Podcast recorded at our September 2024 Dinner … John Cryan on Saving the Pine Bush All Over Again

John Cryan, entomologist and co-founder of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, spoke about how we have battled preservation to a standoff; we have a preserve, but it’s in pieces and fragments, and still too small. Development continues. John described an optimistic change of approach to work to protect our Pine Bush.

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John Cryan’s Testimony on the Albany Landfill Expansion (1989)

You can Download the John Cryan Testimony as PDF or View it Full Screen.

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John Cryan and Robert Dirig Present Moths of the Past – 2020 [PDF]

THIS PUBLICATION FEATURES A HIGHLY DIVERSE COMBINATION OF CONCEPTS AND PRESENTATION STYLES that thoroughly blend art with science. It contains much that is new. Ostensibly foremost is our original description of a remarkable new saturniid moth, which is characterized in Parts One and Three. Perhaps of greater importance is a contextual re-sorting, synthesis, and extension of long-held wisdom from many areas of human endeavor, including mythology, mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, history, religion, biogeography, geology, genetics, taxonomy, cosmic and organic evolution, and conservation of our Earth and its amazing (and now imperiled) envelope of life. These are elucidated in Part Two, the Conclusion, and the Epilogue. Taken together, this is a highly philosophical work. We understand that many of these innovative ideas may surprise, and possibly delight, puzzle, or even alarm some readers.

Moths of Autum: Buck Moths and the Pine Bush by John Cryan and Robert Dirig – December 1977 [PDF]

Winter’s White blankets the rolling, brush-covered sand dunes lof the Karner Pine Bush. Here there a scraggly, pictures-que Pitch Pine tree (Pinus rigida) rears skyward, with a beautiful pattern of icy white ornamenting its rough, fire-blackened trunk, its limbs straining against the January gale. Occasionally a Black~capped Chickadee calls from the pine branches, and the trail of a single Cottontail Rabbit winds through the scrubby thicket, but there is very little wildlife about.

From time to time, a truck lumbers past on Karner Road (Route 155), just to the west, and cars hurry by on the New York State Thruway (Route 90), a tenth of a mile south, headed toward Albany. A bulldozer’s “putt-putt-putt” comes faintly from the east, where dumping is going on at the massive City of Albany landfill; and a train whistle sounds half a mile to the north, as a Penn Central Railroad passenger coach, en route to Schenectady from Albany, stops at the Colonie depot. But all these man-made sounds are muted by the constant swish of the pine needles, the creak of their boughs before the wind, and the plops made by snow suddenly shaken from their branches.

Retreat in Barrens by John Cryan – Defenders Magazine – January/February 1985 [PDF]

TOUCHED by the rising sun, the ancient pine barrens flamed in brilliant scarlet, russet and ochre as their mantle of low shrubs caught the light. Columnar pitch pines with gnarled crowns towered in deep green silence around us. We waited expect- antly as mists in the interdune swales dissipated and the chill of night evaporated into a clear, crisp day.Several hours went by as we scanned the dune crests and hollows. The sunrose toward its zenith. We were beginning to lose hope, and my companion, Don Rittner, archaeologist, pine barrens expert and president of the American Pine Barrens Society, actually started to say, “Maybe this is it.” But suddenly he gave a shout and pointed to the next dune ridge. There, flying rapidly in the golden October sunshine, its bold black and white wings brilliantly contrasting with the multicolored foliage, was the object of our pilgrimage, a buck moth. Don gave a sign of relief. The moths would fly this fall; the Pine Bush population would survive for at least one more year.

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Top-down Tectonics The Role of Oceanus and Gaia by Jon Thoreau Scott with Don Rittner, Editor [PDF]

This book has two major themes. The first is the re-introduction of a mechanism that might explain how plate tectonics works. I call it the Expansion-Contraction (EC) mechanism of plate motion and I have been thinking about this idea for some sixty years since working on ice-covered lakes in Wisconsin. The mechanism has some very good features in that it explains such things as how ocean ridges between continental plates move away from the continents to which they were originally attached. I call this “ridge migration”, but other authors describe it as a “decoupling” of the ridges from the convection currents that are thought of by many as the driving force that moves the plates. Ridge migration is required in the EC mechanism and thus no assumptions are needed. The EC mechanism also can possibly explain the variation in spreading rate at mid-ocean ridges, ridge height, triple points of ridges, compression within plates and such things that are not easily explained by arguments of other mechanisms of plate motion. As can be gathered from the title of this book I also attempt to show that the living world, or James Lovelock’s Gaia, can be an important cause of plate tectonics if the EC mechanism actually works. I propose that it is the magnification of climate signals due to biologically driven positive feedbacks that result in the large changes in atmospheric temperature that eventually causes the variation of temperature at the top of the ocean ridges.

The second major theme of this book is that of top-down tectonics, which is in agreement with Don L. Anderson’s ideas. He posits that it is the plates themselves that produce tectonics while the mantle convection is a result, not a cause, of plate motion. His statement is: “The tectonic plates can be viewed as an open, far-from-equilibrium, dissipative and self-organizing system that takes matter and energy from the mantle and converts it to mechanical forces (ridge push, slab pull) which drive the plates.” The EC concept, while not the same as other top-down ideas, can be considered to be a top-down mechanism because the driving force is a result of seafloor spreading at ocean ridges.

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The Genesis and Meaning of Moths of the Past

I was forced to retire early in mid-2015. My wife, Christina, had had open-chest surgery the year before, and though she made it through that, she was never the same afterwards. I moved upstate full-time to care for her in the cabin we’d built together over the previous …

Mothtectonics

Scary things happen when you combine Moths of the Past with Top-Down Tectonics Jon Thoreau Scott’s Top-Down Tectonics: The Role of Oceanus and Gaia (2015) explains for the third time in print his Expansion-Contraction Theory, a new theory of plate tectonics Scott derived over thirty years ago. …

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Energy in the Chaonic Universe: Transforming the Human Economy

I’ll start off with the easiest option to dispose of. I’ve read a bit about ongoing efforts to kindle fusion here on Earth. As an energy-producing proposition, they are doomed to fail. The reason is simple: It takes the energy density of sun-sized chaonic gravity to sustain atomic fusion …

Decoherence: Advancing Science in the Chaonic Age

As described in the longest of the previous ten white papers presenting implications and extensions of the Chaon-Convolution Theory, entitled Creating New Science Out of the Old (now affectionately known as ‘Big Imps’), the biggest obstacle to doing good science (which is science that lasts, that sticks with …

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The Convolution Casino: Underpinning the Triangle of Survival

There has been enormous resistance to the idea that we have to drop our global population by one full order of magnitude in order to have even a chance to continue as civilized human beings. This is only natural. It is our deepest wired-in evolutionary survival strategy: Over-reproduction in the …

Cultural Convolution

Chaonic physics drives every force and process in the Universe. This includes all forms of biological Convolution. And human cultures – which form wherever people come together, then interact, accrete through compound compositing, and decay through many interwoven processes linked to free chaonic action – are subject to the same principles of …

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Chaons and Tech: Our Future is Limited

The Arrow of Time waits for no one. Events are The Triangle of Peace starting to get past this old man in the woods. So I am sending this missive to all of you because it cannot wait until I have more time to think. . . BIOSPHERE …

The Third Way: Chaons and Politics

In The Chaonic Economy, the concept of effective body size was introduced. The same concept applies to politics. Politics, culture and economics are completely intertwined. Chaons rule them all. The standard continuum of politics runs left-right. Instead of being a linear dualistic paradox, though, it runs in …

Chaons and Nukes

A committee convened by the Lawrence Livermore Lab, famous as one of the historic technological ‘hot’ spots in the US for prosecuting the Cold War, just came out with a 77-page report. The committee of nuclear weapons and diplomacy experts used mock-continuous analyses of streams of publicly …

Chaons and Evil

Despite living in a nodally-perceived world, we humans do, subconsciously at least, occasionally truck in very primitive forms of continua. The most familiar are scales based on our hands: binaries or dualities (two hands) like bad or good; five-star rating scales, made ubiquitous by the internet (one hand’s worth of fingers); and …

The Chaonic Economy or The Basis of All Wealth is the Biosphere

The economy sits on top of the ecology, and draws all its energy and materials from it. The ecology, or biosphere, wraps around the planet. The planet was formed and exists in the physical universe, or expanding spacetime. What we call chemistry is part of physics. So is what we call biology. …

A Universal Theory of Disease (Chaonic-Convolutionary, of course)

by John Cryan When I was a kid breeding exotic giant silkmoths from all over the world, I found out among the true obsessives in the business (yes, there was an active, and at that time wholly unregulated, global trade in the biggest and most spectacular; little Buck Moths generally weren’t part of this) that …

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Making New Science Emerge from the Old

Some Important Implications of the Chaon-Convolution… Anyone who has studied the history of science even casually knows science is not magic. It takes hardwork, discipline, organization, persistence, communication, resources, and luck. And students of science are increasingly revealing the human elements, and consequent flaws, of the enterprise – as it was, …

The Spinning Universe

God was a southpaw when Hre threw out that first superchaonic pitch. Hris dexterous move with the hand sinister led to an initially ‘perfect’ Right-Handed Universe that spun just this side of infinitely fast on a near-perfect axis like a perfect SuperEarth with virtually no wobble or tilt. …

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Creating a UN with Teeth

The UN Charter contains a flaw fatal. Its Security Council has five ‘permanent members,’ any of which can veto any action in either the Council or the General Assembly. Two of those five members are brutal dictatorships armed with nuclear weapons. One has the largest landmass of any country, the other the …