Ray Wiggers' October 2004 Newsletter

In addition, this fall has been a time of further development for my own Natural History Exploration Guild education program. The guiding concept of this program -- what I've dubbed, rather academically, "site-specific integrative nature education" -- has been tried out in my current Lake Forest Open Lands course. My thanks to Open Lands staffers Jeremy Batson and Betsy Martens for doing so much to make this course a success. And heartfelt thanks also go to those of you who have become Guild members already. You were there at the founding, and I shall never forget that.

To learn more about the Guild, visit its ever-evolving website, www.nheg.org. And expect to see some new Guild-sponsored field courses listed therein, soon.

(This addendum to the preface, on a separate theme: my October 17th Hyde Park Historical Society geology tour was covered in the Chicago Tribune by distinguished "City Watch" reporter Jon Anderson. You can gain access to that article on-line at the Trib's archives, but alas, there is a charge. To see photos of both HPHS event and the one the week before, go tohttp://cuip.net/~jay/geotour. My thanks to Jay Mulberry and Kitty Picken for taking those pictures.)

PART I. NONLINEAR SOLILOQUIES & SERMONS

A. The Ozone Sermon (the fourth in a continuing series on the constituents of the atmosphere)

Have you ever had a whiff of the strange scent given off by a burning electrical motor or by a lightning bolt that has just hit a little too close for comfort? Well, that rather unpleasant bouquet you smelled was ozone -- the highly reactive gas that is both a remarkable boon and a bane to the life of this planet.

In common with carbon dioxide, ozone, otherwise known as O3, tends to get a bad rap -- especially in such urban centers as Chicago and Los Angeles, where many residents know from listening to the weather-report warnings that it is a chief constituent of smog. (Incidentally, here's one note for the etymologically curious: smog is a manufactured word -- a contraction of smoke and fog.) The ozone component of this brown haze that sometimes blankets our cities is a grave health concern, because it exacerbates the woes of those with bronchial problems and can even cause the healthy to suffer from smarting eyes and breathing difficulties of their own.

And yet, when this unusual troika of oxygen atoms takes on another guise at much higher altitude, it literally saves our skins. It does so because it blocks much of the deadly ultraviolet radiation that otherwise would sterilize the Earth's surface. On average, ozone makes up a remarkably tiny 0.000004% of the Earth's atmosphere, and most of this is situated, fortunately, in a section of of the stratosphere appropriately named the ozonosphere. Located approximately fifteen miles above surface, it is colloquially known as the ozone layer. It is Earth's own analog of heavy-duty sunblock lotion.

In a sense, O3 is a chemical spinoff of our planet's much more abundant supply of O2. As noted in last December's newsletter, our store of the latter gas is by no means a surety: were it not for the tireless efforts of billions of photosynthetic organisms acting over billions of years, ours would probably be a nitrogen-and-carbon-dioxide world quite inimical to higher forms of life. There are a number of theories about when the O2 level first rose to the point when some of it was transformed into an effective ozone barrier. Still, many students of Earth's early life believe the rather rather tardy colonization of the land by plants and animals was caused, at least in part, by the fact that the ozonosphere just wasn't thick enough to keep UV radiation from killing these early invaders from the sea.

With this in mind, it makes a great deal of sense to keep our planet's ozonosphere in tip-top shape. Therefore, imagine the concern generated in the 1970s when British atmospheric scientists stationed in Antarctica discovered that there were holes forming in the ozone layer over the South Pole. And not only that; further research indicated that the ozonosphere was thinning elsewhere, too.

I spend a fair amount of effort acquainting my meteorology and physical geography students with the fact that an increase of carbon dioxide (which does indeed cause the different problem we call Global Warming) is not responsible for the very great danger of ozone depletion. Instead, the culprit is the class of compounds known as CFCs -- chlorofluorocarbons. Is our hyperactive species responsible for their increase? You bet. Formerly used as spray-can propellants and refrigerants, they were shown to effectively break down O3 molecules in the ozonosphere. When this was realized, the use of CFCs was dramatically reduced by most nations with remarkable rapidity, especially given how frequently short-sighted commercial interests often retard even the most crucial environmental regulation. It's too early to tell yet how long it will take for the ozone layer to repair itself -- one prediction is that things will be distinctly better by the middle of this century. In this case, at least, we human beings can take pride that once we saw we were acting in an overtly self-destructive manner, we did something distinctly positive about it.

I would love to compile an unashamed optimist's list of other such examples of wise corrective action on the part of Homo sapiens. (Actually, I can think of at least two more.) Can you? If so, let me know, and I'll add it to my tally. And that sounds like material for a later newsletter.

B. Of Lethal Wienies and Nancy Hanks Lincoln

I'm a big fan of science fiction, but occasionally I come across a sci-fi story line that strikes me as downright risible. I know that some consider it a classic, but personally I'd consign John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids to the back pages of a supermarket tabloid. I won't expand on its vastly implausible plot, other than to note that it involves almost all of humankind going blind at the same time and subsequently being preyed upon by ambulatory plants that can both vocalize and bring down their stumbling bipedal victims by squirting toxic juices at them. To quote the great Fats Waller: Mercy!

Nevertheless, this tale has one grain of truth: many plants have developed, through the stately if brutal process of natural selection, sophisticated methods of waging war against their Animal Kingdom adversaries. Besides producing chemical compounds directly essential to their own day-to-day survival -- sugars, starches, chlorophyll, and so forth -- plants concoct substances biologists call secondary metabolites. Some of these have no use we've yet discovered. But other compounds have a distinctly unpleasant and even deadly effect on any creature unwary enough to nibble on their leaves or roots. A classic example of this chemical warfare is the popular tropical shrub oleander (Nerium oleander). Widely used in the warmest regions of the U.S. as a high-growing foundation planting that produces beautiful floral displays, it's known to contain over fifty separate phytotoxins (plant poisons), including cardiac glycosides that can swiftly cause coronary arrest in anyone who accidentally ingests its sap. There are accounts of unwitting Sun Belt suburbanites who have, as their final earthly act, used its stems as impromptu weenie-roasting sticks at barbeques. When heated, the sap bubbles onto the meat, making the hot dog even more unwholesome than it already is.

Recently I was asked by one of my Lake Forest College biology-faculty colleagues to present a short lecture for her class on how plants succeed in killing human beings. Inspired by this offbeat theme, I agreed. After citing the obligatory oleander, I described a plant that is native to much of the central and eastern United States -- white snakeroot, Eupatorium rugosum. While by no means as immediately deadly as its tropical counterpart, it too has disposed of its own fair share of the American population. White snakeroot uses a different sort of secondary metabolite, the alcohol compound tremetol.

This poison rarely makes its way into the human digestive tract directly. Its host plant is much more appealing to dairy cows that unwittingly eat this seemingly tasty addition to their diet. Eventually, the tremetol accumulates in bovine tissues and produces a disease of the nervous system with the sufficiently descriptive name of "the trembles." However, before this malady manifests itself, dairy cattle often produce enough tremetol-rich milk to produce a serious health risk to the equally unsuspecting people who drink it. The results are the potentially deadly human malady, milk sickness. The most famous person highly suspected of dying of this disease is well know to Prairie State schoolchildren -- Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the mother of our illustrious sixteenth president. While milk sickness was a much more common threat to public health in the agrarian nineteenth century, cases of it still occasionally crop up.

PART II. UPCOMING EVENTS

Tours. There's one more tour scheduled for this fall. Entitled "Architectural Geology of the Chicago Loop," it's part of my decidedly inexpensive Mini-Trek series that has already featured such Illinois locales as Starved Rock State Park and Illinois Beach State Park. It's coming up this Saturday (30 October), so if you're interested, please let me know without delay.

The Spring 2005 tour schedule will be formulated soon -- keep checking the Tours Page of this website for details. I have received some votes for my popular Redbud Special -- an April expedition to Shawnee National Forest and other points of interest in southern Illinois. If you're interested in that or other venues, cast your vote by e-mailing me. Keep in mind that I often choose trip locales based on what newsletter readers suggest.

Courses. There is still time to catch the final class in the Natural History of the Lake Forest Open Lands course. Held on Friday 5 November, it will be devoted to the geology and living communities of McCormick Ravine, the best-preserved woodland ecosystem on its type on the western Lake Michigan coast. See my Courses Page for details and enrollment information.

My association with the Lake Forest Open Lands Association continues on 26 February, with the one-day Winter Tree Identification course, which features both indoor and field instruction.

I'm also pleased to announce that I will be teaching for Oasis 50-and-over adult education program. My Geology of the North Shore course starts on 10 January; more information is cited on my Courses Page.

Lectures. Winter is the perfect time for an nice indoor presentation on the great outdoors. At time of writing, I have geology and plant-ecology lectures booked for Illinois public libraries in Elburn, Algonquin, Plainfield, and Oswego, and for the Chicago Rocks and Minerals Society. Dates, times, and contact information are listed on my Lectures Page.

PART IV. REVIEWS OF BOOKS AND FILMS

A. Books: Ecology, Sort Of

Here's my rule of thumb about reviewing books: I usually only cite titles I think are mostly worthy of praise, and which are definitely worth the reading. My one exception to this is that I occasionally mention books of lesser quality that have already received such publisher or media hype that my own reservations about them, however forcefully stated, will certainly not put a dent in the author's royalties.

With that in mind, I must take exception to the hyperbolic praise dished out by the New York Times and other papers for Tim Flannery's The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples. The idea behind the book is a superbly creative one: to track the history of one of our planet's major landmasses over millions of years. This should be an excellent example of my own pet concept of integrative natural history!

Unfortunately, Flannery (I gather that his academic training is that of a vertebrate paleontologist) turns his narrative all too often into a shopping list of -- you guessed it -- ancient vertebrates, and mammals in particular. As fascinating as the record of creatures is, there is the sense of continental perspective never quite attained. After a good review of the floristic communities at the beginning of his chosen time period, there is remarkably skimpy coverage of the plant life that followed -- communities on which the mammals, and a multitude of other organisms left unmentioned, have always dearly depended. This isn't ecology, as the book's subtitle suggests, but paleomammology with a few quick digressions into selected other bits of biology. And the geology -- which is supposed to be an integral part of this grand story -- is poorly presented. Some of the most dramatic examples of geologic upheaval in Earth history are glossed over or completely ignored, and the author's understanding of the great mountain building events in the West is not at all evident. His equating of an earlier volcanic arc of the Cretaceous Period with the modern Sierra Nevada is an example of his need to brush up on historical geology. And when he also describes our native basswood species as having star-shaped or palmate leaves, it's time for all studious graduates of tree-identification courses to e-mail the publisher's office.

And I'm still not sure why Mr. Flannery implies that North America was "created" some 66 million years ago, when in fact it goes back much farther than that. (If one accepts its ancient core, the Canadian Shield, as the continent's earliest version, it goes back well over 3 billion years.) He may of course mean that the most modern, post-Pangea version of North America dates to 66 mya -- though even that is considerably older -- but how many readers not well versed in the arcanities of earth science will grasp that? A few additional phrases or modifiers would have made the larger span of our continent's evolution more evident -- but since Mr. Flannery's attention is fixed mostly on mammals, not much mention need be made of those nonmammalian times.

B. Videos/DVDs

Yes, I know that National Geographic videos, always so splendidly produced, often resort to blatant hagiography, and tend to simplify and extol the lives of a few high-profile scientists while the work of other important researchers is left unsung. Two NGS documentaries are excellent and inspiring educational tools nonetheless. The first of these, Asteroids: Deadly Impact, recounts the life of American geologist Eugene Shoemaker, who did much to convince a skeptical world that there is dramatic evidence that major impact events have done much to shape Earth history. The other, Volcano!, describes the wonderfully eccentric pair of French vulcanologists and photographers, Maurice and Katia Krafft. Get these doucumentaries and see them, if you haven't already. Both were completed not long before the untimely deaths of their subjects. (The Kraffts met their end in 1991 when they were caught in a searing pyroclastic flow from a Japanese volcano; Shoemaker was killed in 1997 in a car accident, while conducting research in Australia.) When I show the Krafft video to my college students, I pose this question: Do you think that this was a fitting and even noble way for inspired geologists who so clearly loved their work to end their careers? I admit I do. Death by incineration in a 1000-degree ashfall seems hideous to the living, but presumably it's over in an instant. At our passing may we all be granted some thematic link to our lives.

And this postscript about Shoemaker. One of the great authorities on lunar craters, he was deeply disappointed that a health problem prevented him from making it to the Moon as an Apollo geologist-astronaut. In one heartrending scene in the film, he sadly notes that he knows he will never reach his extraterrestrial goal. Ironically, his ashes now reside there. With an uncustomary flourish of redeeming romanticism, NASA officials placed them on the unmanned Lunar Prospector spacecraft which, at the end of its mission, was purposefully crashed into an impact crater near the Moon's South Pole. Accompanying the capsule bearing Shoemaker's remains was this inscription from Shakespeare:

And, when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

PART V. BECOME A JOINER!

In this new section, I list laudable natural-history and horticultural clubs and societies in northeastern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin. If your group has had a professional association with me and would like to be included in the next issue, let me know. The groups below are listed in alphabetical order to avoid the suggestion of bias, conscious or otherwise. Some of the following organizations that have their own websites are cited in my Geo-Links Page or Botany Links Page; others are worth looking for on your favorite search engine.

1. Chicago Rocks and Minerals Society. Meets on the North Side of Chicago, Illinois.

2. Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois (ESCONI). Meets at the west-suburban College of DuPage, Wheaton, Illinois.

3. Friends of the Indian Boundary Prairies. Meets in south-suburban Markham, Illinois.

4. Gardeners of the North Shore. Meets in north-suburban Glencoe, Illinois.

5. Hyde Park Historical Society. Meets in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, Illinois.

6. Lake County Wild Ones. Devoted to gardening and landscaping with native plants. Meets in north-suburban Grayslake, Illinois.

7. Racine Geological Society. Meets in Racine, Wisconsin.

PART VI. THIS ISSUE'S PARTING QUOTATION

"To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall."

-- T. H. Huxley

Best regards,

Ray Wiggers