - using the same hormones occurring naturally in the body - in order to make the cycle more regular and prevent a fertile period entirely, would be acceptable too. Of course he ultimately was wrong, and became an embittered ex-Catholic by the end of his life.

But the greatest travesty was done to women who simply wanted convenient birth control, and to have power over their own reproductive lives. A menstrual period every 28 days was arbitrarily introduced into the regimen by a Catholic doctor who thought it would appease the pope. A pope, who, eventually, decided Catholics were not allowed to use the Pill. So every woman who has used the birth control pill since is either a non-Catholic, or a "Catholic" who doesn't give a hoot what the pope thinks anyway. And yet for nearly 50 years we have been stuck with a Catholic Pill as our only option.

The one argument made in the Times article about forcing regular "periods" that made any sense to me at all was the psychological reassurance of not being pregnant. Fine, those women can use a period-forcing pill as far as I am concerned. Why should the rest of us be compelled to as well?

Here are some of my particularly favorite quotes in the article:

"It's not an easy decision for a woman to give up her monthly menses," said Ronny Gal, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

There has also been a backlash among groups that celebrate the period as a spiritual or natural process, like the California-based Red Web Foundation. "The focus of our group is to create positive attitudes toward the menstrual cycle; suppressing it wouldn't be positive," said Anna C. Yang, a holistic nurse and executive director of the organization.

One [person] who attended the screening [of "Period: The End of Menstruation?"], Aviva Bergman, a 22-year-old student at Goucher College in Maryland, said she would not use products that suppressed her period because it seemed unnatural.

"I just feel that there's a reason you're getting it every month," she said.

You know what? Y'all can have as many periods as you like. You do your little spirit dances while you are washing the blood out of your underwear and popping the Advil like candy. If you believe in "natural," go live in a cave somewhere. Just don't have the gall to "backlash" against something that will make my life significantly more bearable, and that I should have already had for my entire adult life. Thank you.

Labels: gender, health, humans, nature

A reader has provided the poem below which encompasses the spirit of Biotunes better than I have done thus far. Music and biology do interact more often than most of us think about, and there will be more posts eventually to reflect this. For now, here are Michael Pettit's musings. Thank you, Michael.

MATINS So the seed falls when wind vibrates the stalk to just such a pitch, and it is music which reproduces these speechless grasses. This is dawn. Lola calling her cows in, frost on the fields melting as light brightens and the air warms one critical degree. Now, dew, thick over clover, alfalfa, green pastures from which rise, like bits of dreams, scattered white asters, cool blue chicory. This is dawn. Fog down in all the valleys the Kickapoo River twists through the hills, draws filled with fog, world emerging from fog. Shagbark hickories on the ridge take shape and shreds of clouds change color -- red, pink, gray. This is dawn. Lola calling her Holsteins, a lone man picking wildflowers and weeds, grasses packed with seeds waiting for the wind to rise, waiting for song to scatter them -- purple thistle, red clover, packed clusters of pink smartweed, flowering campion, tall long seedheads of sunlit timothy. Here. I've walked over the cold grass, my tracks a shadow from flower to flower, my hands full as I stand dumb in the dawn. Lola calling her cows. Old rituals at sunup, before the world goes silent and still and we wait for the wind to rise. Michael Pettit

Labels: nature, poetry

It has surprised me that I have not heard about environmentalists complaining about the planned 700-mile fence along the U.S. - Mexico border. As an ecologist, my first reaction was to guess that it would be a disaster for the many endangered species in the Sonoran Desert, and it turns out this assessment is shared by The Center for Biological Diversity, in Tucson.

Many large mammals in the Sonoran Desert need access to large ranges in order to survive. The fragmentation of populations is a detriment to endangered species recovery. In addition, the construction and maintenance of such a wall will obviously result in a lot of habitat destruction in the area.

Labels: biodiversity, environment, nature