Holobionts against Totalitarianism

by Ugo Bardi

I read Jordan Peterson's book "12 rules for life" a few months ago, and I must say that I was not very impressed. I found it nice, but I saw many things that Peterson says as non-controversial, so I wondered why someone should bother to write them in a book. It must be because I live in a relatively different cultural climate. I can understand that it is not the same everywhere in the world. Anyway, the work by Peterson seemed to me not especially original, but never banal. 

Then, a few days ago, I stumbled into this interview by Cathy Newman on the TV station Channel 4 in the UK. Look, a 30 minutes clip usually is way beyond my capability to watch in full. But this one kept me glued to the screen the whole time. Try it yourself. It is an incredible drama playing. The interviewer, Newman, tries all the time to lead Peterson into a trap, to make him admit that he said something that he never said, to confess some unconfessable sin of his. 

I have seen it happen. It has happened to me. We you are questioned so aggressively and continuously, it is all too easy to lose your balance and then the slightest mistake will haunt you forever. But Peterson, here, is truly fantastic. He never loses a step. He never gets angry. He never fails to make his point. I mean, absolutely great. Do spend half an hour listening to this interview because it encapsulates most of what's wrong with our world. And, in particular, how poisonous the dialog can become when it falls into the hands of propaganda professionals (aka journalists). 

Here is an example of the conversation, at 24:35: 

CN. Under Mao, millions of people died, but there's no comparison between Mao and a trans activist. Why not? Because trans activists aren't killing millions of people, 

JP. the philosophy that's guiding their utterances is the same philosophy, the consequences are yet...

CN . You're saying that trans activists know it leads to the deaths of millions of people? 

JP. Well no. I'm saying that the philosophy that drives their utterances is the same philosophy that already has driven us to the deaths of millions.

CN. Okay, tell us how that philosophy is in any way comparable.

JP. Sure that's no problem. The first thing is that their philosophy presumes that group identity is paramount. That's the fundamental philosophy that drove the Soviet Union and Mao's China and it's the fundamental philosophy of the left-wing activists. It's identity politics doesn't matter who you are as an individual it matters who you are in terms of your group identity

You note the not-so-subtle techniques that Cathy Newman uses: "if you say that, then you mean this" -- with "this," for instance, condoning Mao Zedong's mass exterminations. It is usually done mentioning Hitler, but recently he seems to have slipped down the list of the bugaboos of history. In any case, it is a very easy trick, and it works almost all the time. Sometimes it spectacularly backfires, as in this case, but not everyone will understand the game being played.  

Indeed it is so easy to get trapped in the totalitarian vision of the world. This interview took place before the Covid pandemic, but somehow it prefigures it. The aggressive, continuous, obsessive, categorization of all manifestations of non-standard thought as dangerous forms of misinformation was exactly what Peterson was speaking against. No wonder that he is now involved in a sort of witch trial that might lead him to undergo forced re-educational training.  

In the end, I think the whole story is about holobionts. the holobiont philosophy is about recognizing diversity and valuing it. The totalitarian philosophy is to squash diversity and make it disappear. Ecosystems are not made of creatures that are all the same. Ecosystems thrive the more diversity they contain. They may compete, mostly they collaborate. If we lose our holobiont nature, we are doomed forever. 

Chip 'n Dale: Holobionts

 

Do you remember Chip 'n Dale? They were created by Walt Disney in 1943. It seemed wholly natural to viewers that they had a nice home inside the trunk of hollow trees. The idea that they were looking for natural cavities appeared from their very first story, which had to do with their attempt to settle inside the barrel of a cannon. 

Cannons are still abundant in the world, but hollow trees don't seem to be so common anymore. Think about that: have you ever seen a hollow tree outside horror fiction or cartoons? I never saw a hollow tree comparable to the fictional ones. It is only in parks that keep old trees that, occasionally, you can still see hollow trees, but rarely with those huge hollows where Chip and Dale could make their home. 

Yet, hollow trees have a special fascination and are part of forest lore everywhere in the world. They are not just fascinating for human beings, they are also home to all sorts of animal species. Birds, typically, but also larger ones, such as raccoons and even bears. In this sense, hollow trees are a feature of the forest holobiont, just one of the many multispecies holobionts that keep the ecosystem alive and adaptable. 

The formation of a hole on a tree stem is a wholly natural process that's generated, normally, by the action of specialized saprophyte fungi -- although woodpeckers can initiate the process and, sometimes, dig quite substantial holes. The plant is not normally harmed by one or a few hollows. Old trees tend to accumulate hollows, and when they die they become "snags," not anymore live trees, but still part of the forest ecosystem, homes to a variety of animal species.  

So, why so few hollow trees around? Have they become an abomination? Apparently, yes, I have a fig tree in my garden with a few hollows in the stem, and everyone who sees it asks when we are going to cut it. And that's the destiny of hollow trees everywhere. If you look at the term on the Web, you'll find plenty of pages describing "hollow tree removal services." It seems that hollow trees are indeed seen as a monstrosity, slated to be eliminated as soon as possible. And whenever a tree develops a hollow, it is plugged with cement or silicon, or whatever. 

More in general, hollow trees are a victim of the "optimization" trend in forest management. It doesn't matter whether it is a plantation or a park, if the idea is to make trees grow as fast as possible, then hollow ones have to be removed. It is typical of human management: it is aimed at maximizing just one of the parameters of the system. Instead, holobionts aim at optimizing all the parameters together. Humans aim at yield, holobionts aim at stability. Maybe, one day, humans will learn, and maybe they are already starting to learn. In the book "Chanterelle Dreams" by Greg Marley, you can find an entire chapter dedicate to how to restore tree hollows for cavity nesters. Some creative methods can be used, such as using shotguns to shoot slugs packed with fungal spawn into the bulk of a tree stem. It seems to be working -- so, not everyone marching into a forest with a shotgun in hand is there to do damage!

Up to not long ago, I was convinced that, apart from my fig tree, hollow trees had been scientifically exterminated in all the areas close to where I live. Instead, I discovered that the avenue just near my home is lined by wonderful honeyberry trees ("bagolari" in Italian), most of which have numerous, well-visible hollows. Some are clearly the result of branches having been cut off, others may have developed by themselves. I won't tell you where exactly this place is, least someone decides to cut these trees for being "dangerous" or to plug the hollows with cement. As far as I can say, these cavities are not inhabited by birds or other animals, probably because they line a trafficked road. But it is nice to know that there are places where owls, squirrels, and maybe Chip and Dale could take refuge if they decided to live in this area. Here are a few pictures. 

Holobionts of all the world, unite against totalitarianism!

 

Image from the Genetic Literacy Project

This is taken from a discussion we had with the members of the mailing list "The Proud Holobionts" a couple of weeks ago. It is inspired by the chapter that I am preparing for the book "Life and the Construction of Reality" edited by Pierre Imbrogiano and David Skrbina. 

I keep finding hugely interesting things on the Web. Too many, and I am losing a lot of time following links that lead me to unexpected discoveries. But so is life and, just to make you suffer as much as I do, let me alert you about this paper by Harald Walach, researcher in the field of medicine and psychology. The post is a comment about Mattias Desmet's "The Psychology of Totalitarianism" -- another hugely interesting thing that I am trying to avoid reading because it would completely absorb me for days.

So, here is the link to Walach's paper

https://harald-walach.info/2022/10/17/a-middle-way-in-difficult-times/

The point that Walach makes does not look like it is related to Holobionts, but, in my opinion, it is. Read this, first, from the paper:

"The ideology of naturalism has become more and more widespread since the beginning of the Enlightenment and dominates the brains and hearts of many people, especially those in important positions in science, politics, business, the media, and perhaps even religions. It leads to people feeling more and more like isolated atoms in a world without meaning or purpose. This gives rise to fear. But this fear has no goal, it just lies there. In psychology, we speak of “free-floating fear”. It leads to frustration and aggression. If this is the case with a large number of people, then this fear will always look for a new object to direct itself towards Terrorists, Islamists, foreigners, climate catastrophe – or a pandemic.

"In such a situation, self-organization processes emerge that lead relatively quickly to new structures, new patterns, and new orders – the “new normal” – which then suddenly seem very logical. These self-organization processes seem to be so well coordinated that one cannot imagine them arising of their own accord. But they do in fact arise of their own accord. Towards the end of his book, Mattias Desmet presents a few striking examples from chaos theory that explain how such things work.

"And now something important happens: the formerly atomised individuals, each bobbing along in a meaningless and empty world, now suddenly feel a new sense of purpose. And above all: they feel new connectedness with others. All are united in fighting this new threat and something emerges that they have not felt for a long time: a sense of belonging, of connection, of solidarity with others.

This in turn leads to the in-group of believers, similar to the members of religious groups or political parties, feeling good internally and delimiting themselves externally: against the others, the pagans, the unbelievers, the sceptics and doubters. Their arguments, threats against the newly created world view, are thus devalued, no longer find a hearing, no longer penetrate the channels of reporting of the mainstream media, but have to look for side channels."

Walach (and Desmet) have a perfectly fundamental point. Atomized individuals seek "something" -- an idea, a religion, a leader, a master, something that gives meaning to their life. The result is often "totalitarianism" in the sense that the atomized individuals find themselves at home under an "umbrella" organization that rules them from above. If you have friends in the military, you may notice how many of them feel about that. They recognize the enormous defects and inefficiency of military organizations but, all the same, they feel comfortable with the idea of belonging to a tight group that gives them a purpose.

Walach proposes a solution. He says, "The solution is to speak. Words trigger hypnosis. Words can also release it. By speaking, writing, discussing, whether in public, at home or at work." It can't work with the true believers, but Walach doesn't suggest speaking to the hypnotized, but to that fraction of the population that's not completely dazed by the propaganda barrage they receive. But it is not easy, and you always risk pushing the lukewarm ones into the group of those burning with faith.

It may work, but I am not sure about that. Walach and Desmet may have identified the problem, but that doesn't mean that the solution is good. The way I see this matter is that totalitarian structures are "vertical." That is, a true totalitarian organization is one in which you only communicate with those above you, and those below you, but not with those at the same level. Because of this structure, whatever comes from the top diffuses down, and is not subjected to discussion. You know that it is bad: it means that the mistakes made at the top cannot be corrected -- there is just no mechanism for the bottom layers to influence the top layers. If there is, it is very weak and easily perverted, just like our election. But it is a structure that makes you feel safe, so you accept it. 

So, if we want to change the vertical structure we must propose a different form of organization that can provide some of the same benefits, without being so rigid and inflexible as the typical hierarchical pyramid. So, what if we were to propose the holobiont as the social structure that avoids totalitarianism? If you are part of a holobiont, you don't have a master. Holobionts are non-hierarchical networks mainly based on local interactions among nodes (e.g. people). Typically they are smaller than hierarchic networks and tend to form higher order holobionts forming fractal structure. Mutual holobiontic interactions are based on self-respect and they have harmony as their purpose. It is a horizontal kind of network. 

A holobiont may be slower to react than a hierarchical structure because the signal that comes from an outside perturbation needs to diffuse from node to node, and that takes time. But it is more flexible and I believe it can avoid the terrible mistakes that pyramidal structures are known to do. 

Could that be the way to avoid totalitarianism? I am not sure, but I think it is at least a promising idea. And, in any case, the push toward localism and relocalization is evident everywhere. We still have to learn how to make large hierarchical organizations, and maybe the best idea is just to avoid building them! 

Onward, fellow holobionts!

Learning from plants: how to become a forest

 

The Boboli Garden in Florence, which Andrea Battiata cites as an example of harmony and connectedness. Battiata is an agronomist living in Florence who set up a vegetable garden called "ortobioattivo" where he cultivates vegetables using only natural methods. Here, he does not directly mention holobionts but makes a fundamental point on how the network of a forest is organized as a holobiont, and how we, humans, could learn a lot from forests. Even to the point of "becoming" a forest. It is a deep, deep point. You can compare Battiata's considerations with those of Blair Fix, a Canadian physicist. We have a big problem with an entity we created, perhaps unwillingly, the human social hierarchy, which may be the ultimate origin of the economic inequality in the world. The ways of holobionts are many, but all are worth following.  

by Andrea Battiata 

Over the past decade, in which I have begun to produce food that is good for people and at the same time does not deplete the fertility of the earth, I have felt fortunate to have co-created meaningful relationships that are deeply connected.  I realize now that the intense training to become a co-evolutionary agronomist was, more than anything else, a prelude to receiving lessons from plants and from how plants are virtuous.

Beautiful are the gatherings at my garden, "Ortobioattivo" where people get together with others who understand their concern for the future and share the enormous range of emotional intensity surrounding their lifestyle. These things matter, because loneliness is a disease in and of itself. There is much research to support this: one scientific study showed that people who had weaker social ties were 50 percent more likely to die early than those with stronger ties. Being disconnected, in fact, poses a danger comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and was more predictive of early death than the effects of air pollution or physical inactivity.

It is the sense of belonging to something greater than one's existential loneliness and the tangible support derived from this sense that makes us feel vital; connection is so important to us, humans, that without it we wither and may even die. In our first months of life, we are cradled, kissed, and hugged, and, along with eye contact, we receive loving touch and hear our names spoken to us.

We are programmed for this. We are evolving to relate to each other. The search for models and ideas for building communities that relate to and improve their existence with food has become a way of life for me. 

I think that if we can create places and spaces that give what we are looking for such as connection with nature, interaction or physical proximity to each other, a structure that provides opportunities for community building, services, and learning appropriate lifestyles to make us feel good by feeding well, we can be a "forest", helping each other just like plants that stay together and help each other.

The nature of plants shows us the way how communities grow and thrive despite, overcoming the challenges of finding space, light, and fertile soil. 

Nature does this. Every day, from an evolutionary perspective. 

I think we can do it too.

Plant communities are constantly adapting to their environments: growing deep tap roots when water is scarce, flowering at night to prevent dehydration and growing bright and colorful flowers to attract pollinators. Together they create ingenious ways to survive and thrive even in harsh deserts and tropical forests. Humans, too, can find a connection with the Earth. We long for membership in a community and constantly work to adapt to the negative factors of isolation and separation that we face and often create. As scientific research and experience show, as our social ties weaken and our sense of belonging diminishes, we lose one of the great possibilities for resilience to the negative factors of daily life.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed to us, through the difficulties of our continued isolation and estrangement, that we are a species with a deep need for connection. Exactly like the mycelium of fungi that communicates in an uinderground network, good human community functions as a huge underground support system, allowing us to live well above ground in our individual bodies. We are attached to the Earth, physically and metaphorically. Looking to Nature for healthy living patterns makes sense, and it is there that wisdom can be found in times of trouble.

Many of the most successful health models are literally outside our windows and based in communities. Here in Florence, in early fall, I look out the window at the Boboli Gardens, a large city park in the center of the city. The trees are in various states of change; many are already bare and some are clinging to a few multicolored leaves. They are alive, but the pulse of energy is not visible as they head into winter. Trees, of course, do not die in winter but become dormant. It is a semi-hibernation that cause everything inside the tree to slow down: metabolism, energy consumption, growth. Since they do not produce photosynthesis and thus energy in winter, they release their leaves, which require a great deal of energy to maintain. In these autumn days, trees transfer water into their cells and, when the temperature drops, move that water from inside the cell to the tiny spaces outside, between the cells. This prevents tree cells from freezing.

Even in this dormant state, trees communicate through their root structure, sending nourishment to smaller trees around them that need it, and protecting each other by sending chemical communication messages. They work in a community. Nature is literally showing us the way to health. Communicate and be close to those you care about. Some of the answers are right there, outside the window, in our parks rich of hedges and trees, everywhere in Florence. All we have to do is look away from our computers, television screens, and cell phones to stop, listen and absorb it all.

Without dormancy, energy conservation, leaf fall, rest, restoration, a different appearance throughout the seasons, and the added benefit of a community of trees nearby, a tree may not survive for long and will not have the much-needed energy to thrive and gather sun from the sky and nutrients from the earth. With these adaptations, a tree can survive several challenging seasons.

The simplicity of this lesson is lost in the complexity of human life. There are people who are burning their energy on all fronts: work, family, conflict, poverty, violence, wars, and stress from multiple sources.

And while the narrative may be different for each person, the message of becoming like a tree may be the same. This unhealthy living condition is creating a winter, and inner health and strength must be preserved by limiting emotional expenditure in every way possible. Having a community to lean on when winter is upon us can make a significant difference in healing, mental health and spiritual stability. In the end, like trees and mushrooms.

Ultimately, the way of being in connection with other people and being of use, or at least listening and empathizing, is life-giving and makes us feel that we are in connection with Nature. We don't have to do anything so naturally different or unique or special to create communities to which we can all belong. Exactly like plants!

A limit to growth in food production – thoughts about the soil holobiont

What if we are not able to further increase our food production? What will we eat tomorrow?

By Thorsten Daubenfeld

As we are celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the “Limits to Growth” study I recently came across the question “how do we feed the world in upcoming years?”. Some people may argue that we already have sufficient food supply but only need a more effective and efficient system of distribution of the existing food. However, already the late Roman empire stumbled across this challenge and wasn’t able to solve it. Others argue that we have sufficient knowledge at our hands to further increase the yield of our crops (fertilizers, agrochemicals, genetically modified crops) and “technology will solve the problem”.

As a physical chemist, I love data. And the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations) provides plenty of data on this topic. Together with some of my students, we decided to investigate this topic a little bit more in detail. Our key hypothesis is: There is a clear limit to growth in food production – and it already becomes visible.

We first had a look at the top 40 crops (by global production quantity) and plotted the yield (in t/ha) for each country and each of the last 60 years. Most of them showed a pattern like the one we observed for wheat (Fig. 1):

Fig. 1: Evolution of wheat yield in t/ha, 1961 – 2020. Gray dots represent wheat yield per country for the respective year, the orange line represents the global average yield (weighted by production area).

Globally, we have increased the average yield per hectare more than threefold in the last six decades. So by taking a look at the orange line in Fig. 1, we may argue that there is no indication that the growth in food production may slow down. But what could be more interesting is that there seems to be an absolute maximum in how many tonnes of wheat you are able to produce per hectare. This number has been hovering around 10 t/ha for more than 20 years. No single country, whatever they did to maximize their yield, by whatever technology that was at their hands, was able to cross this limit.

The same pattern can be observed for tomatoes, it is even more impressive in our view (Fig. 2).

 

Fig. 2: Evolution of tomato yield in t/ha, 1961 – 2020. Gray dots represent tomato yield per country for the respective year, the orange line represents the global average yield (weighted by production area).

The Netherlands was able to massively increase the yield of tomato production by growing tomatoes in greenhouses. But again, whatever they (and others) were able to do by means of technology: the biophysical limit for tomato production seems to be around 500 tonnes per hectare. No single county was able to sustainably surpass this limit in the last 30 years. Despite our celebrated technological advances in genetics and agrochemicals.

In all of the top 40 crops we examined, there is not a single example that shows any signs of (exponential) growth – rather a sigmoidal curve as for wheat and tomatoes that seems to approach a maximum value. Or no growth at all in yield.

You now may argue that we just have to learn from the “top yield countries” and copy their recipe for success to other countries. However, this has not been done, neither for wheat nor for tomatoes – nor for any of the other top 40 crops. Otherwise, we would have seen a much larger growth in recent years. But why?

Looking at the data again, we plotted the yield per country against the production area of the respective county – and obtained the picture shown in Fig. 3.

  

Fig. 3: Wheat yield per county plotted against production area. Each dot represents the yield in t/ha for one county and one year (1961-2020).

In Fig. 3, you see all countries and all yields for wheat for the years 1961-2020. Of course, this means that the same country is shown multiple times. But you see a pattern that emerges: the larger your production area, the lower your yield. And the “top yield countries” are the ones with the lowest production area. This pattern is similar for other crops as well and so far, my key takeaway would be: we cannot simply “copy” the recipe of the top-yield countries to the top-area countries. To put it simply: greenhouses for tomatoes might work for a small country like the Netherlands (910,000 tonnes of production in 2017). But copying this for China (about 60,000,000 tonnes of production in 2017) would mean a lot (!) of greenhouses.

There is another part of the story that may be subjective, but is part of me as a holobiont: when I think of tomatoes, I always remember some days spent at a friend’s family house somewhere west of Pescara (Italy) at the hillsides of the Abruzzi mountains. They grew their own fruits and vegetables in their garden and, in the summer evenings, we had dinner together outside the house. Part of the dinner was the home-grown tomatoes that were much larger than anything I ever saw before as one tomato slice was as big as my two hands. Coupled with olive oil and sea salt, this was one of the most delicious food I ever came across in my life. This was a tomato from a year when Italy “only” harvested around 52 t/ha. In the same year, the Netherlands was able to produce more than 450 t/ha of tomatoes. I have also eaten a lot of tomatoes from the Netherlands. But not a single one of them was able to evoke such strong (holobiont?) feelings in me like the big Italian tomatoes in my story. So thinking about yield and numbers from the perspective of a holobiont, there is definitely more to food than just “yield optimization”.

But let's come back to our numbers. Another question that we would like to investigate is how the countries with high yields managed to obtain that growth. My guess is that most of them increased use of fertilizers, agrochemicals, or genetically modified crops – which are not sustainable (e.g., we are running out of high concentrated phosphate mines to have sufficient phosphate fertilizers) and whether GM crops are really a “progress” still remains to be seen. After having lived on a farm myself for more than 20 years, I would cast some doubt on this. And whether technology is able to produce the wonderful “tomatoes from the Abruzzes” may also be questioned.

So what do you think? Are we running towards a limit to growth in food? Or am I too skeptical? What is the “price for growth” we are paying or going to pay? As for the latter question, I just would like to point toward the challenge of uranium accumulation in groundwater due to long-term phosphate fertilizer use.

In their 1972 study “Limits to Growth”, Meadows et al. were mainly looking at the accessibility of arable land when thinking about the limits of food production. While this is another major challenge, I think that we should have a look at what we are really doing when “optimizing” yield. All crops have to be grown in soil. And soil is a very complex system, maybe also a holobiont in our understanding. Putting the soil holobiont under permanent and rising stress due to the maximization of one output variable (tonnes of crop per hectare) may not be the wisest way to take care of this system.

  

Acknowledgments: Thorsten wants to thank his students Diana Carrasco and Mirijam Uhland for their contribution to this work.

Our Holobiont Friends, the Fungi. A road toward the Circular Economy?

 

The Amanita Muscaria, perhaps the most beautiful mushroom in the world. Said to be poisonous, some say it is edible. It can also have hallucinogenic effects. In any case, the bright red color is a signal directed to animals that, basically, says, "eat me." And the resulting hallucinations may well be a further reason for animals (humans in particular) to seek for it. This bright livery and the mental effects of the fungus may be the origin of the myth of a fat man driving a sled pulled by reindeer and dressed in a liver that's exactly of the same colors. But, apart from myth creation, fungi can be the basis of a number of interesting advanced technologies to recycle waste and produce food. (note: in this text, I often use the concept of "holobiont" that may not be familiar to most people. To know more about it, see the blog "The Proud Holobionts")

Fungi as holobionts

Fungi are the quintessential holobionts. Neither plants nor animals, they are a world apart from us. They lack the capability of photosynthesis and so they cannot live except as associating themselves to plant roots (they are called "mycorrhizal") or, sometimes, as scavengers (in this case, we call them "saprophytes"). In both cases, they obtain their food from plants and, in exchange, they provide plants with a variety of services, including the all-important capability of extracting minerals from the soil and turning them into forms that plants can absorb. The relationship between plants and fungi is so strict and intricate that some plants live on fungi: they are epiparasites ("parasites of parasites"). Holobionts have many way to exist!

Fungi, plants, and animals form different "kingdoms" in the biological classification of living creatures. But the separation between fungi and animals is especially sharp. We may see fungi as the specular opposite of animals in terms of their survival strategies. Both depend on plants, but they live on opposite sides of the ground surface. Animals, like us, live mainly above ground, mushrooms underground. What we see of them is the occasional appearance of the "fruiting body," or the "mushroom," the sexual organ of the underground creature. (if you want to know the proper scientific term, it is the "epigeal" part of the creature).

Given the different environments in which fungi and animals live, it is not surprising that the interactions between fungi and animals are usually limited. Although fungal spores pervade the air we breathe, even in towns and inside homes, we do not harbor many fungal species in our bodies. The Candida Albicans is one of the few examples: it is common in human bodies, where it is probably doing a useful job as a saprophyte, removing decayed materials. But, occasionally, the Candida may become a pathogen and do plenty of damage when something goes wrong in the complex equilibrium of the human holobiont. 

Nevertheless, the above-ground manifestations of fungi are part of the human lore, and also of the human diet. But even as food, mushrooms are not so common, and they are surrounded by myths and legends: some are poisonous, some are hallucinogenic, most have no eating value, but some are considered prized food -- think of truffles! 

From the viewpoint of fungi, we animals may be considered exotic and legendary creatures, often causing damage but in some cases useful to spread the spores. Truffles would not smell so good to human (and animal) noses if they didn't "want" to be dug out and eaten. The same is true for the brightly colored mushrooms that advertise themselves as good food (or, in some other cases, carrying the "do not eat me" message). 

So, fungi and humans form the kind of symbiotic relationship of holobionts only occasionally. In particular, humans are not so good at cultivating fungi as food, but by far not as good as they are at cultivating plants and herding animals. To this day, mushrooms remain one of the few human foods that are mainly harvested from the wild. The capability of cultivating them is a recent skill acquired in human history. It is said that the first mushroom cultivations were developed in China during the first millennium AD. By now, several species can be cultivated, mostly of the saprophyte kind, (the Japanese "shiitake" are an example). Cultivating mycorrhizal fungi, such as truffles, is much more complicated because they live in association with a living plant, which must be provided by humans. "Truffiéres" do exist, but they are a recent development. In all cases, cultivating mushrooms is a step upward in complexity with respect to conventional agricultural techniques. 

Despite the problems involved, cultivating fungi is an attractive idea for many reasons. Apart from food, the capability of saprophytes to break down materials that humans consider waste is interesting: if we can turn waste into food, we can "close the cycle" of many agricultural and industrial activities and move in the direction of the "circular economy" that is the only kind of economy that can last a long time. Can fungi be a fundamental tool for that purpose? Maybe, but we are still far away from a truly circular economy. Let me tell you something about my experience in this field.

Cultivating the mushroom holobiont: the circular farm

It was Galileo who said that "knowledge is the child of experience" (la sapienza è figliola della sperienza). So, in order to learn something about fungi and their cultivation, I took a two-day full-immersion class in mushroom cultivation organized by a company engaged in that field. Amazing: there were so many things I didn't know about that, and so many tricks I hadn't even imagined. I don't think I'll ever become a professional mushroom grower, but it was surely an enriching experience. 

First, let me tell you a few things about the "Circular Farm" company created by Antonio Di Giovanni, a spinoff of the "Funghi Espresso" company. One of the many good things that can be said about the company is that it is a real company, one that's making a product and selling it. I say this because, over a career of working with startup companies, I arrived at the conclusion that most of them are scams. They are there to cash in government grants and gullible investors. When they have made enough money, they close shop and good riddance. That's not the case with the Circular Farm company. 

After 10 years of work and development, the Circular Farm company lives on the profits it makes. It is not an easy task: it is a biotechnological feat that requires a certain degree of sophistication and control of the process. It is not large, it is in many respects a family-based enterprise, but it works. And I can tell you that the mushrooms it produces are delicious. 

The objective of the company, as its name says, is to "close the circle" of the resources it uses -- recycling what others call waste. So, the cultivation of mushrooms is made mainly on coffee ground waste recovered from local coffee shops. The process is remarkably efficient: about 20% of the waste is transformed into edible mushrooms. What is left is composted and it could be another sellable product, were it not for the Italian bureaucracy that forbids selling it, or even giving it away for free. But it is not a pollutant, so it can be used to grow the vegetable garden of the company. 

The company is also engaged in developing more products, different kinds of fungi on different substrates, applications of fungi other than food, and other agricultural technologies according to the concept of "urban farm." After all, the idea of cultivating something inside towns is not new: our ancestors often had vegetable gardens, and they derived a substantial fraction of their food supply from them. If it worked for them, it can work for us, too!

Fungi as a tool to attain a circular economy: is it possible on a large scale?

The idea of recycling coffee ground waste appears to be a success story. The Circular Farm company can do that, and it is not the only one. In the UK, the Bio-bean company does the same, although on a larger scale and its products are different -- including, for instance, "coffee logs" to be used as fuel for wood stoves. The question is, what can these successes teach us about the more general problem of waste recycling? 

One good thing about the idea of recycling coffee waste is that it is a commercial activity. That is, it is a real way to make profits while, at the same time, doing something useful for society; in this case getting rid of some waste. But expanding the idea to a much larger scale, well, it is not so easy. 

Waste is a peculiar entity. For one thing, it has a "negative price," in the sense that people are willing (or, more often, are forced) to pay to get rid of it. This generates the problem that would-be recyclers find themselves in competition with waste management companies, whose business is not recycling, but disposal. Since the public is forced by law to pay, these companies have an unfair advantage and they tend to use all their lobbying power to make the state enact laws that make life difficult for recyclers. In some particular cases, the business of waste disposal is so lucrative and exclusive that you risk being sent to sleep with the fishes if you become a nuisance. If you work in this field, you surely have plenty of horror stories to tell. I do, too, but let me skip this subject, here. 

Another problem, and maybe the most important one, is that if something is classified as waste, it means that it is just that: waste. It means that people don't know what to do with it and just want to get rid of it. So, how come you think you can do something useful with it? Either you are especially clever or you are willing to work on the cheap side of the economy. In the latter case, you must accept to work for low profits, a strategy also known as the "church mouse" strategy." 

Most of the recycling done worldwide today is performed by people who live on the edge of survival. You may have seen pictures of the people who live by scavenging landfill in places such as India or Africa. They are so poor that for them even the very modest profits made from the things that other people throw away help them to survive. But you don't need to think in terms of exotic places. You know that you can find plenty of edible food in the waste bins of your local fast food joint. Surely, it is not as good as the food you buy at the counter, but the people called "binners" rely on that food to survive. They are, by all means, good recyclers. Interestingly, though, in many Western countries "binning" is forbidden and sanctioned by law. This illustrates both the problems I was describing: the powers that be do not want you to recycle, and what you recycle is of lower quality than the original product. This is called "downcycling" and it affects most kinds of recycling, not just food found in waste bins. Recycled plastic, for instance, is a poor material in all respects, while recycled paper is good for toilet paper and little else. 

Instead, the approach of the "Circular Farm" on recycling coffee waste is on the other side of the waste recycling strategy: it exploits cleverness. Indeed, they are performing a remarkable feat: transforming something that nobody wants into relatively high-priced goods, edible mushrooms. But can it be expanded? In part, yes. Fungi are nearly miraculous creatures, and they can do things that no other living creature can do. Just think of the possibility of using the chitin that fungi produce (plants don't produce it). Chitin is a solid polymer, typically used in nature by insects for their exoskeleton. Chitin could be grown by fungi inside molds and replace plastic, with the advantage that chitin is a natural substance that can be easily degraded by bacteria. Fungi might also be able to degrade plastic directly, but we are not there yet. 

Overall, we are just starting to explore the many possibilities of biotechnology in many fields. It could do many useful things (and many horrible ones, bioweapons, for instance). Perhaps the most interesting possibility is to reduce the impact of agriculture on the ecosystem. This is a point that's scarcely recognized, but agriculture is one of the most destructive technologies ever devised by humankind. It occupies enormous areas, with the consequent destruction of the natural biota, deforestation, and the destabilization of the whole ecosystem. To say nothing about how, today, most agricultural production is made on soil that has been thoroughly destroyed by the overuse of artificial fertilizers and pesticides so that it has become sterile and inert ("as sterile as the brains of my students" as I say, but let me not harp on that). In itself, the cultivation of mushrooms can't replace agricultural products, but it is part of a revolution that includes "precision fermentation" which promises the production of food using bacteria with a much smaller environmental impact than conventional agriculture. 

Concluding: The Holobiont Strategy

Modern biotechnologies give us hints of revolutionary possibilities, but we are not there yet. In quantitative terms, some ten million tons of coffee are produced every year in the world, practically all of which becomes coffee grounds waste. Now, Circular Farm recycles about 10 tons per year and, even though there are other companies engaged in the same task, the impact on global waste production is minimal. Besides, coffee grounds are not a major source of pollution. So, you see that it is a long road that we have to walk before we can use bacteria and fungi to replace conventional agriculture or even to make a serious dent in the pollution created by waste.

It looks more likely that we'll have to adapt to what we can do rather than dream about things we cannot do. A good strategy in terms of optimizing a production system is to mimic the way the natural system works: It is the "holobiont strategy." Holobionts do not accumulate capital -- they exchange what they produce immediately after they produce it. A good holobiont is a chain of creatures that cycle nutrients down from solar energy all the way to fertile soil, which then is returned to the top. Holobionts don't strive to become rich, they strive for stability. And they strive for efficiency: a good holobiont would never forbid fellow holobionts from getting their lunch from the waste bin of a restaurant. The holobiont way is to help, not to forbid. And so, one step after another, we'll arrive somewhere. Onward, fellow holobionts!

Photos of the Circular Farm Seminar

A Good Holobiont has a Good Immune System. Managing your Microbial Environment

 

An incredible book by Philipp Dettmer: an ambitious attempt to tell the whole story of the human immune system in an understandable form even for the non-specialist. The result is a 345-page tome, lavishly illustrated, and written in an entertaining style. Remarkably well done, but not easy to digest nevertheless. I went through the whole thing once, but I need to restart from the beginning and reread it again. And, probably, I'll need a third pass. Afterward, I may be able to say that I know just a little bit about how the immune system works. 

And think that this is just an introduction that neglects or just mentions several important details. For instance, it mostly skips the role of the microbiome. But that must be hugely important: after all, human beings are holobionts. We can't survive without our microbiome, and it is likely that the huge numbers of small critters that populate our body play a fundamental role in managing the microbial system "holobiont-style." It means that the immune system is not a sort of Nazi militia that shoots down everything it doesn't recognize and doesn't like. It must be able to recognize those parts of the microbiome which are helpful and those which are not. And note that, in some cases, the same species of microbes can play the role of pathogen or symbiont, depending on the general conditions of the rest of the system. That's how good holobionts behave: they adapt to each other. We need to be colonized by microbes in order to survive. It is just a question of being colonized by the good ones. And it is the job of the immune system to ensure that it happens!

Amazing, as I said. It gives you a glimpse of the immense complexity of just a section for the even more immense complexity of the ecosystem -- that some call "Gaia." The goddess gave every one of us a complete defense and management system that kept our ancestors alive for the past 400 million years or so as multicellular organisms, and also a few billion years as single-cell organisms. If we are here, it means that the immune system of our ancestors worked well enough to interact with, and protect them from, the zillions and zillions of microscopic creatures that we eat, inhale, or come in contact with one way or another. 

But, wait.... aren't we supposed to be much smarter than Gaia, that poor old lady? We are so smart that we discovered that we can do better than just relying on that old stuff that uses billions of antibodies, t-cells, macrophages, and more. You know, those squishy things that evolved over a few billion years, what are they for? Instead, just a piece of cloth placed onto your mouth and nose, and -- voilà -- NOW you are safe! 

New Mysteries of the Human Microbiome: Cancer and Fungi

 

The idea that cancer is caused by a fungus, or that it may even be a form of fungus has been proposed by the Italian physician Tullio Simoncini. His ideas have been thoroughly demonized and Simoncini himself has seen his license of practicing medicine revoked. 

Now, don't make me intervene in a matter of which I know very little and, for sure, I am not saying that Simoncini is right. I am just noting that, after what we saw happening with the COVID19 story, the demonization of everything which is not "official" in medicine should be taken with a lot of caution.

The thing which I think matters is how complicated things are in everything that has to do with human health. Cancer is normally described as a mutation that makes cells lose their discipline and start reproducing wildly. Things are not so simple as that, I think. The human body has defenses that can rapidly get rid of any rogue cell and it is strange that these defenses become ineffective when dealing with tumors. And, indeed, the story of cancer growth is much more complicated than that. 

Simoncini may have had an interesting intuition when he proposed an important role of fungi in human cancers. You can read the story in this recent paper

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(22)01127-8.pdf

which is structured as a headache machine from the first ten lines of text. Nevertheless, I think the point it makes is clear: all the cancer types the authors studied had some fungi associated with them. That is a new piece of information that goes in parallel with the fact that cancers also harbor special bacteria. What is the role of this microbiome? Nobody knows and, correctly, the authors state that "they have not established causation," even though it seems that the presence of fungi is, sometimes, associated with more aggressive cancers.  

I think it is possible to say that cancers are holobiont-like assemblies of cells, bacteria, and fungi. If they are, that could explain their resilience and their stubbornness. Holobionts are machines that optimize their own survival, and, in this case, it is unfortunate that the cancer holobiont doesn't seem to care about the survival of its host. Maybe, in the future, we'll learn more about this subject and perhaps we'll find a way to exploit this knowledge to help people who are struck by cancer. For the time being, we can be awed, as usual, at the incredible complexity of life in all its forms. 

More discussions on cancer and fungi at

https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2022/10/02/7787

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03074-z

https://www.healthline.com/health/is-cancer-a-fungus

The Role of the Forest Holobiont in Earth's Climate: More Important than it was Believed so far

Above, the talk by Anastassia Makarieva at the International Conference on Basic Science for Sustainability in Belgrade, on Sep 22, 2022

It is about an innovative and important interpretation of the current climate situation. Anastassia is proposing that the warming of the atmosphere may be caused not just by the accumulated CO2, but by a radiative forcing of the same order of magnitude generated by deforestation. Earth's forests are giant holobionts coupled and embedded in the even larger holobiont that's the whole ecosystem. It is not surprising that they strongly affect climate, and not just by the conventional factors, albedo and carbon sequestration. There is much more than that, as you can learn by watching the clip, above.  

I don't have to tell you the consequences of this concept. If it turns out to be true (and I think it might well be), it means that we have done a lot of wrong things in trying to mitigate global warming, for instance proposing "biofuels" obtained from wood. But there is much more: it is a complete revolution in the way we see Earth's climate system. Forests not only cool the atmosphere, but also stabilize the climate. This means not only that we need more forests, but that some ideas such as carbon sequestration and geoengineering could do a lot of damage if not coupled with reforestation.

On the other hand, Anastassia's ideas could also be misunderstood as meaning that Climate Science, as it has been proposed so far, is all wrong. And that's sure to happen if her ideas come into the hands of politically minded people who would use that to propose that there is no such thing as global warming, climate emergency, etcetera.  But if we believe in Science (true science, not TV science) we must not be afraid of the truth.

Onward, fellow holobionts!

The Best Description of Holobionts Ever Written

 

From Prigogine's "The End of Certainty" (1996), citing Bierbacher, Nicolis, and Shuster:

The maintenance of organization in nature is not -- and cannot be -- achieved by central management. Order can only be maintained by self-organization. Self-organizing systems allow adaptation to the prevailing environment, i.e. they react to changes in the the environment with a thermodynamic response which makes the system extraordinarily flexible and robust against perturbations from outside conditions. We want to point out the superiority of self-organizing systems over conventional human technology which carefully avoids complexity and hierarchically manages nearly all technical processes.

Savannas and Grasslands: Holobionts Adapting to a Changing Earth

 

The Savanna of the Tarangire Park, in Tanzania (image from Wikipedia)

A recent paper by Carla Staver and Carolyne Stromberg on Savannas, recently appeared on "Science" -  It is a fascinating, although brief, review of what we know about savannas and grasslands. The interest in this kind of studies lies, in my opinion, in their "deep time" perspective. We are used to the existence of savannas and grasslands, but we often tend to forget that they are a relatively recent innovation in the biosphere. Staver and Stromberg estimate that they appeared "just" 20 million years ago. To compare, the forest biome is at least 400 million years old.

In evolutionary terms, if something exists, it is because it has a reason to exist. Savannas and Grasslands are mostly a reaction of the ecosystem to the profound changes that occurred during the Cenozoic, the past 66 million years. Earth emerged out of the End-Mesozoic disaster, the one that destroyed the dinosaurs, as a hot and lush planet. But, some 50 million years ago, a phase of cooling started, and it is lasting in our times (except for the recent human perturbation). 

My personal interpretation of this cooling phase is that the outgassing of CO2 from the mantle could not compensate for the carbon sequestration operated by the biosphere and that the cooling is the result of the gradually lower CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. (image from Zhang et al.)

At some moment, plants had to adapt to a CO2 concentration as low as 170 ppm -- never seen before in Earth's history. This adaptation led to the appearance of the "C4" mechanism of photosynthesis that uses less water and less CO2. The result was a major rebalancing of the ecosystem: for some reasons, probably linked to the water pumping mechanism from roots to the leaves, trees are not happy to use the C4 mechanism, preferring instead the older "C3" one. That led to the widespread appearance of savannas and grasslands, better adapted to a CO2-poor climate. 

From then on, two different holobionts have populated Earth: Forests and grasslands. The main difference is that a Forest has a closed canopy, whereas a savanna has an open one. The effects on the water cycle management are profound: the forest can trigger the biotic pump mechanism to carry water vapor from the oceans, while the savanna, probably, cannot. Both biomes are adapted to the conditions that they themselves create: forests thrive in humid environments and they tend to create it using the biotic pump. The savannas prefer a dry environment: they create it to keep forests away. Savannas also tend to thrive in the presence of mega-herbivores, which instead may be a cause of damage to forests. We may see this situation as a tug of war between the two biomes, although it is also true that the ecosystem knows no "war," only adaptation. Those holobionts that adapt best, survive. It may be possible that grass and trees are two sides of a single, large holobiont that includes savannas, grasslands, and forests. The concept of holobiont is fractal. 

And now? The savanna monkeys (aka "humans") have changed everything. They have methodically razed the forests but, at the same time, they recently engaged in a major re-forestation effort. They have destroyed forests by fires but have also done incredible efforts to suppress forest fires. They have also damaged grassy ecosystems turning them into pastures and removing the large herbivores, but they are also trying to preserve the remaining herbivores. In short, they can't decide what they want to do! The only sure thing is that they have been raising the CO2 atmospheric concentration by burning fossil carbon, gradually returning it to the levels of the early and mid-Cenozoic. That favors trees against grasses. Indeed, we are seeing a remarkable defined reforestation trend all over the Earth. 

So far, we cannot say how this heavy intervention of the savanna monkeys will affect the ecosystem in the long term. The pumping up of the CO2 levels in the atmosphere may be a short-lived pulse, or it may affect the planet for millions of years. Whatever the case, Gaia has been around for a few billion years, and she surely knows what to do. She can deal with these monkeys as they deserve. 

h/t Mara Baudena. To know more of the evolution of forests and savannas, see this post on "The Proud Holobionts" If you cannot access the paper by Staver and Stromberg, ask me for a copy at ugo.bardi(thingamajig)unifi.it

   

Holobionts: a new Paradigm to Understand the Role of Humankind in the Ecosystem

You are a holobiont, I am a holobiont, we are all holobionts.

"Holobiont" means, literally, "whole living creature." It is a concept known in biology at least from the 1930s, but that was rediscovered and diffused by Lynn Margulis in the 1990s, to emphasize how life is more than all a question of collaboration. Everything in life is an exchange of matter, energy, or information: holobionts are the building blocks of everything in the ecosystem, and also of human-made systems: families, companies, associations, markets, and more. The concept of holobiont gives us a new paradigm to rebuild our relationship with the ecosystem and with our fellow human beings.

Onward, fellow holobionts!

James Lovelock, 1919-2022. One of the great minds of the twentieth century

The great rainforest holobiont is part of the even greater holobiont we call "Gaia"

James Lovelock left us at 103, after a life dedicated to science. His main contribution was the concept of “Gaia,” which will forever accompany his name.

There are many ways to be a scientist: some are collectors who collect facts as if they were stamps. Others are theorists, who spend their lives building castles in the air that never touch the real world. There are those who spend their lives criticizing, and many who see science as a competition to prove they are better than others.

Lovelock was in another category: he never wrote an equation, he never worried about cheap brawls between scientists, and never even an employee of a university or a research institute. He was a creative, one who was not afraid to build measurement tools using his hands, a characteristic of creatives who often combine manual and mental skills. Lovelock was part of the tradition of the great creative scientists of the past, walking on the same path that Charles Darwin had started tracing with his theory of evolution by natural selection. (like Lovelock, Darwin, never wrote an equation!)

For a scientist, being creative is risky. The creative seeks the perfect blend of data and intuition and does not always succeed. An intuition without data is nonsense, while data without intuition is nothing more than a telephone directory. But Lovelock managed to get the right blend with Gaia.

Like all creatives, from Newton onwards, Lovelock hoisted himself on the shoulders of giants, taking from them what he needed for his synthesis. Lynn Margulis and William Golding are equally responsible for the idea of “Gaia,” in the sense of the terrestrial ecosystem. But it was Lovelock who acted as the spearhead, launching the idea as early as 1972, after studying the data coming from the first probes that had landed on Mars. His basic intuition, that oxygen is the “signature” of the existence of biological life, was right. Then, he expanded this idea to explain how the whole planetary ecosystem self-regulates by a series of feedback mechanisms.

As always happens, also in science original and innovative ideas tend to be attacked with a vehemence that goes beyond the need for proper verification. Lovelock's idea had an undertone of mysticism, of "New Age," of hippies smoking weed, that kind of thing. And, above all, it went directly against the dominant paradigm of the time, that of “neodarwinism” which couldn’t conceive how the creature called “Gaia” could emerge without being in competition with others for the same resources.

You can imagine the controversy that came up. And, even today, officially we must use the term "Gaia hypothesis" to avoid the risk of being mistreated by the defenders of the orthodoxy. And yet, perhaps unexpectedly, Lovelock's idea “Gaia " was never completely discredited, despite the crossfire of critics.

Of course, Lovelock was not always right, and his ideas had to be refined, tuned, and sometimes radically changed. He had to back down from some interpretations that turned out to be too radical: for instance, he argued that an ice age is a perfect condition for Gaia to exist to maximize the ecosystem’s “metabolic rate.” It seems clear, nowadays, that it is not the case. Then, one of the regulation mechanisms he had initially proposed, the “CLAW hypothesis,” based on the role of phytoplankton in generating cloud condensation mechanisms, turned out to be probably wrong or, at least, not relevant. And sometimes his interpretations of Gaia as endowed with a certain volition of hers went a little too far on the side of mysticism.

But these mistakes are not crucial. The point is that the idea of Gaia is fundamental to understanding how it's possible that such a fragile thing as biological life has existed on Earth for at least three billion years. It was not by accident, but by the self-regulating capabilities of the system that allowed it to survive the various catastrophes that hit Earth during this long period. Then, you may call this capability with a different name. It doesn’t matter: "Gaia" remains a fundamental idea for today's science, still a source of new ideas, new insights, and new discoveries.

And I think the idea of Gaia also goes beyond the dry terms that science uses to describe phenomena such as “complex adaptive systems” or “self-regulating feedback systems.” I think that we can say that “something” exists, out there, that’s beyond our capabilities of understanding. If we want to call that “something” Gaia, it is perfectly legitimate. And if we wish to see “her” as a Goddess, it is legitimate, too. Who said that science must always be right? So, we can thank Gaia for having been so kind to James Lovelock, and giving him a long and productive life. May he rest in peace in the arms of the Goddess he created, and who created him.