Esau and Jacob revisited

 

Advance warning: This post will speculate about events in the Bible and if that will raise your blood pressure then don't read this post.

A few operating premises:

The events in the narrative of Esau and Jacob happened EXACTLY the way it was recorded.

Events similar to the narrative of Esau and Jacob happened scores of time in other places, other families, slightly other times.

The events in the narrative of Esau and Jacob might not have happened exactly WHEN it was said to have happened. Time in Genesis jumps around in a non-linear fashion. Some events even happen twice (two narratives of Noah and the ark, for instance).

The first two books in the Bible: Genesis and Exodus are more concerned with defining the Jewish people and their relationship with THE ONE WHO IS than as an Owner's Manual for moral behavior.

Playing with time

Suppose that you were an anthropologist from a culture that had never encountered the Judeo-Christian tradition and you found a copy of the Bible in an un-sequenced form. Furthermore, suppose that as you were trying to make sense of the Book, you put the story of Cain-and-Abel next to the story of Esau-and-Jacob. That makes sense, right? Both are stories about brothers who are in competition.

Suppose, just for now, our intrepid anthropologist switches the order. He places Esau-and-Jacob before Cain-and-Abel.

How would an anthropologist compare-and-contrast those stories?

Advancing technology

He would say that Esau was a throw-back or an atavism to the hunter-gatherer method of collecting food. He would say that Jacob represented the next step of technology, pastoralism or animal husbandry.

He would speculate that Jacob's mother imported the technology and that Esau was too proud to listen to her but that she found a willing pupil in Jacob. He would also speculate that the distaff side would appreciate the greater food security of the pastoral life and discount the glory of the hunt so honored by the men.

Isaac allied with Esau because Isaac understood hunting and gathering and was leery of that new-fangled shepherd business.

Finally, the anthropologist would interpret God's choosing of Jacob over Esau as God approving of the new form of food production.

Lastly, Esau being banished to the dry lands was a simple fact. Marginal producers get pushed to marginally productive lands.

The story of Cain-and-Abel is similar. Cain Abel represents the pastoral mode of production and Abel Cain represents grain-and-vegetable production. There is a natural conflict between the two. Sheep cannot be allowed access to fields near harvest or they will trample all of the grain. That becomes a big deal if the grain fields are close to the oasis where the sheep can be watered.

God's punishment of Cain was a warning to the other tillers-of-the-soil to not take vengeance on their pastoral brothers, even if they were far more numerous then the shepherds and had entrenched positions around watering holes. A culture that can extract resources from pastoral AND tilling of the soil is stronger and more resilient than a society that relies on just one mode.

All that back-stabby stuff

The anthropologist would write that off as the messiness of establishing workable law when there is no viable precedent.

Does that apply in modern times?

You bet. When I was growing up everybody assumed wealth was created by that assembly line that spat out one new Oldsmobile a minute.

Today, "wealth" is created by purchasing viable businesses and strip-mining their assets, borrowing huge sums of money against their "good will" and then passing those monies through a firewall to a holding company. Then, the board-of-directors of the holding company pack toxic assets into the shell of the zombie company, tow it to the Sargasso Sea and pull the bilge plugs.

The company doesn't even need to make or sell so much as a single ballpoint pen to "create wealth".

In the case of the most recent election, the votes were created with the same cyber legerdemain as the "wealth" in the previous example, Biden will be scuttled in the Sargasso Sea and Harris is the holding company.

Presented without comment

 

What price for a birth-right and a blessing?

 

If you turn to the Bible for guidance during these tumultuous times, you might find yourself opening the Good Book to the story of Esau and Jacob in Genesis Chapters 25-through-36.

The opening gambit of the narrative has Esau (the oldest son) trading away his birthright for a bowl of "pottage", quite likely a bowl of hot lentils seasoned with herbs to his younger, fraternal twin Jacob.

Slightly later in the narrative, Jacob reveals himself to be a masterful trickster when, aided by his mother, Jacob fools his father (Isaac) into giving him the blessing intended for Esau.

Jacob then decamps for far-away lands to avoid Esau killing him.

A bit later we learn that Esau had won his mother's disfavor by marrying two, local Canaanite women.

While away from his ancestral home, Jacob enters a mutually toxic relationship with Laban, the man who becomes his father-in-law. For the next twenty years Jacob and Laban try to screw each other over in the  most intricate and back-stabby ways.

Finally, Jacob and his camp and the animals he claimed he was owed head back to his ancestral homelands. Jacob does not trust Esau. Jacob's children lay a village to waste, killing all the men. Jacob moves on.

Esau ended up in what is now southern Jordan thus fulfilling the blessing Isaac had for him

“See, far from the fertile earth

will be your dwelling;

far from the dew of the heavens above! (Tafilah, Jordan averages 7" of precipitation a year)

By your sword you will live,

and your brother you will serve;

But when you become restless,

you will throw off his yoke from your neck."

Looking at the story, it defies easy identification of who we are most likely to identify with.

Are we Esau, hyper-masculine but simple of mind with little ability to delay gratification? Are we Jacob the crafty fox who is favored by God for no merit of his own?

Are we Laban or Isaac?

It is a strange mix. The leftists entered a marriage of convenience with Chinese actors and hard-core Marxists. In that way they are like Esau marrying the Canaanite women because they were readily available. On the other hand, they were slippery and underhanded and devious much like Laban or possibly Jacob.

Perhaps the only useful thing that can be filtered out of the story is that memories are long and the damage multi-generational. The theft of, or auctioning-off of somebody else's birthright to the highest bidder means that the thief must watch his back for more than twenty years.

One smaller lesson is that there is no honor among scoundrels. Jacob prevailed because God had chosen him. Cute tricks make cute stories but without God on your side you will surely fail...eventually.

Creating resilient ecosystems through strategic choices in Genus

 

Tallamy's study included sawfly larvae in with caterpillars.

Douglas Tallamy of University of Delaware makes an interesting case that not all trees contribute the same amount to the resilience of an ecosystem. Tallamy and his team investigated the hypothesis at the genus level. That is, they did not care what species of oak they were looking at, they were looking at the fact that it was in the "Oak" genus. Genus is the next step up in coarseness from species when looking at how life is categorized.

Key Point: A node's contribution to a system's resilience is related to the number of links to other nodes. A Swiss Army Knife adds more resilience than an ice-pick.

Their premise is that caterpillars are the largest primary consumers of green plants in the ecosystem and are very well documented. They created a sub-set of 83 counties that provided a diagonal slice through the United States and provided representation of different climates. They dredged up academic studies and totaled up the number of butterfly species that made use of a given genus within each county.

They found that the data looked much like a Pareto distribution. Some genus like Oak, Willow and Prunus were favored by a broad spectrum of butterfly species in nearly every county. The vast number of other plant genus were consumed by zero, one or two species.

They used their methodology to create a defensible quantification of HOW MUCH a given genus member contributes to the resilience of a given ecosystem.

The list:

1. Oak
2. Willow
3. Cherries and Plums
4. Pine
5. Aspen and Cottonwood
6. Birch
7. Blueberries, Cranberries 
8. Maples
9. Hickory and Pecan
10. Apple
11. Elm
12. Alder
13. Basswood
14. Hawthorn
15. Raspberries and Blackberries (Brambles)
    
16. Chestnut and Chinquipin
17. Spruce
18. Douglas Fir
19. Ash
20. Viburnum
    

How might this be useful?
Suppose you inherited a piece of property that floods and was completely filled with Silver Maple. Properties like that is not uncommon in this part of the world.

While Maple is in the middle of the list it would not be hard to add Willows, Hawthorn, Brambles and Viburnum. All four of those would be likely to spontaneously occur if a large enough of a patch of maple was harvested to ensure the sun hit the forest floor and that there was a gradient from very wet-to-damp.

With a little bit of work and money, even more genus could be folded into the mix. The majority of the forest might still be Silver Maple but the insect food-base for bird species would be vastly more "buffered" against catastrophe AND one would expect a large increase in both numbers of bird species nesting and their reproductive success.

Or consider if you were harvesting firewood from a woodlot. You would diminish the resilience of the woodlot less if you removed the last Hackberry or Honeylocust than if you removed the last oak tree. 

Weaknesses of the study

The term "primary grazers" is a bit misleading. The majority of vegetation does not get grazed. Rather, it falls to the ground and is either decayed or directly consumed by worms, beetles, etc. Even the material that decays are subject to consumption by beetles/worms as fungi.

Hat-tip to Lucas Machias for calling this article to my attention.

Fake News Friday: The Cleveland what???

 

 

Representatives from Islamabad informed Cleveland that nobody would get too torqued if they changed the name of their baseball team to the Cleveland Pakastani as long as Cleveland paid for the privilege.

STOP THE PRESSES: Severe side effects of Covid vaccine reported

Electoral Dysfunction reported in more than seven states!

Sawdust

 

The exposed face of the sawdust I was shoveling out of the back of my truck. I think it is pretty in a very subtle kind of way.

I noticed bundles of wood slabs for sale along a side road while I was out-and-about.

Investigating, I found a crew of gentlemen cutting logs into lumber.

After a short conversation and handing the crew-boss an embarrassingly small amount of money, I had permission to fill my truck with sawdust to use as mulch. His crew was busy. It was up to me and my trusty scoop-shovel to do the job.

Sawdust make for every easy-to-spread mulch and if you are lucky it is available in very large quantities. The downside is that it can blow away if it is in a windy spot. Another disadvantage is that it steals nitrogen if you mix it with the soil. The key is to use it for mulch ON TOP of the soil.

Most of what the crew was milling was cottonwood and silver maple with a few other bottomland species mixed in. That sawdust should be fine. I would avoid black walnut, if possible.

Pro-tip: Milling lumber is heavy work. The young men peeled down to short-sleeve shirts as they worked and it was 30 degrees out.

The crew-boss agreed to pull my truck out of the muck if I got stuck. I decided to get on his good side. After shaking hands on the price, I pulled a bag of candy out of my truck: Snickers bars, Werther's Caramels, chewing gum. Did I mention the crew consisted of young men.

As I was buttoning up the first load, a couple of the guys came over. I think they wanted to check out how full the truck was. One of the young men informed me that the crew preferred donuts; specifically custard-filled long-johns and maple-or-fudge-frosting covered cinnamon rolls. Good to know. The crew might as well get what they prefer.

Had I gotten stuck, I don't think the crew-boss would have left me dangling for an hour. Besides, the boss was more then willing to let me have a business card in case I need more sawdust. The crew moves from job-to-job. Next week they move to a job about fifty miles north of this one.

I ended up moving three loads of sawdust. I was dragging by the time I finished shoveling in the third load of sawdust. It doesn't look heavy but the springs were pretty well squatted down by the time it was full. I will be dragging the next few days.

Covid update

NEGATIVE!