Planetary Coffee. Column in Computerra Online #18

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Dmytro Shabanov
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Coffee and Chthonic Forces: Planetary Coffee and the Third Nature

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{ "title": "Coffee and Chthonic Forces. Planetary Coffee and the Third Nature", "summary": "", "body": "Dmytro Shabanov\n\nCoffee and Chthonic Forces. Planetary Coffee and the Third Nature\n\nColumn in ComputerraOnline #17\nColumn in ComputerraOnline #18\nColumn in ComputerraOnline #19\n\nThis is already the fourth column of reflections over a cup of coffee. In the first one, we listed the sources of energy in a cup of coffee; in the second, we described the powerful energy processes accompanying the production of our food; in the third, we discussed the mechanisms that ensure the elemental diversity of this drink. And we started this conversation, as you remember, to \"dig up\" the unique ecological features of our species.\n\nReaders suggested in the comments - either to discuss the energy used by sailing ships to transport coffee from one continent to another, or to take into account the energy costs of logistics. \"Across the sea, a calf is a halfpenny, and a ruble is a ferry.\" It is clear that the share of costs for moving overseas goods is quite high. But is there something unique behind it?\n\nWhat is the transportation of coffee from India or South America to Europe? Moving (with energy costs, of course) accumulated but not consumed resources from one local population to another. Do any other species have something similar?\n\nThe accumulation of resources in other species is certainly present. The movement of individuals who have consumed resources in one place to another place is also present. There is also the transfer of resources from one individual to another within a population. Examples?\n\nWhat do jays scattering acorns, squirrels hanging mushrooms to dry on trees, shrikes impaling killed mice on thorns, or hamsters stacking hay do? They accumulate resources. It happens that the collected supplies will not go to the one who collected them, but to someone more agile or more aggressive. But there is no transfer of unspent resources here.\n\nThe seeds of dandelions or poplars, thanks to a light \"parachute,\" will fly where the wind takes them. They will bring with them a valuable resource: nutrients in an amount sufficient for germination. Salmon rise to spawn in fast streams with a rocky bottom. They spend the energy of ocean resources stored in their bodies on the ascent. Their caviar (red caviar!) contains a supply of resources that ensure the first stages of development of their offspring in relatively poor fresh water. There is a movement of resources, but transfer - only from parents to offspring.\n\nThe emperor penguin, which travels a significant distance across the Antarctic ice from the colony to the ocean, eats fish and then walks back to vomit part of the collected food to its chick (or maybe to its female). A female sperm whale, which dives to a depth of two kilometers, catches squid and fish there, and then rises to the surface and feeds her cub with a concentrate of the received energy - milk.\n\nIn a colony of vampire bats, an individual that has drunk the blood of a representative of a suitable species of mammals can share part of its prey with a less fortunate neighbor. Probably, a vampire bat that was ready to vomit part of its blood to a hungry neighbor may someday receive similar help from him. But these are all phenomena of interaction between individuals within a population.\n\nBut in humans, there are plenty of examples where there is accumulation, movement, and transfer of resources at the same time. Such relationships can be called different: sometimes humanitarian aid, sometimes contributions, but most often - trade or exchange. Commodity-money relations, economy, and foreign policy - phenomena whose roots go back to this unique feature of our species. When did such interaction appear? A very long time ago.\n\nI am currently located near the city of Zmiyiv, a district center in the Kharkiv region. The Seversky Donets River, a right tributary of the Don, flows along a wide floodplain, cut by oxbow lakes and floodplain lakes. The river winds, undermining either one or the other shore. Where it narrows, on a fast current at a depth of several meters, there are accumulations of heavy objects washed out of the eroded shores. Bones and artifacts from different times lie together. The age has to be determined not by the features of occurrence, but by the technological features of different cultures.\n\nFor example, there is a lot of easily recognizable bronze-age ceramics here. My former student, and now colleague, Gleb Mazepa, even found half of a pot (about five or six thousand years old) with burnt, charred porridge. By the structure of the burnt porridge, a specialist established that it was made from emmer: a grain that was widespread in these places several thousand years ago.\n\nOne of the frequent finds here is stone knives and scrapers. There are not only finished products, but also numerous chips that prove that these products were made here. There are no mountain rocks from which knives were made in the vicinity; the nearest deposit is Mount Kremenet, located in another district center of the Kharkiv region, Izium. Along the route connecting Zmiyiv and Izium, there are 113 kilometers between them. Even if stone blanks for products were transported (against the current!) along the winding Seversky Donets, this distance was quite serious.\n\nBy the way, it is likely that some of the blanks came to the vicinity of Zmiyiv not from Izium, but from even more distant places. Where the stone was mined, and where they made knives from it, different groups of people lived, so we see manifestations of both inter-population exchange and movement of important resources!\n\nWhere I am now, there are no reliable finds of remains of other human species except Homo sapiens. But similar features of distribution are characteristic of tools of other, more ancient species. This is an old feature common to us and our closest relatives.\n\nHow did it appear? The first step was the ability to share joint prey within a group. Some types of prey (carrion, which had to be collectively defended from more perfect predators, later - hunting trophies that required the coordinated work of many hunters) required division within the entire tribe. Something less essential a man shared between himself, his woman, and their children (you haven't forgotten about \"resources in exchange for sex,\" have you?). Apparently, humans' ability to exchange expanded: from food exchange to exchange of non-edible resources (for example, materials and products made from them); from exchange within one group to exchange with representatives of other groups.\n\nLook around you. You are reading this column on the screen of some electronic device. Where was it made? Where were its components delivered from? How does your clothing expand the list of territories that serve you? Jewelry? Glasses and dental materials in your teeth? The transport that ensures your movement? Each of us exploits the resources of the entire planet!\n\nIs there something fundamentally new in this? Consider that any animal that breathes atmospheric oxygen gets it from the atmosphere, where the products of photosynthesis of plants of the entire planet accumulate and mix. Is a person in the same position? In relation to the atmosphere - yes, but in other respects - our position is special. The number of any population of any species, except ours, is limited by the resources of its habitat (for migratory species - the totality of habitats within which they migrate).\n\nHumans are different. There are settlements like Antarctic stations - existing due to imported resources, a significant part of which is produced in another hemisphere. Moreover, residents of an ordinary city inhabit a habitat that does not provide them with most resources. Food comes to the city from agrocenoses, water - from a more or less extensive catchment basin, energy and materials - from almost the entire planet.\n\nOur species is the only global species. Despite all its disunity, despite the \"golden billion\" that is getting richer and the \"wooden\" billion that is hungry, global humanity exploits the resources of the planet as a whole. For all other species, each population exploits the resources of its habitat.\n\nHow does this affect population regulation? For all other species, the carrying capacity of the environment (an ecological term that means the population size corresponding to the available resources) is determined independently for each habitat. The number of one population may decline, while another may grow. Our carrying capacity is determined by the capacity of the biosphere. Not only have we escaped the limitations associated with the current intensity of photosynthesis, thanks to the energy of fossil fuels. Thanks to the ability to exchange resources, we have gone beyond the spatial limitations of our habitats, having entwined the entire planet with highways for the transportation of almost everything we need to exist.\n\nThe depletion of resources in one habitat does not threaten the existence of the vast majority of species, because most of them inhabit several or many habitats. Species represented by one local population are considered critically endangered. Our species is represented by one global population. Is this good or bad? This is a fact...\n\nHow nice it is to drink Bolivian coffee brewed in a Turkish cezve and poured into an old Bohemian porcelain cup! The sugar is cane, Cuban; the lemon is Caucasian; the gas is Russian, the water is Ukrainian. On the screen of a South Korean netbook (most of the details are Chinese), there are fresh news from all over the world and a letter from an old friend, half-Georgian from Kazakhstan, whom I once met in Ashgabat and who now lives in Australia... But let's not get ahead of ourselves: both information exchange and demographic mobility require special discussion. That's all for now..." }

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Coffee and Chthonic Forces: Planetary Coffee and the Third Nature

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