#22 - The Nature of Knowledge and Security
or at least a headline that touches a bit on everything....
Soil is Rad 🤙
“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” - Paul Harvey (source)
Mankind has reach heights of incredible technological prowess. We have harnessed the energy from split atoms, for both good and incredible ill. We have broken free of our planet’s gravity and atmosphere, if only for brief moments. We have peaked into the incredible depths of our oceans and seen creatures no previous generation could have imagined.
We are also well on our way to destroying the soil we, and most other life on this planet, need to survive.
You may have heard of mycelium. These are tiny white filaments found in the soil. They look a bit like roots, but much smaller and more numerous in their interconnections. These filaments come together in an incredible network which allow for other plants to survive times of drought, extreme temperatures, poor soils conditions, disease, and more.
The first time I can recall having heard of the mycelial network was from a documentary about fungi. Among dozens of fascinating tidbits, the film explained that a mycelial network could span hundreds of miles and act as a kind of communications system of the forest, directing nutrients and water stores where they are most needed.
The highest profile reference to mycelial networks I’ve ever encountered came from Star Trek: Discovery. In that show, the network is said to permeate subspace just as actual mycelial networks permeate the soil on Earth. The network is used by the Starship Discovery as a mechanism to travel across the galaxy virtually instantaneously. It’s a bit of a silly stretch, sure, but the real thing is every bit as fascinating, if more mundane.
Mycelium are the vegetation of mycorrhizal fungi, an organism which formed a mutually beneficial relationship with plants on Earth about 460 million years ago. That relationship maintains to this day for over 90% of all terrestrial plants.
That feels a bit like a recitation of bland fact, so let me pause a moment to say it another way. A single fungus—mycorrhizae—has a relationship to basically every plant you have ever or will ever encounter, and that relationships aids in the continued existence of those plants through an incredible subterranean web of data and material transfer.
If that doesn’t blow your mind at least a bit, I must admit I’m sad but not defeated. How about this?:
Several miles of these ultra-fine [mycelium] filaments can be present in less than a thimbleful of soil.
A thimbles fits on your danged thumb!
Unfortunately, we aren’t doing right by this organism, and it’s to our determent as well as that of the rest of the living world. Modern man-made environments are deeply hostile to beneficial soil conditions in large part because they destroy mycelial networks. (There are many other reason as well, all of which are further exacerbated by our destroying mycelium.)
Repeated studies of landscape projects in urban areas have shown that mycorrhizal relationships struggle to take hold. Reasons for this include compaction, tilling, erosion, grading, topsoil removal, tillage, pollution, and more. A lacking mycelial network means intensive care is required to maintain the plant life, including the application of fertilizers, pesticides, and a ton of water. The end result is soil that is little better than sterile dirt, and a water table that slowly becomes poison.
Why? Because, honestly, fertilizer is pretty awful. Yes, they are the reason that we can sustain the population of the planet today. They stimulate top growth and allow for vast food production not possible before the 20th century. Unfortunately, they do so without propagating root structure, which leads to productive plants with very little resilience. A minor drought or a particularly hot day can kill them. Now to be clear, I don’t want to sound sympathetic to ecofascism. There is never an excuse for fascism, and the only proper use of a fascist is as a punching bag. I’m simply calling out the fact that fertilizers feed people at a significant cost.
Since mycorrhizal fungi don’t distribute on the wind, and because we have segmented our world into plots of land demarcated and divided by cement, the only solution is that we have to reintroduce the fungi ourselves and take incredible care to allow the soil to regenerate. Or we could tear up a lot of the concrete and asphalt and allow the natural world to connect itself. Land bridges are becoming more of a thing, to the benefit of wildlife, but not nearly at the rate we need.
A final takeaway: Sample your soil, send it to your local agriculture extension office (if you live in the US; elsewhere, find your equivalent), and figure out how to turn it into the living medium it outta be. It’s friggin’ awesome.
Kim Very Much Possible
It’s been nearly a year and a half since last I recommended Kim Stanley Robinson’s work, so this is long overdue.
I recently read Robinson’s The Years of Rise and Salt (2002) after tearing through a rather bad alternate history novel—The Gate of the Worlds by Robert Silverberg—for book club. The two books share a simple premise: what if the Black Death had truly decimated the European population instead of killing only 1/4→1/3?
The similarities end there for the most part, including that the above premise is deceptively simple in Robinson’s work and exactly that simple in Silverberg’s.
The Years of Rice and Salt is broken into ten parts, each separated by time, place, and characters but for one exception: each contains characters with names beginning “B,” “K,” and later “I.” These characters are linked by aspects of personality, as they are each subsequent reincarnations of their alliterative predecessors. Each section ends with these characters reunited in the bardo ahead of the next turn of the wheel.
Settings start off in Asia and the Middle East but eventually make it to Europe, Africa, and the Americas as many major historical milestones hew more of less closely to the actual historical record. This decisions is driven in large part by Robinson’s aversion to the great man theory of history, but also by a recognition that terms like “The Dark Ages” are deeply Eurocentric. What is thought of as a time of darkness for Europeans was also the “Islamic Golden Age.” In Robinson’s novel, the resulting power and people vacuum in Europe allowed that period to extend out beyond the 14th century.
The book is told linearly with the 10 parts taking place between 1405 and the mid-21st century. During that period, we watch the expansion of the Muslim world, the waxing and waning of China, and an altogether different fate for indigenous Americans (a word not found in this story).
Robinson uses religious concepts central to these various peoples to explore the progressive social and individual evolution of humanity in a way that I will be unpacking for years. What struck me in particular is just how well this novel paired with The Dawn of Everything, about which I wrote a piece a few months back. Despite coming out 2 decades earlier, Robinson’s novel seems to approach similar anthropological, archeological, and philosophical ends. He captures so well the sense of play that can be seen in human organization when taken in from 10,000 feet. He allows for the possibility of a natural evolution in social development only to deeply undermine any conception of fatalism. He manages to tell a story about social history over the course of 600+ years while still rooting it in the lives of diverse and intricate characters. He’s even able to track the development of social movements, like personal religiosity or feminism, along their novel lines given the very different cultural attitudes present throughout the story.
I find it truly difficult to present any one argument for why this book is so fantastic. It is a deeply respectful book which asks interesting, if deceptively simple, questions in a subgenre know for schlocky, ill-conceived, and often racist fantasy. And on top of that, it manages to make one reassess received historical narratives better than most fiction. Robinson is really a treasure.
Sometimes Nature Does It Better
Thanks to McKinley Valentine, I recently learned about manuka honey, which can be used as a naturally antibiotic wound dressing.
She did a great job of teasing out science fact from folk fiction, and I encourage you (yet again) to check out her excellent newsletter if you haven’t already. To provide a quick summary, bees that eat the pollen of the manuka flower produce a honey that works on antibiotic-resistant infections.
It can’t withstand digestion, so it works primarily as a wound dressing. Thus far, scientists have been unable to make superbugs resistant to it, something easily done with most other antibiotics.
‘Natural’ is by no means always better, but sometimes it super is!
Ephemera Punchcard’s First Column
I developed an interest in IT security long ago for two primary reasons.
First, I grew up at just the right time to get to see the the incredible explosion of home computer use while still recalling a time when Teddy Ruxpin and the Talkboy were the pinnacle of technology in my home, and I’ve long held what I consider to be a healthy skepticism of government. (Note: do not read this as being anti-government, but rather cognizance of government overreach and corruption.)
For those unfamiliar with those toys, both used magnetic cassette tapes. They were awesome but, from the vantage of 2022, rather rudimentary and totally analog.
The second reason is that I slightly exaggerated my computer knowledge to kick off a career in IT/tech nearly 18 years ago and kinda needed an early field expertise. IT security was the first things that really excited me.
These days, even the tech layperson sees in so many major news stories a call for greater knowledge, concern, and implementation of IT security measures. At least since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on NSA spying in 2013, people have begun to see a need to better understand how to protect themselves online.
More recently, I’ve seen a call for greater knowledge of operational security (OPSEC) as well. In part, I think this came about from the threats of doxxing and a general feeling that what once was (or at least felt) secure no longer does. More recently, the news that SCOTUS will almost certainly overturn Roe imminently (and may have already by publication) has many terrified that accessing the healthcare they require may put their lives in danger.
My partner suggested this might be a good place for me to share my thoughts. I don’t know as much about OPSEC as I’d like, but I’m eager to learn, so maybe we can do that together. Consider this my first column.
What is IT Security?
Cisco, the massive networking corporation, provides us with a tidy little definition. IT Security is “a set of cybersecurity strategies that prevents unauthorized access to organizational assets such as computers, networks, and data.”
Boiling that down a bit further, it is strategies for making sure our digital information is accessed only by those who should have it and in ways that we have specifically allowed for.
What is Operational Security?
Here, Fortinet puts it best: “Operational security (OPSEC) is a security and risk management process that prevents sensitive information from getting into the wrong hands.“
Because I have spent far more of my life in a digital world than the solely analog one that proceeded it, I sometimes think of OPSEC as bringing principles of IT security into the physical world.
You may note that I said “physical world,” and not “real world.” This is because, for me, an important first step in ITSec & OPSEC is treating the digital world as the real, tangibly important thing it is. A sufficient security posture is absolutely predicated on abandoning the idea of the online world as something lesser or more trivial than the physical world we inhabit.
And understanding what a security posture is, and how to develop one, will be the topic of next month’s security column.
I was completely swept with this months news and writing. I am also a devotee of mycelial networks!! I'm surprised you didn't mention the aspen stand in CO? With its mycelial network and the DNA that shows the trees are all related, very closely to each other and is considered the largest living organism in the country as I think it covers 100 acres? the entire state? world?( Can think of others). Thank you for reading recs focussing on Kim Stanley Robinson but I don't know McKinley Valentine. Nature observer? Yours truly, KM.