Champs d'Avenir: Fields of the Future

This is a little essay I wrote to share with my French class about “fields of the future.”  It was based on an article in Strasbourg Magazine, Oct.-Nov. 2025. I quoted a few lines from the article, but I wrote most of it and cannot guarantee the accuracy of the translation. This article shows that what is considered rare and progressive in America is ordinary and mainstream in France.

First, the English translation:

In America and France, most food production is in big fields which contain only one type of crop. In Alsace, one sees big fields of corn, sunflower, beets, and wheat. The big fields need lots of pesticides and fertilizers. Big machines consume a lot of fuel. In the future, we need organic food (“bio” in French). People want organic food. This is an excellent business opportunity for farmers in Strasbourg and for consumers, especially for school cafeterias.

Ms. Anaïs Meyer planted thousands of crocus bulbs in the soil on the roof of a parking garage near Deux Rives. Crocus flowers are the source of saffron. “I do everything with my own hands; there is no need for watering or pesticide,” she explains. The article does not say, but saffron is a high-value product (very expensive at the store).

Urban agricultural projects at Neuhof, the Cité d’Ill, and at Elsau. Nicolas Burgmann, a gardener, cultivates tomatoes, squashes, carrots, leeks, and beets in Neuhof.

The farmers welcome groups from pre-schools, schools, and retirement homes.

It is the agriculture of the future! According to the mayor of Strasbourg, “The agriculture of tomorrow is growing in Strasbourg.”

In French:

En Amérique et en France, la plupart de la production alimentaire est en grandes champs qui contiennent qu’une type de plante. En Alsace, on voit des grandes champs de maïs, tournesol, betterave, et blé. Les grandes champs ont besoin de beaucoup de pesticides et de l’engrais. Les grosses machines consomment beaucoup de carburant. À l‘avenir, on a besoin de nourriture biologique (bio). Les gens veulent des aliments bio. C’est une excellente opportunité commerciale pour les agriculteurs à Strasbourg et pour les consommateurs, spécialement pour les cantines scolaires.

·         Mme. Anaïs Meyer a planté des milliers bulbes de crocus dans le sol du toit du parking près de Deux Rives. Les fleurs de crocus sont la source de safran. « Je fais tout de mes mains, il n’y a ni arrosage, ni pesticide, » elle explique. L’article ne le dit pas, mais le safran est un produit de grande valeur (c’est très cher dans la supermarché).

·         Projets d’agriculture urbaine au Neuhof, à la Cité d’Ill, et à l’Elsau. Le maraîchère Nicolas Burgmann cultive des tomates, courges, courgettes, carottes, poireaux, et les betteraves en Neuhof.

·         Les fermiers bio accueillent des groups venant de crèches, d’écoles, et d’Ehpad.

C’est l’agriculture de l’avenir ! Selon le maire de Strasbourg, « L’agriculture de demain se cultive à Strasbourg. »

Jardins Familiaux de Strasbourg : Family Gardens of Strasbourg

All around me in Strasbourg I see little gardens that people rent from the city. This is one of the things that make living in Strasbourg so pleasant. This time of the year, the gardens are dormant, but they are full of activity from April to November. I described it in a little article I wrote for my French class.

First, the English translation:

What do you do when you don’t have a house but you want a garden? You could rent a “family garden” from the Strasbourg Eurometropole. [Strasbourg thinks of itself as European, not just French.] In this garden, you can raise plants: a vegetable garden, and flowers. According to strasbourg.eu, our city has 4,800 family gardens. According to jardins-familiaux.org, there are only 13,000 family gardens in France, thus Strasbourg has the most!

These gardens are bits of land for inhabitants of the municipalities to use. The garden requires regular maintenance, maybe once a week. No weeds allowed! Commercial use is prohibited. The demand being much larger than the supply, delays could reach several years to get a garden.

How much does it cost? It depends on whether you want just a plot of land, and pay for all the improvements yourself (51 euros a year), a garden with just a shelter (97 euros a year), or a garden with all the amenities (170 euros a year). [I think I’ve seen some with running water, but many people have cisterns where they collect rainwater.]

If you live in an apartment and you can’t barbecue, rent a garden and invite your friends to a party!

The gardens have to meet criteria such as biodiversity, absence of invasive species, and use of biological pest control.

As for me, I do not want to rent a garden. Too much work for me. I prefer to walk around and watch happy people in their gardens.

The original French:

Que faites-vous quand vous n’avez pas de maison, mais vous aimerez avoir un jardin ? On peut louer un « jardin familial » du Eurométropole de Strasbourg. Dans ce jardin, on peut faire pousser des plantes : un potager, et les fleurs. Selon Strasbourg.eu, notre cité dispose de 4 800 jardins familiaux. Selon jardins-familiaux.org, il n’y a que 13 000 jardins familiaux en France, c’est donc Strasbourg qui a le plus !

Ces jardins sont des parcelles de terrain mises à la disposition des habitants par les municipalités. Le jardin demande un entretien régulier y compris en semaine. Pas de mauvaises herbes ! L’usage commercial est exclu. La demande étant largement supérieure à l’offre, les délais d’obtention d’un jardin peuvent atteindre plusieurs années.

Combien ça coûte ? Selon le website du métropole,

Jardin traditionnel (tous les équipements à la charge du  locataire) :

    loyers : 51 euros/an, caution 100 euros à la signature du contrat,

Jardin semi aménagé (abris de jardin à la charge du locataire) :

    loyers : 97 euros/an, caution 100 euros à la signature du contrat,

Jardin aménagé (jardins équipés par la Ville) :

    loyers : 170 euros/an, caution 200 euros à la signature du contrat.

Si vous habitez dans un appartement et vous ne pouvez pas faire de barbecue à maison, louez-vous un jardin et invitez tous votres amis à une fête !

Les jardins doivent répondre aux critères tels que la biodiversité, l’absence d’espèces invasives, et l’usage de pratiques du biocontrôle.

Moi, je ne veux pas louer un jardin. C’est trop de travail pour moi. Je préfère faire de la randonée et voir les gens heureux dans leurs jardins.

The New Reality of the Scientific Method: Donald Trump Is Always Right

I outlined the scientific method, which is something in which anyone, not just scientists, can participate, in my previous book Scientifically Thinking. But there is a new reality about science, at least in the United States, which has developed since I wrote the book, and which I will now explain.

For many years at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, I taught the Research Methods course for science graduate students, which was pretty much the precursor of my book. I recently found, in some old papers, that I taught a similar course at The King’s College, in my first faculty job. King’s was and is a fundamentalist Christian college. Soon after I left, it also became a fundamentalist Republican college and, today, is probably a fundamentalist Trump college. When I taught the scientific method, I taught it pretty much the standard way, although technology was different back then (no internet). But that was because my department chair, although he was a leading creationist, was open to free scientific inquiry. He believed that open inquiry would lead a person to accept creationism. He did not, unlike almost all other fundamentalists, impose his views on other people.

But here is what research is usually like at fundamentalist institutions. First, instead of reaching a conclusion, you impose one. For example, you will stipulate up front that there can be no evidence that is consistent with evolution. Next, you selectively gather information that agrees with your conclusion. Last, you draw your “conclusion” from the selectively-gathered information. This is the exact opposite of the scientific method.

The result was predictable. The scientific value of creationist research is nil, for two reasons other than the above. First, creationists used this method to defend not only the Bible but their sometimes highly imaginary interpretations of it. Second, their misuse of the scientific method made their work sloppy even when it had nothing to do with evolution. Their habit of mind was that, no matter what they did, they had to be right. I documented these two things in a pair of articles I wrote a long time ago: in 1988 and in 1989.

Today we must add another dimension. Not just in creationist or fundamentalist camps, but in all publicly-funded research, the researchers must begin with the conclusion: they must begin with whatever belief the Republican party holds upon the question. For example, is global warming happening, and are humans contributing to it? The answer, fundamentalists think, must be no, even though the Bible does not mention it. The answer must be no because the fossil fuel industry says it is no. This, then, is the conclusion they reach. Are vaccines effective? Again, the required answer is no. Has gun violence reached epidemic proportions? The answer again must be no. Science, then, becomes just a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.

It has been this way for a long time, to various degrees, starting mainly with the George W. Bush administration. But now, under Donald Trump, there is yet a new version of science. You begin with the conclusion that Donald Trump is always right. Science has now become a propaganda arm of Donald Trump, and of his chosen spokespeople, such as RFK Jr. who says that vaccination is not necessary. The conclusion is that vaccination is not effective, because Donald Trump, who used to champion vaccination, says so.

For example, even under Republican presidents in the past, the website climate.gov existed. As of 2025, that URL redirects to NOAA where global warming is hidden, although at this point they still admit that today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide level (421 ppm) is comparable to the atmospheric level four million years ago, and much higher than any time during 6000 years of human civilization. But they are not allowed to draw the obvious conclusion that the Earth is getting hotter, only that it happens to be hot right now; certainly they do not blame our use of fossil fuels.

I am glad that I taught and wrote about science before Donald Trump became the sole standard of truth. I am not sure, however, that I am safe. My most recent book, Forgotten Landscapes, provides evidence that Native Americans were civilized and had a significant effect on the North American landscape. This is not the picture of Native Americans that Republicans prefer. They want to claim that Natives were savages and did not deserve to keep the land that was taken from them. Republican opposition did not prevent the publication of my book. But what will happen next?

Pyroterrorism?

This essay follows directly from a previous entry, based on Quand la Forêt Brûle: Penser La Novelle Catastrophe Écologique by Joëlle Zask (Premier Parallèle, 2019). (When the Forest Burns : Thinking about the New Ecological Catastrophe), about megafires. It made the point that, in the globally-warmed future, there will be no small fires, whether control burns or natural fires. They will all be big and destructive.

Toward the end of the book, the author mentioned a possibility that I had never considered, or even heard about: Pyroterrorism. That is, terrorists could start huge fires, believing that these fires would disrupt whatever little social cohesion that we have and leave us vulnerable to their other acts of terrorism. Apparently this idea has been published on foreign terrorist websites, to which I will not provide any connection.

It gets even worse. The terrorists do not even have to start the fires. They can wait for the fires to start in some other way, and then claim credit for them. They could say that, See, Allah is great, because He destroyed Paradise, California and surrounding areas in the 2018 Camp Fire, and He destroyed Maui in 2023. They would not have to say that their terrorist groups had started them, something of which most people would be skeptical.

But there are a couple of major reasons that pryoterrorism will either not occur soon or will have no great effect.

First, it is easy to start a forest fire. All it takes is a match. An arsonist can start a fire and leave so little evidence of his identity that no one would ever find him or even suspect that arson had occurred. Authorities estimate that there are thousands of such cases of criminal arson every year. But in order to prove that a fire began as an act of arson, much less to find the culprit, there has to be multiple simultaneous ignitions, and probably evidences of piling up brush and of gasoline. These are the things that would be necessary in order to give a fire a good chance of spreading. Even under hot, dry conditions, with lots of dry vegetation and strong wind, most fires will not become mega-fires under present conditions.

Second, terrorists have said online that a mega-fire would disrupt our society. But that is not what has happened. One of the few good things one can say about the modern world is that natural (or human-enhanced) disasters being people together rather than driving them apart. The California and Hawaii fires ignited an outpouring of humanitarian sentiment and relief. This has left the terrorists looking like the Grinch who was astonished to see the people of Whoville celebrating even after he had successfully stolen Christmas.

Neither foreign nor domestic terrorists would have much chance of success with pyroterrorism.

Enough mega-fires would cause such financial strain that we could have a major economic disaster, but it does not appear that pyroterrorism will destroy even the little bit of altruism that we have. So the good news is that there is one less thing to worry about.

European Tourists Are Staying Away from America

European tourism to America is in steep decline, averaging about 25 percent for seven major countries. Since I live in France, I was particularly interested in French tourism to America. It has declined by about 20 percent, according to this article in Le Monde. This article is in English, but you can only read the first two paragraphs without a subscription.

The decline in European tourism is almost completely due to the hatred generated by Donald Trump against Europe. It is a pattern all to familiar, when Canadians largely stopped coming to American ski resorts after Trump threatened to annex Canada. He had no serious intention to do so, but he caused billions of dollars in lost revenue just by spouting off his hatred.

The decline has also resulted from safety concerns. Europeans, quite frankly, are afraid of getting shot if they visit America. My son-in-law, when he moved to America to marry my daughter, said he had checked on the figures before coming, and he was fifty times more likely to be shot in America than in France. While this may not appreciably increase a tourist’s risks, everyone keeps hearing about American mass public shootings. They happen almost every weekend. The news on December 14 was of a public shooting at Brown University. The previous week it was Kentucky State University. After this happens enough times, European minds begin linking the thought of visiting America to the fear of getting shot.

And I honestly cannot tell them otherwise. In one of my French classes, we read a passage in which a (fictitious) French woman dreamed of moving to America. I had to say, « Pour quoi est-ce qu’elle aimerait habiter en Amérique ? Les États-Unis ont tant de fusillades!» Why would she want to live in America ? The U.S. has so many shootings!

This is a science blog, so I will make a connection to evolution. Throughout human evolutionary history, migrating to a new location has given immense fitness advantages to many people and to their tribes. There has always been a risk, but the risk has been worth it. But today, visiting another country has risks without much benefit. Natural selection may have favored wanderlust in the past but today it provides no benefit. Why buy a plane ticket to America when you can hop on a train and visit Spain or Italy?

Trump has tried to compensate for the loss of agricultural sales (from his tariffs) by paying farmers. This is a big government approach. His big government ruins business then compensates for it by a socialistic payout. But is Trump going to offer a big payout to the tourism industry in return, not for tariff payments, but merely for the personal pleasure of insulting Europe? Just how many billions of dollars is America willing to lose to pay for Trump’s peevish insults?

I’d better post this pretty soon before we have another mass public shooting.

How Cultures Can Unite without Domination

Part of the message of the Christmas season is “Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men.” But is this even remotely imaginable?

Yes, it is.

As shown in a video [https://youtube.com/shorts/D4GB35JCuzE?] I have just posted, war raged between what is now France and what is now Germany for millennia until 1945, when Nazi Germany was defeated. Today, no two countries are as closely allied with one another as are France and Germany. Today, war between them is unthinkable (as well as illegal). How did this happen?

First, the country (Germany) that wanted to conquer and assimilate the other (France) had to be humiliated into abject surrender. Second, the two countries had to make the deliberate decision to cooperate, and to resolve any and all tensions through constructive negotiation rather than war. And that is what France and Germany have done. Not only them, but all of the other couple of dozen nations that make up the European Union, which is a unique accomplishment of the work of peace in human history.

The result of the European Union has not been assimilation. Neither France nor Germany assimilated the other. The French still have their own language and culture, and the same is true of Germany. As shown by the statues in the video, France and Germany are saying the same thing (“I give, you give, we live”) in their own languages. They have the same objectives, each in their own cultures.

As I also explain in the video, this has not been the case in the United States, with regard to the Native American nations. The white culture of the United States has conquered the Native nations and imposed its culture and language on them. There is no mutually respectful meeting of cultures. Many tribes, such as the Cherokee tribe of which I am a member, maintain cultural identity, but it has little practical meaning in governance or the economy.

Two cultures can mutually benefit one another if they cooperate and share objectives, while maintaining their distinction. This happened with the European countries, but not with white and Native America.

Donald Trump has declared that Europe is weak, Putin is strong, and that it is stupid for America to help Ukraine remain independent. Putin represents all the worst in assimilation; he wants to obliterate Ukrainian culture and identity, and make Ukraine into a colony that provides cheap goods and labor to Russia. And, according to Trump, it is stupid for us to help Ukraine to resist this. Putin wants to do (as Russia did under the communists) to Ukraine what white America has done to the Native nations. But it is Europe that is strong, because a Union of proud nations has come together to defend its common interests.

The New World of Mega-fires

Mega-fires! Or, megafeux in French, as in the book Quand la Forêt Brûle: Penser La Novelle Catastrophe Écologique by Joëlle Zask (Premier Parallèle, 2019). (When the Forest Burns : Thinking about the New Ecological Catastrophe.)

Through much of my professional life, I have considered fires (in forests, prairies, and chaparrals) to be ecologically beneficial. Where to begin with the ecological benefits of fires? Fires clear away underbrush and release nutrients in the dead litter into the soil where new plants can grow back and use them. The sunlight can now reach the soil surface, warming it up earlier in the spring than would have been possible with a thick litter layer still in place. In many cases, the perennial plants that were present before the fire grow back, more vigorous than they were before. This is the case for hundreds of species of prairie plants, which maintain their thick sod of roots and underground stems. It is also true, as I have seen for the cross timbers forest of Oklahoma. As for the plants that grow back from seeds in the soil, the seeds germinate profusely, as I have seen Phacelia strictiflora do in cross-timbers forests after fires. So frequent are these fires that many plants have adapted to them even to the extent of requiring the fires to maintain their populations. My research has shown that Phacelia seeds require smoke chemicals in order to germinate; the same is true for hundreds of species around the world in fire-prone habitats such as chaparral. How can fire, which has so many ecological benefits, be bad?

Fire has long been a tool of habitat management. The whole landscape evolved with wildfires. Since the spread of western civilization, wildfires have decreased, mostly because people do not like to have their homes destroyed by fire. Ecological landscape managers have to set control burns to compensate for the decline in wildfires. This photo shows a control burn near Lake Texoma in Oklahoma in 1999.

In the absence of natural fires and control burns, dead biomass builds up under the trees and virtually assures that a fire will break out soon and be very big.

White landscape managers were not the first to use fire as a management tool. All over the world, native peoples have set fires to forests and fields to renew their growth. This was nowhere more true than with the Native peoples of North America, as I describe in my book Forgotten Landscapes.

But times are changing. In particular, global warming is changing the landscape. As Naomi Klein said in the title of her book about the economics and politics of global climate change, This Changes Everything. It has certainly changed the scientific way of thinking about fire.

Global climate change includes not only hotter temperatures but less rainfall and more wind in many areas, such as southern Europe during recent long, hot, dry, windy summers. This is not a prediction; it is something that has already happened in many parts of the world. Some of these forest fires have flames almost a hundred feet tall and that spread faster than anybody can run. The fires consume houses, including outdoor free-standing barbecue grills which are built to withstand fire: the grills simply melt.

Other human activities promote the spread of large fires. All around the world, not only in rainforests but even where I used to live in Oklahoma, native forests are cut down and replaced by tree plantations such as loblolly pine. Tree plantations, with breezy understories and with flammable, fast-growing trees, burn more readily than native forests.

The result is that, right when we need control burns more than ever, we do not dare to conduct them. There is a tremendous liability cost associated with a control burn that gets out of hand. If a private citizen loses so much as a shed to a government control burn, the land-owner will sue for lots of money. As global warming progresses, almost any control burn is guaranteed to escape and become a major fire.

A mega-fire, unlike most smaller fires, can and do sterilize the soil, so that there are no roots, stems, or seeds to grow back. The resulting moonscape will recover, but it might take many decades and suffer uncontrolled soil erosion in the meantime.

The time is coming, and in some places is already here, when there will be no such thing as a little control burn. There will be only mega-fires.

I have retired, so it is too late for me to tell my classes, forget everything I said about control burns.