I surmise you are somewhat inquisitive and that your curiosity separates you from those who would limit themselves by their absorption in daily affairs—if such people (devoid of innate inquisitiveness) exist. That there are times when you can cruise through your days without anxiety over or inquisitiveness about the “nature” of life, I take for granted. If you spent all your time in contemplation, you would ignore fulfilling needs imposed by the mere act of living: Acquiring food and eating, for example. Although I sometimes shop at Walmart and therefore might be included in the following category, I don’t hesitate to say that there are Walmart shoppers who do cruise through many of their days without asking themselves about the “nature” of life. Does that mean that if Socrates were alive, he would not shop at Walmart? No, but between shopping trips, he would, I think, think. And his thinking would not be about goods and their costs, not be about fashion or “as-seen-on-TV” inventions. But, I’m guessing since I know nothing about Socrates save what Plato writes. Anyway, I continue to think that you are always on a quest for meaning and insight, my thinking derived from your presence on this website. Not that I believe I am necessarily “an insightful person” whose conclusions you seek, but rather, as I indicate on the title page of this website, a thought-instigator whose ramblings serve as points of departure for your own insights.
 
So, given my assumption about your inquisitiveness, I surmise, also, that you are aware of the current goings-on in 2020: A pandemic and a pandemic-driven downturn in the world’s economy, political upheaval in Hong Kong and elsewhere, social turmoil in Europe and the United States, the crush of migrants driven by wars and terrorist organizations and by the promise of better places to live, and by numerous scandals and intrigues that run across the spectrum of humanity: Rich and poor, famous and infamous, religious and nonreligious, and royal and common. You’ve managed to keep all this compartmentalized sufficiently enough to allow your innate inquisitiveness to emerge.
 
Your awareness of current events and problems makes you think of that famous opening of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” And as an insightful person, in your wisdom you know that all times are similar to the time described by Charles Dickens.
 
Some of your less insightful contemporaries might think, however, that these are atypical or abnormal times. Maybe these times are all bad, all the “worst of times” akin to a teenager’s first romantic breakup. There is the pandemic, of course, and all that aforementioned political, economic, and social turmoil. Actually, Dickens nailed it: All times deviate from “typical times” because each person is the center of a universe that began not with the Big Bang, but rather with his or her life—with your life.
 
What, we might ask under the lingering influence of Freud and Jung, is “typical” or “normal” anyway? Are there “types of times,” some being “atypical” or abnormal and others, “normal”? Only in the generalization we call “history” can we categorize times. In looking back, we find some persons or events that stand out by their influence or impact on “people then” or “people now.” But many “people then” probably never felt any such influence or impact. For each generation there is a mix of times, both the “worst” and the “best.”
 
Was the second decade of the twentieth century a “typical” time? It fostered the Great War that laid the groundwork for WWII. The middle of that decade might be categorized as “turbulent,” bookended pre-war and post-war by the absence of a widespread war. It was, however, even pre-war and post-war a time of war and disease. Remember the Spanish Flu? Or consider the Russian Revolution and the rise of non-monarchial totalitarianism. Or consider that while many under the influence of Marx and Engels sought “egalitarian” socialism, many others sought individual wealth and capitalism. In looking for a “typical time” or “normality,” we gloss over unknown or partially known persons and events and over the interplay between individuals and circumstances. Just as there are too many details and great diversity in our own time that go unconsidered by one group or another, so the detail and diversity of the past went unconsidered by our predecessors.
 
We might call a time “peaceful,” another time “turbulent,” and still another time either “dark” or “enlightened.” All such labels are generalities, of course, maybe even idealizations. Think of the Age of Pericles that we might label an “age of enlightenment.” If it runs from Pericles’ birth to the First Peloponnesian War, it includes, in spite of its famed enlightenment, the condemnation of Socrates. Surely, for Athenians in 400 B.C., this rebellious thinker was disruptive and atypical in their society. He stood trial for his anomalous behavior and thinking and underwent a self-execution the following year.  
 
And in our own atypical times, widespread tension over a pandemic, politics, and societal structure has an obvious media-driven exacerbation. The constant messaging from so many sources is an obstruction to inquisitiveness. If you keep hearing that times are exceptional, you start believing it, and you ignore details—contradictory details. If you think matters can’t be worse than they are, you don’t know history. If you think this year is the worst of times, you ignore that it is also the best of times.  
 
Now, that there have been worse times, exceptionally bad times, is neither a consolation nor a fix. My parents went through the Great Depression and a world war. Their parents went through a great pandemic and world war. There’s no way I can capture either experience; I can say only that some times are similar to other times, but the degree to which the enveloping circumstances alter the lives of individuals is difficult to assess. Think past pandemics with no medical help, seemingly interminable wars like the Thirty Years War or the Hundred Years War, and societal upheaval brought on by massive migrations and the growth of empires.
 
In the long march of humanity every year has been the worst and best of times. Trace the history of the past thousand years that led to your life. Every year saw a war somewhere. Every year saw death by disease. Yet, here you are having made it through the filter of both good and bad. If you think the worst of times are upon us, look not to generalities, but rather to specifics, to the details that you—and maybe only you—can find because or your innate inquisitiveness.

Their stories are well known: Galileo was put in “house arrest” because he said Copernicus was right in saying Earth moved around the Sun; Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake because he said the universe might have no center, that the stars were suns, and that other planets might house life. And now, there’s Peter Ridd. Who?
 
Ridd’s story is well known in Australia, where he lost a job he held for decades because he criticized the “science” associated with global warming, science that said the warming process was killing off the Great Barrier Reef. Ridd, who had studied the reef for 30 some years, claimed that the reef was actually healthy, a contention contrary to popular “reef belief.” Ridd said the popular misconception about reef health was driven by what I term Agenda-Science. The global “warmists” took offense, of course. Ridd’s criticism of his fellow scientists did not sit well at his university. And--would you believe it?—it did not sit well in the Australian courts. What occurred was censure of yet another person who isn’t in the back pocket of the IPCC.
 
I’ve written about climate science before. There’s much to discuss and much to study there. But in a world that has seemingly more journalists making scientific pronouncements than scientists, it’s a bit difficult to outshout the unified faithful mob. The world is probably on the cusp of Common Speak, of one-idea-for-all governing, and of the end—maybe for centuries—of true skepticism. Note to George Orwell: “At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, people are living in your 1984.” And as we know from examples of censored speech in socialist and communist countries of the last century, once a society commits itself to Common Speak, it takes decades at the very least to undo. Generations steeped in the appropriateness of accepted metaphors will only reluctantly give up their notion of how the world works and how science works—or is supposed to work.  
 
Stories of contention between the new One and the old Many are not new. Galileo and Bruno lived the individual’s struggle against entrenched thought. In the twentieth century, decades passed before geologists came to accept Alfred Wegener’s “continental drift” (now known as seafloor spreading).* American geologists actually ridiculed Wegener, using in part as their argument that he was a meteorologist and climatologist and not a “true” geologist while ignoring the fossil and petrological evidence from which he derived his conclusions. Fortunately for Wegener, his many detractors did not have the power of the Inquisition that imprisoned Galileo and burned Bruno. But Wegener, who died before WWII , wasn’t really accepted into “mainstream geoscience” until the 1950s when irrefutable evidence for seafloor spreading began showing up. I suppose there’s an analog in Bruno. He was a monk and a bit of a polymath, not strictly what we might call an astronomer and his contemporaries might term an astrologer. Nevertheless, like Wegener he was a somewhat insightful fellow. With respect to the cosmos, Bruno was definitely way ahead of his time. Rejected in his era, Bruno, if he were alive today, would be delighted with our own era’s discovery of extra-solar planets, and Wegener would know he established one of the most fundamental principles of modern geoscience.
 
Who knows what will happen to Peter Ridd’s contentions? In a world of “cancel culture,” Ridd might fall into the sea of forgotten rebels, his work on reefs expunged from the “science du jour.” The machine of Common Speak and common thinking has been grinding out the dire circumstances that global warming is the cause of every environmental change. Fluctuations in lake levels? Anthropogenic global warming. Melting ice caps? Anthropogenic global warming? Frigid polar vortexes? Anthropogenic global warming? Species extinction? Anthropogenic global warming. Extensive droughts? Anthropogenic global warming. Increased flooding? Anthropogenic global warming. Human migrations? Anthropogenic global warming. Wars? Anthropogenic global warming. Dead reefs? Anthropogenic global warming. Pandemics? Anthropogenic global warming. Years with many hurricanes? Anthropogenic global warming. Years without many hurricanes? Anthropogenic global warming. Asteroids and comets? Yes, in the mind of CNN's Deborah Feyeric, who asked on air if an Asteroid 2012 DA 14 was caused by global warming, probably anthropogenic global warming. The “science” of climate change now permeates the minds of the laity, just as Ptolemy’s cosmology held sway for more than a millennium, such is the status of knowledge about how our world and the cosmos at large works and how a rigorous scientific method yields to popular belief and indoctrination. 
 
It might be true that the planet is warming. So far, that warming amounts to about a degree Celsius rise over a century of record-keeping. It might also be true that on a complex planet beneath a fickle sun, we don’t really have an irrefutable intellectual handle on all ongoing cosmological and terrestrial processes and their subtle and interlocked effects. Is there, for example, a limit on the effect of carbon dioxide because it captures only certain wavelengths of light? If the troposphere warms, will the stratosphere warm, also? Will the troposphere expand and the stratosphere contract? Will a burst of plant growth sequester carbon? Or, will increased forest lands engender soils that release more carbon? What role will ocean currents play in altering climate?  
 
That Agenda-Science and Common Speak confound science seems obvious to me. Worse, the confounding both ruins and elevates careers. Ridd gets ruined; someone else gets elevated. And climate science isn’t the only affected discipline. Try denying the validity of string theory while applying for a physics professorship at a “major” university. There’s no way to test string theory; yet, there are many string theorists, all making a great living by producing complex math in support of their hypotheses—and many of them enjoying the cuisine and repartee at government-funded conferences just as climate scientists enjoy such ego-boosting events.   
 
I was watching an interview of Tim Palmer, a climate scientist, by Sabine Hossenfelder, a popular YouTuber who explains scientific principles.** Palmer, at the end of the interview, brings up migration: Africans and Middle Easterners flooding into Europe and South and Central Americans flooding into the United States. He appears to fault “climate change” for the migrations. Hmnnnn. Has Tim not been watching the news? Does he dismiss the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people by ISIS, al-Qaeda, Syrian democidal gas attacks and bombing, African poverty, governmental incompetence and corruption, and terrorism as causes of such migrations? And what of the poverty in Central America, typically fostered under corrupt governments and drug cartels? Don’t these causes outweigh climate and drive people toward the security and affluence in Europe and the United States? Does the promise of an endless cornucopia of social services in the United States not play a role in driving migration more important than the role played by climate change? No doubt Tim Palmer is an expert in climate science, but to conflate twenty-first migrations and climate seems an oversimplification of political and social realities and an obfuscation. Conflating the migrations of the past two decades with changes in climate just plain misses all the other causes. What climate change occurred in Guatemala in this century that drove thousands to migrate? I’ve been to Guatemala, the “land of eternal spring.” Beautiful country. Magnificent volcanoes. Tons of jade and native artists. Avocadoes everywhere. Coffee, too. Half-millennium old Spanish cities, and millennium-old Mayan ruins. Wonderful, but it houses a suspicious and undereducated people. Migrations? Not because of some radical climate change. Guatemala seems to have suffered that natural event during the Mayan apex. Can anyone say “corrupt government, weak economy, and drug cartels” that followed a thirty-year civil war? And, by the way, guns everywhere, even in the banking district of Guatemala City, so many guns and so many potential criminals, that the police, who might also be corrupt, and the military show up in town centers as daily guards to supplement the many guards paid to stand outside businesses, even restaurants. What to talk “anthropogenic”? What of the human causes of human changes?
 
The problem with “climate science” is that it’s “all over the map” in themes and topics, including political and economic themes. There’s money to be made, monopolies to be established, funding to be had for academics, conferences to attend in exotic places—damn the fossil fuels burned to get there—and egos to support.
 
All those clerics invested in the Ptolemaic system wouldn’t yield their pride to Galileo. Same for those who condemned Giordano Bruno. It took three decades for Wegener’s ideas to inch into the scientific mainstream, spreading, I suppose, as slowly as the Thingvellier Graben in Iceland and the rest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Will Ridd’s reef science be accepted eventually? Maybe, but only a century from now when scuba-diving tourists frolic in the waters among the box jellyfish of the Great Barrier Reef in a time long after his persecution and the deaths of his persecutors. Is it possible that the healthy reef he and others have documented will undergo bleaching? Sure, reefs die off for various causes, including warming waters. But reefs have always died, just as all life-forms undergo catastrophes. Is there some evidence that humans are changing the chemistry of the seas and affecting sea life? Of course. We’ve upset the balance of the food chain by overfishing. But made the Great Barrier Reef die? Not according to Ridd. There’s still a Great Barrier Reef, millions of years in the making with probably quite a few more years left in generations of coral polyps of various species. Could we see the Australian government’s data on the reef? Not today.  
 
I suspect that Common Speak will quash most skeptics as a means of control exerted by politicians and compliant journalists, by scientists unwilling to question their own findings—as the scientific method demands—and by the willing masses who follow along as they have been told. Listen to the language used by those who believe disaster is around the corner: Climate change—once known as “global warming”—is commonly called “an existential threat.” And many use the term, particularly politicians with no scientific training: “But 97% of climate scientists say anthropogenic climate change is a fact.” Is the percentage really that high?*** On what set of documents is that claim based?
 
There will at times be Galileos, Brunos, Wegeners, and Ridds who will suffer censure and even persecution and death as in the case of Bruno. On occasion, their ideas and findings will become mainstream just as today we accept Galileo’s science, Bruno’s extra-solar planets, and Wegener’s movement of the continents. But ideas contrary to the commonly held beliefs of Agenda-Scientists are like the rocks Sisyphus had to push uphill. Contrarians work against the steepness of a mountain of accepted, entrenched thought. Ridd, for example, was awarded $1.2 million by a lower court only to have the judgment overturned by a higher court.**** His effort to push the rock uphill has been Sisyphean. Great effort or long time is required to overcome the gravitational pull of popular Common Speak and common thinking.    
 
*Wegener, Alfred. 1915. Die Enstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane.
 
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fkCo_trbT8   Accessed November 7, 2020. Palmer’s linking climate change to the recent mass migrations comes at the end of the video. Hossenfelder, normally a voice of reason, doesn’t seem to question the premise, but maybe she just ran out of time or cloud space.
 
***Naomi Orestes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewJ6TI8ccAw
 
****https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-22/james-cook-university-can-appeal-unfair-sacking-of-peter-ridd/12481974   Accessed November 7, 2020.  There are YouTube videos on the subject, including an interview or two of Ridd, and there are other articles online about him and his travails. If you want to see him argue his side of the climate issue, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nETKLfJyY9E     Accessed November 7, 2020.

You just have to read this passage. I took it from the October 10, 1846, issue of Scientific American.
 
     It is dangerous for a man of superior ability to find himself thrown upon the world without some regular employment. The restlessness inherent in genius, being thus undirected by any permanent influence, frames for itself occupations out of accidents. Moral integrity sometimes falls a prey to the want of a fixed pursuit, and the man who receives his direction in active life from the fortuitous impulse of circumstances, will be very apt to receive his principles likewise from chance. Genius, under such guidance, attains no noble ends, but resembles rather a copious spring conveyed in a falling aqueduct, where the waters continually escape through the frequent crevices, and waste themselves ineffectually on their passage. The law of nature is here, as elsewhere, binding, and no powerful results ever ensue from the trivial exercise of high endowments. The finest mind, when thus destitute of a fixed purpose, passes away without leaving permanent traces of its existence; losing its energy by turning aside from its course, it becomes as harmless and inefficient as the lightning, which, of itself irresistible, may yet be rendered powerless by a slight conductor.*
 
We might have to infer some of the meaning in the passage. By “employment,” the writer most likely meant “a fixed pursuit,” not working for a wage or salary. And by “moral integrity,” he is probably arguing from the perspective of the old saw, “Idleness is the Devil’s workshop.” So, the fixed pursuit can’t be, let’s say, chasing after an armored car’s money sacks. He’s arguing, I believe, for an energetic life that benefits others, thus his warning about passing “away without leaving permanent traces,” another term that we have to infer a meaning. Hitler left a permanent trace on the world, but such a “trace,” coming a century after the date of the paragraph, would lack moral integrity. Let’s use that “trace” as a point of departure:

​“The finest mind, when thus destitute of a fixed purpose, passes away without leaving permanent traces of its existence…” reminds me of lyrics in a song by Cat Stevens (AKA Yusuf Islam): “Oh! Very young, what will you leave us this time?” ** In the affluence that has arisen since 1846, human population has grown from about 1.2 billion to more than 7.8 billion. Even the smaller population of the nineteenth century could not have all its individuals leaving a “permanent trace,” and surely the writer was aware of that fact. What, for example is the permanent trace left by the Scientific American editor, save a piece of writing that I stumbled upon? And what of the fundamental message in his writing? Isn’t it a timeworn cliché about “doing something with one’s life”?

Had Plato’s writings not been fortuitously preserved through the centuries, would he have left much of a trace save indirectly through his student’s student, that is, through Alexander the Great whose conquests spread Hellenism? And we have only Plato’s words to pass on the “trace” left by his teacher Socrates. Permanence of trace is haphazard at best, mere footprints in the sand, but since death is inevitable, leaving a trace is a consolation path to permanence. Think, for example, of the lyrics to the song “Fame” from the movie and TV series about talented youth: “Fame!/I’m gonna live forever/Baby, remember my name.” *** Leaving a trace isn’t an uncommon desire, but all fame is temporary. No doubt many pharaohs were famous in their time. But only an exceptional few names continue past the rise and fall of cultures, for example, Siddhartha, Jesus, and Mohammed. Many who were well known in their times, even conquerors, have fallen into the dustbin of history. We might have to thank Gutenberg and the increase in the number of historians for any chance of remembrance and influence. What, I might ask, will become of these thousand plus little essays that I have posted on this website when I join the hundred billion humans who have come and gone over the past 250,000 years without leaving a “permanent trace”?

I was particularly drawn to the sentence, “The restlessness inherent in genius, being thus undirected by any permanent influence, frames for itself occupations out of accidents…Genius, under such guidance, attains no noble ends….” There might be in all of us, regardless of IQ, a wasted genius of some kind, wasted because we react rather than act.

​That speaks well in general for purposeful, that is, planned, actions, but not all purposeful actions bear equal value. Collecting beer cans as a hobby leads to a personal museum, as collecting any kind of object does. In some instances, such collections become a mass of items for a public museum’s curator to partly display, given the space available and the value, intrinsic or cultural, placed on the collection. “And this next case, Ladies and Gentlemen, holds 153 of the 2,353 beer cans collected by So-n-So.” Thus, collecting beer cans is purposeful and not an occupation “out of accident,” but it is not likely to leave a trace comparable to that left by the Buddha.

I suppose I could argue similarly that purposeful collecting any kind of object, even art worth millions of dollars, differs little from collecting beer cans. After all, assigning a value to a painting (or a can), however talented its artist, is a matter of culture and economics. Sorry if this kind of thinking puts you in a funk over your years of purposeful collecting or over some other actions you have deemed to be “noble.” But assigning value to art or any kind of object is a cultural preference. We put great value on the 17-millennia-old cave paintings at Lascaux, but most of those drawings are little better than finger-paintings by six-year-olds. Putting aside arguments about collecting as a purposeful action that leaves a permanent trace of the individual, I might argue that because we are finite, any trace we leave is likely to be semi-permanent at best.

Whereas it is true that much of what comes our way comes unexpectedly (“accidentally”), it is also true that we have the ability to plan if we have reached the age of reason. But what of the term “noble ends”? Certainly, the idea of nobility dates the writer’s psycho-socio orientation. I can envision that mid-nineteenth-century writer bearing in his values a leftover notion from the chivalric era, or at least from chivalric literature, some idea that nobles are, well, “noble.” If you remember your medieval French chansons de geste, you’ll associate “noble” with heroism, honor, loyalty, love of country, and protection of the weak and innocent. We still speak of nobility and noble actions in the twenty-first century, but our own meaning has nuances shaded by scandals of contemporary nobles in monarchic countries. I’m thinking, for example, of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, both of who had affairs and of other “nobles” whose purposeful pursuits the nineteenth-century writer would call ignoble. Plus, since the rise of European Romanticism, the thinking in “egalitarian” western societies is either that everyone is “noble” or no one is.****

I suppose the term “noble ends” smacks of “elitism” for some and for others of ethical or even “divine” qualities. The work of Saint Mother Teresa, for example, would be “noble.” Certainly, she left a “trace” of her existence—though like the traces so many other “saints,” secular or religious, her mark will fade with time. Andrew Carnegie, whose life is negatively associated with union-buster Henry Clay Frick and with the Johnstown Flood, left a considerable “trace” in libraries, museums, and in a university, all those buildings and institutions surviving long past their namesake.  

And what of the writer’s comment that “no powerful results ever ensue from the trivial exercise of high endowments”? Would sports be “trivial”? I’m thinking of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, AKA Pelé, Roberto Clemente, Jim Brown, and thousands of great athletes, all of them physical “geniuses” and many of them also intellectual geniuses. Athletes have “high endowments.” Are their pursuits of excellence and superiority in their games “noble ends” that leave permanent traces? The Scientific American writer seems to have only “intellectual” pursuits in mind. And we can’t fault him. Among the greatest athletes, few attain remembrance beyond their eras. Marathon originalist Pheidippides is a notable exception, but he had to die for his enduring “trace.”
 
Regardless of the writer’s undefined terms and the differences in enculturation that derives from our different centuries, I believe I find much to think about in that 1846 passage. Am I mostly a reactive person, with more of my life unplanned than planned? Do I pursue trivial matters rather than those of greater import? I know, what’s “greater import” if it is undefined? Do I possess any “endowments” I should be using to imprint on the planet a lasting trace of my existence? Do I do anything that could be labeled “noble”? Or, shouldn’t I take a realistic view of my relative significance (or insignificance) among my contemporary 7.8 billion fellow humans, most of who do not even know that I exist? Then, again, maybe I can find consolation that a few readers have come to this website, where they find as points of departure a bit of inspiration to pursue their own endowments and genius. If I were like Socrates to Plato your Muse and nothing else,…
 
As Cat Stevens asks in words that apply even to one who is well past youth, “What will you leave us this time?” And if YOU were someone else’s Muse and nothing else,…
 
*Project Gutenberg. Scientific American, under the heading “Employment.” Online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29411/29411-h/29411-h.htm#The_Great_Fair .
** https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-iba-syn&hsimp=yhs-syn&hspart=iba&p=cat+stevens+oh+very+young#id=0&vid=ba8f226a79d166b05e425c2b10208eaf&action=click
***The lively song sung by Irene Cara can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1gMQ_q3FSM  Accessed November 6, 2020.
****Does the thinking that no one is noble derive from existentialism? From Dadaism? From Nihilism? Is it the product of twentieth century wars that have killed untold millions?

Wuhan, China, doesn’t appear on any of today’s “Most Desirable Places to Visit” list. COVID-19 has eliminated it from consideration by travel groups that make such “best places” lists. But life, even during the pandemic, continues there as a recently released study by Wuhan University researchers indicates. The study focused on dangers to “foundation tree species,” those plants that anchor the development of mature forests, specifically in this study, maples.* 
 
In short, some tree genera get there first, establish themselves, and flourish as dominant species in temperate forests. Whereas ecologists have for decades focused on the rare and endangered species, those led by Xiujuan Qiao centered their study on those trees most of us would consider abundant in number. Their contention is that the health of those foundation species is an important indicator of the health of the temperate forest ecology.
 
Let’s think human analogs. The government gets the funding to build a highway with its associated cloverleaf entrances and exits. Someone or some company then builds a gas (or petrol in the UK) station at one of the cloverleaf junctures. Across from or adjacent to the station, someone then builds a fast-food restaurant. And then another gas station, and then another restaurant, and then a few motels and some shops, and then a couple more restaurants and two more gas stations. The whole area then gets first condos and then houses, all precipitating more of the same as the cloverleaf stretches into a full-blown community, with shopping centers or a mall and probably with a school and hospital. Gas stations are the foundational species of mature temperate communities, just as the maples are “foundational” across 26 degrees of latitude in China.
 
But, of course, there’s a downside to being the foundational and dominant species. When they are mature and form a canopy, dominant species can crowd out or prevent from growing other potential inhabitants of an area—or even more of their own kind. Look around. That’s what we humans do all over the planet. And we often suffer the same fate as forests dominated by single species. When those species age, they yield to decline for various reasons. Communities that grow off cloverleafs tend toward vitality and then toward decline. An elementary school established to accommodate young families serves little purpose when all the children grow and move away, leaving the elderly to pay for a school with a declining enrollment. And with changes in their types and numbers of patrons, shops and restaurants can also undergo a decline, leaving store fronts—and factories—vacant. You could probably think of numerous parallels: Walmart and Costco, for example, dominant business species that crowd out other store species and then ultimately moving on to different locations with changes in the area’s demographics.
 
It seems to me that the human analogs of foundation species are numerous. It might even be evident in the forests of political systems. Think, for example, of the Soviet Union. That forest dominated by a single widespread political philosophy declined under the pressures of other political species. And the same might be said for dominant political parties in any government. The foundation species give way to age; the old political forests decline. Sometimes the decline derives from internal processes, like aging. Sometimes the decline occurs as a new species invades: Kudzu, for example.
 
But from plants to humans, isn’t that the way of the world? Interestingly, the old surviving foundational species don’t readily give up their dominance. I think of “older” communities bypassed by new highways, the businesses in those towns dead or dying for lack of trade. I live on the outskirts of such a town. It was, before my time, once vital. But the “old trees,” not recognizing the futility of trying to revitalize, keep holding onto the image of their once diverse and mature “forest.” Archaeologists have dug up many such towns across the world, towns whose origins date from centuries to millennia ago. There’s always a struggle for dominance, and there’s always the inevitable decline of the dominant.   
 
 
*Qiao, Xiujuan, et al. 26 Oct 2020. Foundation Species Across a Latitudinal Gradient in China. Ecology Society of America (ESA online): https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3234. Online at https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.3234  Accessed November 2, 2020.