Constants

I am taking an online class on Ocean Systems. It makes my head hurt. I am not a scientist. While science fascinates and amazes me, it feels too fixed in many ways. I like to think about loftier ideas. Here is my response to this week's discussion question: Mangrove trees are considered to be one of the few true plants of the ocean. Why?

I’ve been trying to recall constants in my life – things that stay the same and only vary slightly over time. I can’t think of any. The only constant is change. I’m not sure who said that, but it strikes me as profound – until this morning when I read in my assigned reading for my Oceanography class that the chemical make up of the ocean is relatively constant. Relatively in the sense that it does change, but the changes are miniscule. The temperature, for instance, varies only 5-10 degrees in any given spot. So water at the polar icecaps stays the same temperature and though it may vary from the temperature of the tropics, the tropical oceans stay basically the same temperature as well.

So it is with their chemical composition. Of course, that constant seems to be in danger. That’s the great debate. How much are we changing this constant? If you think about it, we are the only species who significantly changes our environment versus adapting to it like most species on the planet. If it’s cold out, we make warm sweaters or better yet, build houses with central heating systems. Those heating systems require intricate networks of energy in order to work, but we’ve mastered that as well. Need heat? Flip a switch, push a button, and the whole system swings into action. While we have some remarkable internal adaptations, we have constructed for ourselves even more extraordinary external adaptations.

Adaptation by other species is much more internal. There aren’t plants, for instance, that in response to the cold build elaborate external structures to protect themselves or their entire “family.” Instead, they internally adapt, they insulate or die back or store their energy in the roots. They figure out ways to survive the cold and then genetically pass that information onto the next generation of plants. If they don’t adapt, they die and like a cleaver to the artery, the ability to pass on that genetic genius dies with it.

But what happens if human external adaptations mess it up for everything else? For instance, what if our adaptation for traveling great distances – cars, planes, space shuttles – depletes the layers of the protective atmosphere or even worse, disturbs the once-believed constant of the oceans?

The mid-west is once again under water. Record flooding of the Mississippi River and its tributaries has buried small towns and large cities built with our external adaptations on the flood plains of the river. But the Mississippi has flooded for thousands of years, long before humans built their homes and farms and factories along its banks. In fact, the Mississippi’s path has been altered by human civilization so it can be argued that the flooding is simply the river’s attempt to run its natural course. It was our ego that thought that somehow we could construct safe-havens from the flooding waters. Through our external adaptations we have altered a relative constant – the flow of the Mississippi – with disastrous results (though mostly disastrous for humans, which in turn, may damage the surrounding ecosystems through human pollution swirling into the flood waters.)

I suppose none of this really has anything to do with the assignment for the week – Mangroves are one of the few true plants that live in the oceans. Why? – but after reading the assigned essays and the related pages in the textbook, I’ve been thinking about the purpose of adaptation and our inability as a species to understand the functions and benefits of it.

Simply stated, mangroves are one of the few true plants that live in the ocean because they have adapted to the conditions of ocean living in a variety of ways. First, they can live in both fresh and saltwater conditions simultaneously and exclusively. Next, they can extract fresh water from the seas and have a variety of ways to dispose of that salt – some filter it through their roots, others excrete it from their leaves, and still others store the salt in their older leaves or bark that sheds with them. Third, they have an elaborate root system that allows the plant to “breathe” during high tides and stabilize the tree in shallow, loose soil. Finally, they have seeds that germinate on the tree allowing them to “drop and grow” at a rapid rate, hardy enough to survive the harsh and fluctuating conditions in which they must thrive.

While I find all of this fascinating, what truly amazes me is how scientists have learned all of this and still humans refuse to live by these elaborate, complex, and multi-layered laws of nature. Instead, we have spent a great deal of time and energy circumventing them, separating ourselves from nature in hopes of mastering it somehow and avoiding its pitfalls. For instance, we spend a great deal of time and energy converting the deserts into a habitat viable for humans. The consequences of this conversion are dramatic and devastating to the environment.

I once taught a college Global Issues course in which I started the class with this assignment: How would your lives change if all that you consumed could only be obtained in a 10 mile radius of where you lived? The next week’s assignment was: How would living in such a way impact the environment – both on land and in the oceans? While many students struggled to wrap their brains around the idea that there would be no shopping malls, no grocery stores, and no cell phones most of them came to the understanding that their lives would be dramatically different and their impact on the earth and oceans significantly less. Most of them also argued that this “modification” to their lives was counter to their nature, counter to human nature that was genetically predisposed to explore, expand, and reproduce in the way that it had and would continue to do. The creation and marketing of bottled water was, in fact, our evolutionary genius at work.

I was pondering all of this while reading about water molecules and ocean salinity and even more so as I read about mangroves and their astonishing adaptations. It seems to me that, as a species we have fooled ourselves into believing one of two things. First, that we are exempt from the laws of nature by our own brilliance and ingenuity and second, that the principle tenets of evolution justify and condone our exemption from the laws of nature.

We have much to learn from the mangrove forests. On a practical level they are one of the many barometers of how detrimental human progress can be. As hurricanes and cyclones threaten coastal towns, as our oceans grow more and more polluted, and as other species that depend upon the sophisticated ecosystems live at the edge of extinction, we find ourselves questioning our destabilizing impact on the environment. On a more theoretical and perhaps more existential level, the destruction of the mangrove forests and the subsequent ripple effect this will have on the earth’s environment as a whole, the mangrove forests offer us countless and pertinent lessons in areas we are just now exploring – sustainability, climate change, and balance.

In the human world there appear to be few if any constants, but if we see ourselves as a part of larger body of life than perhaps we could come to understand the brilliance of evolutionary adaptability as a constant of sorts. Metaphorically, it might not be too late to rise to the evolutionary genius of the mangrove tree with our roots planted firmly and extensively in both the saltwater of the oceans and the freshwater of the earth – living with versus living in contradiction to that which surrounds and sustains us.