We contend that the human race is the founder race.
Whales can sing, parrots can talk, chimps can manipulate things with their hands, octopuses may be brains, crows may be tool users, but humans found. Homo fundensis.
God is Creator, Man is Founder. This is the imago dei.
To found a thing that affects millions, that determines the destiny of continents, that ripples down through the centuries--to found a thing that affects one child, that makes a neighborhood, that helps define a moment--is to participate in peak human experience.
There are Many Founders
For most of us, a founder is an entrepeneur, somewhere on the spectrum from a small businessman at one end--"our restaurant was founded in 1983 by Papa Billy"--to a start-up billionaire at the other--"Rings of Power is a flop? Dang, sell the guest yacht."
Above this spectrum floating hazily in the realm of legend and myth are political founders. George Washington, Romulus and Remus . . . .
Small business, big business, and starting countries. These are real and valuable. They are not all there is though. Founder space is vaster than these.
Families are founded. The damage our culture is doing right now to marriage and childbearing is denying millions access to the peak human experience of founding. Family founding is more necessary and more powerful than at any other time in history.
There are founders of social institutions, folk institutions, religions, socialities, clans, economic modes, lifeways, parareligions, sports, hobbies, and on and on.
What is Bio Founding
If we rank these in significance, the great entrepeneurs, and the great founders of nations and states, and the great founders of religions, they rank at the top.
Right along side them is the bio founder. The business founder acts in the economy. The political founder acts in government. The bio founder acts in ecology. We might say that the bio founder is an entrepeneur in the biological economy.
The bio founder creates a new ecology. He could be the breeder or genetic engineer who introduces a new organism, or simply the importer of one (No one praises the kudzu founders but no one discounts them either!) He could be a terraformer of some region of the earth. He could found a new ecological life way.
Regenerative agriculturalists and permaculturists are bio founders in a small way. The developers of these trends are bio founders in a large way. Johnny Appleseed was a biofounder. Jethro Tull is one of the great men of the 19th century. Bio founders invented the ranch in Mexico several hundred years ago and Texans reinvented it in the century before last. The bio founders of camel culture were just as responsible for the Arab explosion in the 700s AD as the religious founder Mohammed.
Bio founding can be extremely high impact
Bio founders have the potential for impact that outlasts any business--that sees nations rise and fall--that might even endure as faiths crumble and are remade.
Clan founders might people the desert. City state founders might leave the ruins of great trade centers to break the monotony of desert. A faith founder might give the clans solace in the harsh desert, or the asabiya to unite and come out conquering from it. But a bio founder may make it blossom like the rose.
Someday soon there will be those who successfully reintroduce the American chestnut to its historic range. The landscape will bear witness to them a thousand years or ten thousand years in the future, long after even the ruins are gone. Imagine finding a way to hybridize the American chestnut for the cloud forests of the Rockies! That would be a founding literally for the ages.
Biofounding is in the air
Biofounding is in the air. We could be on the brink of intentional biofounding events at a scale and at a depth of time without parallel. The future is wax.
Terraform earth first.
The first planet that we must make more earthlike is earth. This begins with you and extends to your home, your family, your neighborhood, your town, your country. At the intimate scale this means growing healthy by eating healthily grown food. It can mean growing flowers in pots that speak to you, because they are beautiful, because they are tied to your place or to your family heritage. Perhaps they are native and remind you of your local character and of your walks in the wild. Perhaps they are the ones your grandma grew, and are taken from her seeds. At the global scale, it means—with due respect to native life forms and customs—greening the Sahara, making the deserts of the American southwest wet, transforming Antarctica, settling the Canadian shield, herds of bison roaming the Plains, thundering mammoths ruling Siberia.
It could also mean filling the deserts of the ocean with life and abundance. Concepts like these turn scholarship to poetry.
Oceanic Iron Fertilization. The ideal geoengineering method for tackling the carbon problem would mimic a naturally occurring process which has been shown to mitigate past episodes of global warming, would not be prohibitively expensive or environmentally destructive, would have beneficial effects beyond those of reducing climate change, would not create dependency on continuous careful management, and would have self-limiting negative consequences if misapplied. Such a method exists, has been demonstrated experimentally for decades, and does not require the creation of any massive infrastructure or technological innovation. This method is oceanic iron fertilization.
Iron fertilization takes advantage of the fact that the growth of marine phytoplankton is primarily limited by micronutrient availability, specifically that of iron, and that repletion of available iron in the photic zone of the oceans is able to induce massive algal blooms, which then sink into the abyss, sequestering vast quantities of carbon. Iron fertilization has been experimentally demonstrated twelve times since 1993, most notably in 2007 in the South Atlantic by an Indo-German consortium (project LOHAFEX, 2007), and in the North Pacific in 2012, by the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation (HSRC). In both cases the addition of ferrous sulfate in quantities between 10 and 100 tons resulted in massive plankton blooms visible from space, with an estimated production of up to 100,000 tons of algae per ton of added iron. Even assuming that much of the carbon contained in this algae is eventually returned to the atmosphere, this is a most favorable ratio. Oceanographer John Martin was aware of this as early as 1988, when he stated “give me half a tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.”
Several iron fertilization experiments have been of doubtful legal status, and societal reactions to them have been polarized both in the popular press and academic contexts. The HSRC release was organized by the HSRC in collaboration with Russ George, founder of the San Francisco based company Planktos Inc.. They were careful to release the iron in technically international waters, which gives an idea of the ambiguous legal situation. George was subsequently described in much of the media as a “rogue geoengineer” and “Pacific Ocean hacker,” and accused of manipulating the Haida into supporting his scheme. In reality the project was collaborative and the Haida were equal partners, standing to benefit economically from the expected increase in salmon catch.
As intended, there was a correlated massive increase of the 2013 year class of sockeye salmon by up to 400% due to increased food availability. The causality is still debatable, but a similar increase in salmon population occurred in the years following the 2008 eruption of the Kasatochi volcano in Alaska, which introduced a large quantity of iron-rich dust into the atmosphere, providing strong evidence that iron fertilization in general increases fish stocks.
Currently, the majority of iron input to the deep oceans originates from desert dust storms over the Sahara and Central Australia, which also contribute to the fertility of the Amazon rainforest, due to their global transport by wind currents in the high atmosphere. There is evidence that the increased input of windblown iron rich dust into the oceans due to aridity in the last glacial maximum was partly responsible for maintaining low CO2 and cold temperatures. The quantity of this windblown dust has been decreasing in recent decades, and this is correlated with a decline in ocean fertility.
Another major source of iron and other nutrients is whale feces. Whales distribute nutrients throughout the world ocean by feeding on krill and small fish in productive regions of upwelling, and spreading nutrients throughout their migrations by defecating in surface waters. Krill contain so much iron that the feces of whales become red, containing 10 million times the concentration of iron in ocean surface waters. But the global population of large whales is still only at most 20-30% of that before industrial whaling, despite a decades old ban. Studies of average water transparency suggest that there has been an annual decline of 1% in ocean phytoplankton populations throughout the 20th century. Artificial ocean fertilization would help reverse this trend as a side effect.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2019/01/28/ancient-upheavals-show-how-to-geoengineer-a-stable-climate/
Imagine wild caught salmon “too cheap to meter.”
Why does it matter
Knowing about bio founding opens up space for action. Perhaps you and others like you will be the ones to make the oceans teem.
More importantly, it is essential that you know that you are a founder by nature. Recognize what you are doing and what you are, cherish it, preserve it, and do more of it. Is there bio founding you can do, a tree to plant, some local food to make part of your family life ways, some garden to introduce into your personal or neighborhood or family economy? It is what you were meant for.