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Heathlands are slow and patient, stubborn and unruly. You cannot plant or move a heathland. Its surplus cannot be easily multiplied. The heathland reminds us that there are explicit limits to our dreams of production and growth. And here I’m not just referring to heathlands, but our myriad cultural landscapes, including those maintained by machines. These remind us that the usefulness of our hyper-domesticated landscapes and species is also limited. We arrive at a crossroads: how will we care for the landscapes that have entrapped us? And looking deeper into the future: how will we care for them once they are no longer useful?

Mutual entrapment is also mutual dependency. The deep-time persistence of heathlands as low-nutrient production landscapes depended on strong relationships with humans, animals, soils and other plants. These relations have not always been characterised by persistent mutual care and commitment. There have been several times when humans have threatened to make heathlands extinct. And being surrounded by heathlands has, at times, made peasants starve and emigrate. However, mutual dependencies were what initially made heathlands such successful cultural landscapes, suggesting that there is something we can learn from heather when thinking about our future landscapes.

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“Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse.”

— Aldous Huxley, Island

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Ferdinand Andri (Austrian, 1871-1956) - XXV Ausstellung Secession, color lithograph,  94 x 62.2 cm (1906)

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Art by Nancy Grossman, 1960s / 1970s

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a complete index of books salvaged from the bin at the bus stop

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J.G. Ballard, Four Text Collages (Project for a New Novel), c. 1958

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(from the potential to storm heaven - a documentary on the greek 2008 uprising)

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The jungle garden of Dr. Simon Olpin, 70, in Sheffield, South Yorks (Image: Alex Cousins SWNS)

The green-fingered dad says the dappled shade that’s offered by his numerous canopies provides the perfect place to cool down as temperatures rise above 40c on Monday.

He said: “It’s lovely to be in the garden on a nice sunny day as it feels calm, warm and tropical – but it’s not blisteringly hot

"When you move out into the sun on a very hot day, you immediately notice the difference - and it can become unbearable

( Image: Dr Simon Olpin / SWNS) The consultant clinical biochemist, 70, has been passionate about nature since he was a boy but his fear of flying means he has never visited any jungles

Instead, he brought the jungle to his suburban garden in Sheffield, Sth Yorks, after planting his first tree in 1987/

Since then, his 8,000-square-foot tropical paradise has grown to have more than 100 species of plants, with 25-foot palm trees which tower over the sprawling garden.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/green-fingered-man-creates-incredible-27507831

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Lucien Smith (American, b. 1989), A kiss strikes like lightning: love passes like a storm, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 60 in.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/15/it-comes-from-bacteria-and-goes-back-to-bacteria-the-future-of-plastic-alternatives

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How pregnancy turns the stress response on its head

The link between psychological stress and physical health problems generally relates to a stress-induced immune response gone wild, with inflammation then causing damage to other systems in the body. It’s a predictable cascade – except in pregnancy, research suggests.

Scientists exploring the negative effects of prenatal stress on offspring mental health set out to find the immune cells and microbes in stressed pregnant mice most likely to trigger inflammation in the fetal brain – the source for anxiety and other psychological problems identified in previous research.

Instead, the researchers found two simultaneous conditions in response to stress that made them realize just how complex the cross-talk between mom and baby is during gestation: Immune cells in the placenta and uterus were not activated, but significant inflammation was detected in the fetal brain.

They also found that prenatal stress in the mice led to reductions in gut microbial strains and functions, especially those linked to inflammation.

“I thought it was going to be a fairly straightforward tale of maternal inflammation, changes in microbes and fetal inflammation. And while the changes in microbes are there, the inflammation part is more complex than I had anticipated,” said Tamar Gur, senior author of the study and assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral health, neuroscience, and obstetrics and gynecology at The Ohio State University.

“The complex interplay between the stress response and the immune system is dysregulated by stress, which is problematic for the developing fetus. There are key changes during this critical window that can help shape the developing brain, so we want to figure out how we could potentially intervene to help regulate these systems.”

The study was published recently in Scientific Reports.

Most attention paid to the negative effects of prenatal stress on offspring mental health focus on disruptive major life events or exposure to disaster, but evidence also suggests that up to 84% of pregnant women experience some sort of stress.

In a previous study, Gur’s lab found that prenatal stress’s contributions to life-long anxiety and cognitive problems in mouse offspring could be traced to changes in microbial communities in both mom and baby.

Gur focuses on the intrauterine environment in her search for factors that increase the risk for prenatal stress’s damaging effects, and this newer study opened her eyes to how complicated that environment is.

“The dogma would be that we’re going to see an influx of immune cells to the placenta. The fact that it’s suppressed speaks to the powerful anti-inflammatory response of the mom. And that makes sense – a fetus is basically a foreign object, so in order to maintain pregnancy we need to have some level of immunosuppression,” said Gur, also an investigator in Ohio State’s Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research and a maternal-fetal psychiatrist at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center.

“We want to figure out what is at the interface between mom and baby that is mediating the immunosuppressive effect on the maternal side and the inflammation on the fetal side. If we can get at that, we’ll get really important keys to understanding how best to prevent the negative impact of prenatal stress.”

Prevention could come in the form of prebiotics or probiotics designed to boost the presence of beneficial microbes in the GI tract of pregnant women. Maternal microbes affect the brains and immune systems of developing offspring by producing a variety of chemicals the body uses to manage physiological processes.

“I think microbes hold really important clues and keys, making them a tantalizing target for intervention. We can do things about individuals’ microbes to benefit both mom and baby,” Gur said.

To mimic prenatal stress during the second and early third trimesters, pregnant mice in her lab are subjected to two hours of restraint for seven days to induce stress. Control mice are left undisturbed during gestation.

In this recent study, the researchers found stress in mice activated steroid hormones throughout the body – the sign of a suppressed immune system – and resulted in lower-than-expected populations of immune cells in reproductive tissue, suggesting that the uterus was effectively resisting the effects of the stress.

An examination of colon contents showed differences in microbial communities between stressed and non-stressed mice, with one family of microbes that influences immune function markedly decreased in stressed mice. The researchers found that stress showed few signs of gene-level changes in the colon that could let bacteria escape to the bloodstream – one way that microbes interfere with body processes.

“There are absolutely changes in microbes that might help explain key pathways that are important for health and the immune system, especially when it comes to the placenta and the mom’s immune system,” Gur said.

In future studies, her lab will examine immune cells in the fetal brain and monitor how gene expression changes in cells in the placenta in response to stress. She is also leading an ongoing observational study in women, tracking microbes, inflammation and stress levels during and after pregnancy.

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Dentist

Lahore, Pakistan

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“The person who makes a life career in such an institution lives in an “iron cage.” Or, to use another analogy, the lived time in a fixed-function organization is like slowly crawling up, or down, the stairs in a house you have not designed; you are living someone else’s design for your life. In the Protestant Ethic, Weber explains specifically why a person would do so: bureaucracies teach the discipline of delayed gratification. Instead of judging whether your immediate activities matter to you, you learn to think about a future reward which will come if you obey orders now.[…] in Weber’s view, the future gratifications and fulfillments promised in domestic bureaucracies often never arrive. He gives this frustration a subjective twist; a person who has learned the discipline of delay often cannot permit himself to arrive. Many driven individuals harbor this perverse sentiment. They feel whatever they have is not good enough, and they are incapable of enjoying the present for its own sake; delay of fulfillment becomes a way of life.”

— richard sennett, culture of the new capitalism p. 31