Philosophically exploring efficient biofuels

Chatting via e-mail with my normally too busy daughter who had recently graduated with a degree in Horticulture, I had been pointing out recent articles about higher quality biofuels made from fruit, fuel better than ethanol. I had suggested possibility of using fruit, leaves, stem, root material and forming into containers so as to efficiently go direct from sunlight into fruit material with a minimum of extraneous material normally associated with fruit tree orchard production.

She responded something about "mad scientist" and messing with life. So I have responded, and perhaps it all would be appropriate for my energy blog here.

I then wrote:

"There are scientific, economic, and philosophical considerations that can be involved, true.

And yes the image of the mad scientist can be a valid one, where the scientist has been so long bent into the linear scientific analysis process that it is no longer possible to straighten up and look around to see the greater world about, and to see where one's own analytic scientific task is fitting into the much greater picture, and deciding if it is still going in a wholesome direction into the larger picture.

Philosophically speaking, plant physiology as directed to fruit production, I believe, is designed to dangle out that tasty fruit for some critter to amble by and appreciatively munch, to later deposit a mound of nice fertilizer which contains some of the surviving seeds. Maybe one can also philosophize it as the plant giving the critter a gift of tasty fruit in return for going and planting more of its kind. Everybody wins.

As for the manipulation of life forms, the razing of a pine forest and planting rows of apple trees and harvesting the apples later, seems to have messed with nature quite a bit. Also, sometimes a tree is partly grown, then cut off a few feet above the ground and spliced with the trunk and leaves of a different kind of tree, to provide a hardiness. Isn't that also messing with nature? When one bites into an apple and crushes it with the teeth and munches it down, the apple gets really mangled ... is that not messing with it?

So if one were to figure out how to take a bit of apple fruit cells, stem, leaf material (maybe from the parts that were headed into the garbage can and landfill) and getting them all to grow in a more efficient conversion process from sunlight into biofuel, it seems not much different philosophically.

However, plants and animals that get domesticated by civilization, tend to flourish, but other kinds of creatures get crushed out of the way, lost. So if apple fruit material could be grown in sheets for biofuels, it might also then get cookie-cuttered into neat efficient packages for sale instead of apples, and then apples themselves might cease to be tended in orchards.

Such changes need to be responsibly orchestrated into the bigger picture; which unfortunately is rarely done nowadays since "there is no money in it." Only in the long term, big picture, are such things visible as being very economically wise. Growing small apple orchards, or apple trees as part of a forested landscape of diversity in a responsibly tended way, might become a part of civilization's solid progress. Same philosophy for all other kinds of fruit trees ... and other food sources.

OK I can't resist flapping away more with this, and so visualizing growing a tree whose trunk is in the size and shape of a 2 x 4 stud 8 feet long at harvest. No huge logger trucks or sawmill needed. And I recall when I was a boy, fantasizing growing houses by planting and tending various kinds of trees and vines etc to grow into the frame and walls and roof of a house. One could start on a plot of land and start growing such houses; when the first one was adequately grown, install remainder of plumbing, electricity, and move in, live there while tending houses nearby similarly, producing houses year after year for sale, a type of farming. I have it mentioned somewhere on one of my web pages probably one of my old earthlink.net/~jedcline pages, since several years ago I got an email from someone in Hawaii who was building a full sized home supported by three - Banyan? - trees, had seen the page and was looking for ideas."