Why the Democrats Can't Replace Biden

posted by Brian Burke at American Thinker 

After the release of Special Counsel Kennth Hur’s report on Joe Biden’s mishandling classified documents and then the President’s performance several hours later in his hastily convened press conference, a number of Democrats fleetingly expressed misgivings about the head of their party’s reelection prospects next November. Let’s face it -- if your Grandpa likewise raved and ranted after his memory and mental acuity had been called into question, you would seriously start to consider taking away his car keys. Adding to the Dems electoral hyper-anxiety is the fact that the President’s forgetfulness and confused ramblings won’t ameliorate on the hustings over the next eight months -- they can only worsen. Conversely, Donald Trump, while only a few years younger, campaigns as if possessed of the vitality of a honey badger.

If, as Democrats tirelessly pronounce, Donald Trump indeed posed such a grave threat to democracy, not to mention the American Way of Life, you would think their party’s leaders would have substituted a less-doddering presidential candidate with higher approval polls long before now. The success of Democrat candidates up and down November’s ballot depend on a strong showing from Biden in the general election. Admittedly, the President might not willingly be pushed aside because he has a son and brother to protect from even a slightly more independent DoJ. Theoretically, the leaders of his party could bring overwhelming pressure to bear on Biden and his family for him to bow out for “health reasons” before the August National Convention, effectively triggering a Dismissal on Request (DOR). But any such move is unlikely this side of a disabling stroke or conspicuous manifestations of acute dementia, because they simply cannot put forward any replacement candidate who is both politically propitious and acceptable.

Ordinarily, Biden’s understudy in these circumstances would be his Vice-President Kamala Harris. However, Harris is, in her own inimitable way, as rambling and incoherent as the 81-year-old man she would replace on the ballot. Harris immeasurably distresses loyalists in her own party whenever she appears before a camera even more than Biden does, because she frequently speaks as though she were a skipping record. Even more distressing, Harris is the only national politician holding even lower approval ratings than Biden. But you can’t tell that to the Vice-President: she’s blithely announced that she’s ready to serve as our nation’s chief executive; pushing her aside without her protesting terrifically, even if only behind the scenes, would be next to impossible.

Were Democrat sachems somehow able to find a way to bully Harris into stepping aside graciously for another nationally prominent Democrat, such as California governor Gavin Newsom, bypassing the vice president would result in an even greater electoral disaster by infuriating two of the Democrats' key constituencies: women and African Americans. Before the party consensus unexpectedly (and conveniently) coalesced around Biden shortly into the 2020 DemocraticParty primary season, Harris and no less than five other women, no matter how briefly, vied for their party’s nomination and might be seen by woman voters as rightfully possessing the prior claim. Going back for grievances even further, some African Americans declined to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential general election in part because she had the effrontery to run against Barack Obama in the Democrat primaries eight years earlier – notwithstanding his enthusiastic support of her campaign against Donald Trump. The unavoidable downside to the Democrats’ topmost electoral strategy of turning out huge margins from the core segments of their base on Election Day is that they cannot afford to disaffect any of those needed voters to any significant degree.

Privately, Democrats may be pining badly for Michelle Obama to leap-frog ahead of the vice president without splintering the party faithful. The former first lady would presumably campaign arm-in-arm with her husband on the old party platform of “two presidents for the price of one.” But on more than one occasion, Ms. Obama has essentially announced through her and her husband’s political associates that she has no intention of running for the Oval Office. Who can blame her? She has always been repelled by the tawdriness of retail American politics, and she is well satisfied with her and her husband’s place in American history. Whoever becomes president next year will encounter a continuing steam of foreign and domestic calamities, as well as well-nigh insurmountable financial challenges. Michelle Obama is justifiably prudent in her unwillingness to subject herself and her family to lower approval ratings this time next year than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump are scoring this year.

Following a reassessment of their November prospects therefore, the Democrat party has fallen in lockstep, however wistfully, behind the candidate it’s got. In order to thwart the “fascist” Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican followers, Dems will force themselves to campaign as though they did not privately dread that Biden might -- at any minute -- manifest an acute level of clinical senility in public. Tactically, Democrat politicians and administration officials are now recounting second-hand instances of Biden’s astounding total recall and cerebral mastery, no matter how these accounts are belied by what the public has seen and will see in the months to come. At the same time, party apparatchiks have been launching ferocious attacks on the so-called “gratuitous” remarks in the Special Counsel’s report, entirely forgetting that the SC learned the art of drafting “knife in the back” no-charges prosecutorial memoranda during his time working for SC Robert Mueller on the Russian Collusion investigation. And when the voters see the transcripts of Biden’s interviews with SC Hur or hear the actual recordings, should the White House’s recently lodged objections to their release be overcome, Democrats may find that gratuitousness is often in the eye of the beholder.

But you can’t really blame the Democrats for desperately trying to hide, minimize, and outright reject the perturbing and increasingly embarrassing progression of physical and cognitive deficits in their party’s candidate for president. Right up until the day after Tuesday, November 5, they got no place else to go.

The Prophets - First up: Marshall McLuhan.

 Meet the messengers from the past who saw the future and explain our world today. 

Emily Yoffe, senior editor at The Free Press, here. 

Last year while scrolling on X, I came across a post that caught my attention. It was a short clip of an interview with Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher and English professor. 

I had vague memories of McLuhan—who died in 1980—as a semi-famous intellectual of his day. The young writer who posted the clip, Benjamin Carlson, promised it was “one of the most mind-bending riffs on identity in the digital age I’ve ever heard.” 

As I listened, I got a rush from the prescience of McLuhan’s words. It was as if this man, now more than 40 years dead, was a messenger from the future who had been sent to our past, and now was explaining to us the world we live in today. 

I wanted to know more about what McLuhan foresaw, and the fascinating essay below from Benjamin Carlson is the result. 

NOTE: Click the link above for a twitter short video

Who was Marshal McLuhan?

You are reading this essay because Marshall McLuhan, in some sense, planned for it.

In the mid-1960s, when he exploded onto the American pop-cultural scene—which was also planned; more about this in a moment—he decided to embrace television.

This was not because he was born for TV. He was too “hot” for the medium (in the McLuhanesque sense of being uptight), as he famously said of Richard Nixon about his presidential debate loss to the “cool” John F. Kennedy.

Rather, McLuhan used TV because he, more than anyone of his time, understood how electric technology was transforming society and, even then, had already transformed it.

He knew that whether he liked it or not, TV was where he had to be. His mission was to wake people up—to “needle the somnambulists,” as he put it. (This one phrase gives you a flavor of his style: deadpan and unabashedly esoteric.) If TV was as revolutionary as he understood it to be, his message had to run on TV to have any chance of influencing the present—and being revisited in the future.

I first stumbled upon Marshall McLuhan a year ago on YouTube. Within a minute or two of watching a clip, I was amazed: here was a man who, in 1977, seemed to be describing the dislocating experience of living in 2023, and he did so with more insight than people living today. That the words were coming from a craggy, mustachioed man in a rumpled suit only enhanced the eerie feeling. Here was a professor-as-prophet. McLuhan says, in part, to his TV host: 

Everybody has become porous. They’ve got the light and the messages go right through us. By the way, at this moment we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man. 

I shared the clip on Twitter and it went viral with more than 6 million views —including both of Twitter’s father figures, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk—suggesting I was not alone in my reaction. 

Something about Marshall McLuhan has struck a chord—has resonance, as he liked to say. (He believed the electric age was fundamentally acoustic; a confusing concept, but roughly meaning that everything occurs simultaneously.) The long-deceased Canadian scholar—he died in 1980—who first blew people’s minds in the mid-1960s, is blowing people’s minds again.

This is not because he predicted specific devices or apps, but because he understood, with a poet’s intuition, the effects of the electronic age on human psychology.

He did not get everything right. But those things he did get right stemmed from his deep insight into the shift from the mechanical age (of which print was a part) to the electronic era, whose implications are still unfolding.

For further information:

https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/

and;

The Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection

More than 212 minutes of rare televised appearances' 

https://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/

ike

Double rally coverage and podcasts- March 2nd

 

Decades Later, Hayek’s Warning on Planning Echoes Louder than Ever

 

Governments are fixated on the idea that climate change should be mitigated through planning. The problem is that planning is less efficient and effective at processing information than markets.

In March 1977, three years after winning the Nobel Prize in Economics and more than three decades after writing his magnum opus, Friedrich Hayek penned an essay for Reason magazine, in which he, yet again, addressed and assessed “planning.” The essay, “‘Planning’” Our Way to Serfdom,” was written in response to newer, less centralized forms of planning that had been rapidly gaining support in the West. Specifically, Hayek dispatched “indicative” planning, whereby government “guides” private industry in the proper forms and direction of economic growth, and planning done to achieve “social justice.” About the former, he wrote that “that halfway house between a completely planned system and a free market would indeed be the worst of all possible worlds,” while about the latter, he intoned:

The belief in a society in which the remuneration of individuals is made to correspond to something called social justice is a chimera which is threatening to seduce modern democracy to accept a system that would involve a disastrous loss of personal freedom. George Orwell and others ought by now to have taught even the layman what to expect from a system of such kind.

Unfortunately, Hayek’s dismissal of the newer, subtler forms of planning was not as successful as his earlier assault on the centralized variety. In the nearly five decades since the essay in Reason, global governments and other organizations have largely ignored or forgotten his admonitions and have placed greater and greater faith in the power of marginally decentralized planning. This has especially been the case in the 15+ years since the Great Recession.

The most obviously visible form of planning extant in the West today is the response to climate change and the push toward “net-zero.” This also includes the even more thoroughly evolved version of planning—Environmental, Social, and Governance investing (ESG)—which substitutes private actors for governments and utilizes the very mechanisms of capitalism to preempt the power of markets in favor of carefully calculated presumptive economic outcomes. Governments and their private-sector allies are fixated on the idea that climate change can and should be mitigated through the virtues of planning.

The problem with all of this, unsurprisingly, is that even the newer, subtler, and privatized versions of planning are still far less efficient and effective at processing information than are markets. Hayek’s complaint about planning is that it is arrogant and foolishly so. It presumes that the calculations and machinations of a handful of “experts” can be more accurate than the market signals gathered by millions of individual capitalists calculated millions of times a day over millions of locations. Planning projects imprecise information based not on the wants, needs, and tastes of consumers but on the biases of the planners. It misidentifies and miscalculates economic inputs and outputs, distorting both the demand and supply curves.

In the case of net-zero and ESG, the distortions created in the demand curve are readily apparent and growing more so every day. As long as four months ago, car dealers were warning the Biden Administration that consumers had little or no interest in electric cars, which were piling up on their lots. Twice in the last six months, Ford has announced layoffs at the factories producing its F-150 Lightning electric pickup. And while it has dramatically cut production of electric trucks, it has shifted much of that capacity to building Broncos and Rangers, two gas-powered vehicles. More recently, Tesla slashed prices on its cars, Mercedes announced a five-year delay in its plans to electrify its fleet, and Hertz announced that it “would sell one-third of its global EV fleet, or about 20,000 cars, citing weak demand and the expense of repairing the vehicles.” Even companies that mine lithium, the primary component in electric vehicle batteries, are laying off employees, as real-world demand for net-zero-friendly vehicles dramatically trails the demand calculated and demanded by the planners.

The good news here is that in a nominally free economy, the distortions to the demand curve can be addressed and, presumably, fixed. That will come at a considerable cost, but in most places—California being a notable and stubborn exception—the changes necessary are still mostly feasible.

The bad news is that such quick fixes are not likely to ameliorate the distortions net-zero and ESG have made to the supply curve. At present, supply looks to be stable and, if anything, improving to meet the market’s non-planned demands. Despite President Biden’s tough talk on energy and the transition to a “clean” net-zero future, as well as his occasional dramatic misstep (his export ban on liquid natural gas, for example), the United States is a clear leader in fossil fuel production, producing more today than at any time in history. Unfortunately, because energy is a long-term business that requires years and even decades to organize and enable production, present circumstances are likely misleading.

Consider, for example, what the Wall Street Journal reported last summer, namely the fact that energy companies are struggling mightily to find qualified workers, and conditions are likely to get dramatically worse going forward. “At U.S. colleges, the pool of new entrants for petroleum-engineering programs has shrunk to its smallest size since before the fracking boom began more than a decade ago. European universities, which have historically provided many of the engineers for companies with operations across the Middle East and Asia, are seeing similar trends.”

This only makes sense, of course, given the ubiquitousness of the planners’ message on the future of energy. Why would any bright, sensible young student make the conscious decision to study petroleum engineering when government, businesses, and the broader culture are relentlessly insisting that petroleum and other fossil fuels are “evil” and will, therefore, be phased out in the near future? There’s no good answer to that question, which explains why the future supply of trained professionals needed to help the world meet its energy needs is likely to be woefully inadequate.

If that weren’t troubling enough, this just happens to be one rare occasion in which the effects of planning on the long-term supply curve are discernable, even if not likely correctable. Most such effects are not going to be as easy to spot. “Unintended consequences” are the omnipresent soft underbelly of planning.

The world would be a better place—today and in the future—if the planners insistent on net-zero and ESG would read Hayek’s 1977 essay. They might learn something.

Alex Jones Was Right

by Raw Egg Nationalist at American Greatness 

Few men in America have been so spectacularly vilified and misunderstood as Alex Emmerich Jones, the founder of Infowars. In the febrile atmosphere of post-2016 America, it’s almost impossible to find anyone who doesn’t have a strong opinion about him. Depending on which side of the fence you’re sat on, Alex Jones is either a deranged conspiracy-obsessed lunatic who should be made to pay every last cent of the $965 million in damages he owes the families of the Sandy Hook victims he slandered; or he’s a brave patriot, a charismatic warrior for truth who is being destroyed by America’s globalist elite for revealing their schemes and helping get Donald Trump, their mortal enemy, elected as president. There isn’t really a middle position.

This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to talk about Alex Jones and the truth of what he says with any kind of equanimity. And that’s a real shame, because Alex Jones is right and has been right about a lot of things—important things. In many cases, he was right long before anybody else in the public eye, and he kept being right even though he was ridiculed for what he was saying. There’s no better example of this than his infamous “gay frogs rant.”

It’s been over eight years since Jones bellowed, live on air, “I don’t like ‘em putting chemicals in the water that turn the frickin’ frogs gay,” before smashing his fist into the desk and sending his papers flying. Just like that, a meme was born. Critics in the mainstream media by turns mocked and condemned Jones for spreading yet another “right-wing conspiracy theory.” #gayfrogs trended on Twitter, with a video excerpt of the rant garnering over half a million views and thousands of comments. The rant was even turned into an indie song.

A meme was born—and a very serious issue all but died. Of course, Jones did little to help his own credibility in the matter by dressing up as a gay frog live on air, replete with a pink tutu and a bottle labelled “atrazine,” from which he sucked campily. In an instant, it became all but impossible to talk seriously about the havoc being wreaked on living organisms, whether they be frogs or humans, by harmful chemicals in the environment—the food, the water, the air—and especially a class of chemicals known as “endocrine disruptors.”

Many endocrine disruptors mimic the “female” hormone estrogen, upsetting the body’s sensitive endocrine (i.e., hormonal) balance and triggering a cascade of negative effects ranging from reproductive issues and birth defects to obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Our exposure to these chemicals has grown enormously with the progress of the industrial age. While a great number of endocrine disruptors are associated with plastics and their manufacture, they are also widely present among herbicides, pesticides, medicines, food additives, flame retardants, and a whole host of other products, without which modern life would indeed be very different. The simple, scary truth is that it’s now impossible to avoid these chemicals at any stage of life, from gestation to working in the remotest parts of the planet. Three thousand tons of microplastics are estimated to fall over Switzerland each year in snow.

Although he didn’t mention it directly during his rant, Jones was pointing towards a study that had received considerable attention from the scientific community and the popular press, including National Geographic and Sciencemagazines, five years earlier, in 2010. The study showed that exposure to the popular herbicide atrazine at levels typical of US waterways was enough to castrate male frogs and even make them change their gender. Researchers exposed African clawed frog larvae to atrazine in a laboratory and found that fully 10% of the larvae became “atrazine-induced females” that developed into “completely feminized” adults. These transgender frogs would then go on to mate with males from the control group that had not been exposed to atrazine, and they were even able to produce viable eggs. Atrazine does this because it causes the “male” hormone testosterone to be converted into estrogen.

Could endocrine disruptors make humans change their gender too, just like the African clawed frogs? That was obviously what Jones was suggesting, and it’s a claim he’s repeated many times in the years since. This is a much fuller and, of course, more controversial claim than saying endocrine disruptors affect fertility and sexual development, which is far beyond the realms of dispute at this point.

On the face of things, that stronger claim is totally plausible. Our biology isn’t so different from a frog’s, and a rough correlation between exposure to harmful chemicals and increasing rates of transgenderism could be plotted without much difficulty. Correlation isn’t causation, as we well know, but there’s an enormous body of evidence to substantiate both the crucial role of hormones in sexual development and the devastating negative effects of endocrine disruptors. Together, they make a compelling case that transgenderism could be one extreme result of exposure to endocrine disruptors at crucial points in the human lifecycle.

With transgenderism, we are clearly dealing with a complicated issue that goes beyond reduced testosterone levels or sperm counts to touch the deepest aspect of a person’s being: their sense of self, of who and what they are or should be. Many people seem to doubt the ability of hormones to affect a person this deeply, but the truth is, hormones make us who and what we are, and that includes our self-perception. Any woman who has taken a contraceptive pill will know this, and so too, in all probability, will her boyfriend or husband. All of a sudden, you’re no longer Kate but Kate-who’s-trapped-somewhere-in-the-luteal-phase-of-her-cycle-all-month, and she’s a very different person altogether. Of course, this is why hormone therapy is an integral part of the process of medical transition from one gender to the other: estrogen therapy for male-to-female and testosterone therapy for female-to-male. And it’s why, when access to prescribed hormones is scarce, male transgenders have been known to boil plastic bags and drink the resulting plasticiser-rich liquid as a substitute for estrogen.

The problem, however, is that there simply aren’t any studies that directly examine the link between exposure to harmful chemicals and transgenderism. It’s not hard to imagine why that might be the case. I hardly need to tell you how controversial the topic of transgenderism has become. While there have been a handful of studies that attempt to explain the growth of transgenderism as something other than an organic phenomenon—and by that, I mean something other than a stable population finally being able to reveal themselves as society becomes more tolerant and inclusive—these few studies have focused on social factors, like children having friends who claim to be transgender, or psychological factors like having one or more mental illnesses. Nobody seems to be willing to make the chemical connection.

Until now, that is. Now there’s a study that directly links exposure to endocrine disruptors to transgenderism. The study is published in the Journal of Xenobiotics, and it considers the effects of exposure to the chemical diethylstilbestrol (DES) on the rate of transgenderism among French boys. The study’s authors discovered that boys exposed to DES in utero were perhaps as much as 100 times more likely to become male-to-female transgender than the highest reported background rate across Europe. Reliable figures for the number of transgender people as a percentage of the population vary wildly, so the actual increase in risk due to exposure to DES could be even higher.

Although DES has been banned in the US since the year 2000, it was used for decades to treat a wide variety of women’s ailments, from vaginitis to menopause, and, most importantly, it was given during pregnancy to a large number of women with a history of miscarriage to reduce the risk of further complications. It’s estimated that between 1938 and 1971, four million pregnant women were given DES in the US alone. DES was also given to livestock to fatten them for market, and it was even used as a form of chemical castration to “treat” homosexuality, its most famous victim in that regard being the cryptographer Alan Turing, who was forced to take DES not long before his death in suspicious circumstances.

The first comprehensive evidence of the drug’s harmful effects came in the early 1970s, when it was shown to cause rare forms of vaginal tumors in girls exposed to the drug in utero. In 1971, the FDA withdrew approval for its use as a treatment for pregnant women. DES has now been widely linked to reproductive abnormalities in both sexes, ranging from epidydimal cysts, undescended testicles (cryptorchidism), and micropenises in boys to ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, premature births, and various forms of cancer in girls, including breast cancer and the rare cancers mentioned earlier. DES exposure is also linked to psychological disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolarism, eating disorders, and suicidal behavior. Exposure is believed to have multigenerational and transgenerational effects, meaning that the effects of exposure ramify down the generations even when only a single generation has been exposed. We’re now discovering that many harmful chemicals have these kinds of effects; the weedkiller glyphosate, for example, can cause the great-grandchildren of rats exposed to it to become obese.

The new French study looks at a cohort of 1200 mothers who were given DES while pregnant and their nearly 2000 offspring. Importantly, the study includes children these mothers gave birth to before they were exposed to DES. This allows the establishment of a comparable rate between sons born with and without exposure to the drug.

Dune: The 'terraformed' Oregon dunes that inspired Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic

 

https://www.cineplex.com/movie/dune-part-two?ic=cpx_tdp-moviegrid-en&openTM=true

When Frank Herbert saw how ecologists had manipulated the sands of Oregon's coast, it would influence his sci-fi novel Dune – but in the present day, that human intervention has triggered unexpected consequences.

Just south of the town of Florence, Oregon, a strip of sand dunes stretches between the Pacific Ocean and a thick forest of pines and spruces. These shifting hills are constantly reforming – ridges last mere days, entire mountains of sand melt away and reform each year. It's said that you cannot step in the same river twice. Here, you cannot walk the same dune twice, either.

From the right perspective, Oregon's dunes can feel endless as you walk among them, as if you have wandered into the Sahara, or perhaps even another planet entirely. There is sand here, lots of sand. More than enough to bury a town.

The prospect of dune invasion was what brought a young journalist named Frank Herbert to Florence in the 1950s. Sand dunes near Florence were threatening to cover houses, roadways, railroad tracks, and farms, making human inhabitation impossible. He observed how ecologists and engineers with the US Soil Conservation Service (SCS), among other agencies, were stopping the sand with an ambitious plan to "terraform" the landscape.

The trip would leave a lasting impression on Herbert – and he would later draw on the experience when writing one of the most influential science-fiction stories of all time. In his epic novel Dune, the characters' ambition to control the sands of the desert planet Arrakis is a prominent theme. (The second part of Denis Villeneuve's Hollywood adaptation arrived in cinemas on 1 March.)

If Herbert, who died in 1986, were to visit the Oregon coast today, he might well reflect on all that has happened since. As the BBC discovered on a recent visit, the landscape has changed significantly since the author was there seven decades ago. Along with this terraforming transformation have come unanticipated outcomes, though the solutions are far from clear. Is it life imitating science fiction? Or perhaps science fiction come to life?

Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma, Washington, about six hours north of Florence. As a young man he swam in the Puget Sound, and rambled in the lush forests of the Pacific Northwest, an experience that instilled a deep admiration, and concern, for the natural world. He worked for a time as a newspaper editor in San Francisco, and began writing science fiction stories in the early 1950s, spinning fables from his eclectic interests in religion, sociology, psychology and more. Herbert was drawn to esoteric niches of science, and around 1953 he'd become fascinated by dunes, which were like rivers of sand, he said in a later interview. When he learned of the terraforming project in Oregon, he travelled to the coast to see it for himself.

When Herbert arrived in Florence, he flew over the scalloped dunes in a small plane, and talked with the scientists on the ground. They told him how they were planting grasses along the dunes near the ocean to stabilise the sand and build up a living bulwark. The SCS had been nurturing beds of beach grass around the town, hoping to eventually eliminate the sand entirely and make the coast a lush haven of forests and fields of crops.

Herbert was taken with the ecologists' bravado, and impressed by their success at transforming the landscape. He sent notes to his agent for an article he titled "They stopped the moving sands", which was never published. But later, when he was imagining the desert planet of Arrakis in Dune, he returned to his experience. In his story, initially serialised in the magazine Analog, the nomadic Fremen people plan a generations-long project to transform their barren world into a paradise using tactics that mimic almost exactly those employed by the SCS on the Oregon Coast.

In an appendix to Dune, describing the Arrakis project, Herbert wrote: "Downwind sides of old dunes presented the first plantation areas. The Fremen aimed first for a cycle of poverty grass with peatlike hair cilia to intertwine, mat and fix the dunes by depriving the wind of its big weapon: movable grains." 

The "poverty grass" Herbert describes is a dead ringer for Ammophila arenaria, or European beachgrass, which scientists brought to the Oregon coast sometime around the turn of the 20th Century. They were inspired by earlier efforts in France, where engineers had successfully tamed moving sand dunes near Gascony by planting forests along their edges. European beachgrass, with its thin stems, or tillers, and densely woven root system, proved to be even more adept at capturing blowing sand and anchoring a dune.

"What the Fremen are doing in terms of their own terraforming project is really coming directly from the dunes," says Veronika Kratz, a literary scholar at Canada's Queen's University who has written about Dune. "In a sense, it is the Oregon dunes transposed to an entire planet."

In Dune, the science is the terraforming Herbert saw on the Oregon coast. The fiction, perhaps, is that such a project could ever be done so well.

Remaking a landscape

Today, a string of small to medium-size towns dot the Oregon coast, filled with beach cottages, artisanal bakeries, and art galleries, and it is a popular vacation spot for families and retirees. It was all made possible by the earnest terraforming schemes imported by European settlers more than a century ago, says Sally Hacker, a coastal ecologist at Oregon State University who studies the Oregon dunes.

"I think this is really the story of a lot of these coastal towns that are in front of dunes," she says. "They weren't able to really settle there until they were able to stabilise it."

You may also like:

Dune: Part Two review: "jaw-droppingly weird"

Dune: Part One review

Why the world is running out of sand

Stabilisation efforts around Florence began early in the 20th Century, first with willow trees to act as a windbreak, and progressing to beachgrass. Eventually, they hoped, the beachgrass would be replaced by other plants that would establish a virtuous cycle of soil creation and plant growth, turning the barren landscape green. Between 1910 and 1916, the US Forest Service oversaw the planting of beachgrass, shrubs, and trees near the town, and by the 1950s when Herbert visited the dunes they were already well on their way to being stabilised.

Visitors today can see, fully realised, what Herbert had to imagine. In many places, an archipelago of grassy hillocks 75-100cm-tall (30-39in) dot the dunes, halting their movements. The European beachgrass they planted, sometimes called marram grass, has stems and roots that can fix entire ridgelines of sand in place. Unlike other species of beachgrass it grows vertically, sending out new rhizomes upwards, which means it can keep pace with dunes as they get taller.

Over time, the planting has anchored a tall sand embankment called a foredune, which parallels the shore. It captures sand transported by waves and wind, starving the landscape inland of building material, and creating a flat, sunken deflation plain with marshy areas that can extend more than a kilometer behind the foredune. 

This landscape is not native, and would not be recognisable to the indigenous inhabitants of the Oregon coast 200 years ago. But it makes the place livable. Florence, and other towns along the coast are safe, more or less, hidden behind foredunes that still a restless ocean of sand.

Herbert was impressed by the capacity of plants to remake a landscape. It was an insight that, for him, underlined the power of understanding the natural world, a realisation that drives the plot of Dune. "The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realise about an ecosystem, is that it's a system. A system!" says the planetary ecologist Liet Kynes, who begins teaching the Fremen to terraform Arrakis, in the book. "That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences."

Those words would have rung true to the ecologists of the 20th Century, living under the long shadow of the American Dust Bowl. During the 1930s, poor agricultural practices turned the US Great Plains into a barren dystopia of dry, blowing soil. As a result, ecologists of the 20th Century saw blowing soil and sand as nothing less than an existential threat to humanity, to be stopped at all costs.

"What you see happening on the Oregon coast and what you see happening with the SCS as it continues… is still an attempt to avoid the Dust Bowl," Kratz says.   In Oregon, the ecologists likely saw themselves as applying their hard-won wisdom for the benefit of humanity. Human folly had once set the soils loose; now they were being tamed. The terraforming project has enabled generations of people to live, work, and play along this picturesque stretch of Pacific coast.

That privilege has not come without consequences, however.

The European beachgrass that holds the sands fast is steadily spreading beyond the areas it was planted in. Invasive species like gorse and Scotch broom introduced by European settlers have come with it, crowding out native species. Hardy coastal inhabitants like pink sand verbena with its delicate lilac flowers and red fescue are threatened on the Oregon coast, and animals like the snowy plover and Siuslaw hairy-necked tiger beetle, one of the fastest insects on the world, are also in peril.

More than that, the landscape itself is disappearing. "​​We're losing about five feet [1.5m] of open sand every year," says Dina Pavlis, a longtime Florence resident, author of Secrets of the Oregon Dunes, and member of the Oregon Dunes Restoration Collaborative.

"I live on a street that backs up to dunes where I hike. And when we moved there, it was all open sand as you would walk," she says. Today, "the trees are almost closing it off where you can't even see the sand".

The open sand, once seen as a threat, is actually a threatened resource worth saving, Pavlis and others argue. She and other members of the ODRC have laid out a three-pronged plan to save the dunes, which includes restoring natural processes by knocking down foredunes, protecting remaining natural dune environments, and conducting targeted interventions to save endangered species.

The ODRC includes people who at other times might be at odds with one another, like environmental groups and off-road vehicle riders. They find a shared purpose in saving the open dunes, Pavlis says.

"We all agree on the value," she says. "We know if nothing gets done, it's going to be gone."

The group has leveled foredunes in several places along the Oregon coast, restoring natural dune-building processes critical to maintaining the native landscape. They bring work parties to the dunes to remove beachgrass and invasive plants like scotch broom by hand, and use bulldozers and prescribed burns in other places.

The restoration practices work, though they are rarely permanent. European beachgrass returns to the open sand if it isn't kept at bay by human intervention. More existential issues pressure the fight to save the dunes as well.

Living with the sands

On the north edge of Florence, outside of a Fred Meyer grocery store, you can see harbingers in the parking lot. Grains of sand tumble across the pavement and collect against curbs, ambassadors from the massive dune that lurks just behind the store. The dune top is tracked with the imprint of bulldozer treads, evidence of the constant battle to keep it from encroaching on the store and the nearby roadway.

The grocery store's plight is indicative of the complexity of attempting to live with the dunes. The foredunes that keep sand from moving are destabilising the landscape  and imperiling wildlife. But without them, the town might soon become unlivable.

"When I talk about the story, I also remind people in the audience… you all got in your car and drove here today," Pavlis says. "You didn't have to get out and shovel sand out of the way."

The residents of the Oregon coast have discovered further nuances as they struggle with the question of what to do about the sand. Foredunes sequester large amounts of carbon by providing a haven for beach grasses. They also provide a better, and more sightly, means of protecting against rising seas than the jumbled piles of rocks called riprap used elsewhere. Some wealthy homeowners have removed foredunes from their properties to better their views, Hacker says, only to be faced with the reality of incoming sand.

One particular irony arose in 2020, when the Humboldt marten, a species of cute, carnivorous mammal related to weasels and otters was listed as endangered. The species had been pushed out its usual shrubby habitat as a result of human activities, and lives now in the deflation plains behind the foredunes. Grading the foredunes to restore the native ecosystem would erase the marten's habitat, something forbidden under the Endangered Species Act. That listing halted some of the ODRC's restoration work — consequences stacking atop consequences.

Even knowing what restoration means is difficult today, Hacker says, because historical descriptions are rare. "There's very little information, very little natural history of what things were like 150 years ago in our region."

Instead, she and her colleagues today are trying to help coastal residents make better decisions about how to balance the different services dunes can offer. Things like protection from tsunamis, opportunities for recreation, protection from sand, and carbon storage are often referred to as ecosystem services, which the dunes, in both their natural and less-natural iterations offer.

"How do we partition up the coast in smart ways that that basically give us the most bang for our buck in terms of ecosystem services?" she says.

It is a more pragmatic vision of living in harmony with the natural world than that promoted by some environmentalists, who seek to restore the world to the way it was millennia ago. For better or worse, humans are also part of the natural world.

Herbert may well have agreed. In a 1981 interview, he said "I look upon our involvement with the environment – and, by the way, all of man's intrusions into the environment are totally natural phenomena – as a continual learning process." 

When Herbert wrote Dune in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the field of ecology was in its infancy, and not well known among the public. Rachel Carson's foundational environmental book Silent Spring, long credited with galvanising the environmental movement in the United States, wouldn't be published until 1962, just a year before Dune began serialisation.

Herbert's views of ecology likely differed from our own today, Kratz says. To him, it was "a way of understanding the natural world and also a way for people to control the natural world in a way that, today, we would problematise."

Seen from Herbert's perspective, humanity's century-plus history of involvement in the Oregon dunes is simply an iterative process gradually moving us toward a better relationship with the sands. Whether that's possible is an open question.

"Harmony to me isn't necessarily a native dune that is restored to what it was 200 years ago," Hacker says. Should we live in the dunes? Perhaps not. "But we are. The reality is that we are living in that habitat," she says.

For its part, the world of Dune offers little guidance for the residents of Oregon. In ChildrenofDune, the emperor Leto II Atreides, the grandson of Dune's protagonist Paul Atreides, has a vision that reveals the origins of the massive sandworms that swim through the planet's deserts. The beasts were brought to the planet eons ago by humans as small creatures called sandtrout. Arrakis at that time was filled with water and life, much like Earth is today. The sandtrout, let loose in a new habitat, encapsulated all of the water, turning Arrakis into a desert, evolving into the sandworms as they did so.

Arrakis was made into a desert by humans, who then attempted to unmake it. So it is in Oregon, though in reverse — we turned what appeared to be a desert into a grassland, only to change our minds.

It is a message with deep significance today, as ambitious projects to grow forests, coral reefs, kelps beds, and more seek to restore balance to our environment. Will we see the same process play out in these places? Already there are hints of conflict: one 2024 opinion paper in Science assessing plans to conduct large-scale tree planting in Africa notes that about half the land earmarked for trees consists of native savanna, and that putting forests there would disrupt the native ecosystem. Elsewhere, some scientists have proposed transplanting hardier coral species from Indonesia to the Caribbean to replace dying reefs there, even as others say the idea poses risks to other species.

Herbert might smile at our predicament, or perhaps grimace. As he wrote in Dune, "ecology is the understanding of consequences".

*Nathaniel Scharping is a science writer based in Tacoma, Washington. Find more of his work at nathanielscharping.com.

Hacker envisions a middle path for people who choose to live on the coast. With better knowledge of coastal ecology, we could find ways to use dunes to protect people, while also potentially stepping back from coastlines in places where the conflicts are too stark.