Findings: Plant Sex
Plus -- new nuclear (finally!), planting forests, "natural farming" in Korea, glaciers, elites, and Guelzo's latest fab book on Lincoln and democracy
Interesting finds and what I’ve been reading.
Anthropocene
First off, the state of nuclear.
The world's only coal-to-nuclear reactor plant just broke ground in Wyoming | Electrek
Bill Gates’ TerraPower broke ground yesterday on its Natrium nuclear reactor plant, making it the first advanced reactor project ever to start construction.
Next, the complexity of planting trees. The usual carbon schemes are not it.
A rather captivating long read from a newly discovered blog and agroecology project:
Now for some natural history. First, on glaciers and their profound effects!
Second, plant reproduction from the lovely botanist-writer Anne Thomas based in the Alps. (This one is for my daughter, the first-year medical student and anatomist, who similarly geeks out on deep secrets of biology.)
It's like plant sex Inception.
Findings
Many people are writing about elites these days. Here are three extremely different takes. What bothers me the most about all this talk is the big assumption about class → identity and class → thinking, and the steep potential toward “us vs. them.” It always rears its ugly head whenever it’s all-groups all-the-time, generally only two.
Whatever a person’s “class” — or more realistically, his or her membership and adjacency across multiple classes, groups, and communities — each person is utterly unique. We humans live within diverse networks of closer and further-related family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances — these from real life. Plus: all our past education, life experiences, books read, ideas assimilated; plus: all the other ongoing virtual influences reaching us from online media and social channels. Don’t define me by X or Y.
Bottom line, I don’t believe groups, by any classification, including wealth or culture, to be the most fundamental determinant of human identity, or thought. — Group action, on the other hand, may certainly be a Thing.
This next one is for me… (phew) a bit beyond the pale, but eerily fascinating, culturally telling perhaps, and I recommend a read. It is Part II, of which there is a Part I, linked.
Share your impressions?
Books
I quickly finished Allen Guelzo’s accessible but deeply wise Our Ancient Faith, which draws on his lifetime study of Abraham Lincoln. The book uses Lincoln’s writings and biography, including a vast range of details unknown to non-scholars, to illustrate the key propositions, applications, and challenges of democracy. The context, of course, is the lead up, causes, and fallout of the Civil War. Guelzo helps us eavesdrop on Lincoln’s particular struggles, personal and professional, as a frontier American growing up in poverty, as a lawyer, a politician, and ultimately President.
Against present day despair on the part of both progressives and the New Right (p. 16-17), Guelzo presents Lincoln’s faith in democracy, tried and tested in the fires of political strife and war that go far beyond whatever polarization and incivility we think we’re experiencing. In the very first chapter he lays out the “three evidences” of Lincoln’s confidence in democracy: 1) its power to effect economic self-transformation — the hired laborer eventually buys his own tools or land and works for himself, and at length is able to hire yet another to help him; 2) the power of natural right embodied in the Declaration; and 3) the American past — and future, democracy’s vindication and hope for nothing short of “liberating the world.” (p. 19-23)
Guelzo explores the “tenets” of democracy: consent, majority rule (while respecting minories), and law; along with democracy’s “tools”: citizens, elections, and public forums (newspapers, media), tackling Lincoln’s appreciation and application of them across a lifetime of speeches, private conversations, and noteworthy acts. (p. 8-12)
The book closes with the question: What if Lincoln Had Lived? Not only, what would the immediate effects have been on post-war Reconstruction, but what would be the future trajectory of democracy itself?
The book closes with a fine commendation:
A Lincolnian democracy is a democracy which embodies Lincoln’s own virtues — resilience, humility, persistence, work, and dignity. Through the example of Lincoln, democracy can claim to offer people, not only order, but decency, even a kind of quiet and unostentatious grandeur…
Even in its faults, then and now, democracy is still the best method for people to live lives free from domination and exploitation, at peace with themselves and with others, embodying “a progressive improvement in the condition of all men… and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all peoples of all colors everywhere.” Lincoln, then, was not wrong to trust that “our principle, however baffled, or delayed, will finally triumph… Men will pass away — die — die, politically and naturally; but the principle will live, and live forever.”
And there would be neither slaves, nor masters.
Source: Our Ancient Faith, p. 171
Highly recommended.
P.S. — It’s not my intention to link so much from Substack. I subscribe to dozens, if not hundreds, of other RSS feeds, which I scan for interesting articles. But you know? What captivates me these days tends to be on Substack. Not to mention, I can so easily re-stack, comment, or otherwise add my 2 cents, and sometimes authors reply!
Neat lineup, thanks for including me!