Where have you bean?

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Where have you bean? Where have you bean? 〰️

French Bean (phaseolus Vulgaris) Seedling Art Print
by **Dr Jeremy Burgess**

A Time for Choice

You are the mountain, but awake.

You are the rain, but breathing.

You are the forest, but unanchored.

You are the soil, but with choice.

You are the sunlight, but dreaming.

Soon, you will be these things again. Mountain. Rain. Forest. Sunlight.

So, what will you do until then?

Jarod K. Anderson

It’s mid autumn now and the green of the birch and elm leaves has drained away, the remaining yellows coaxing the illusion of colour back into the bleached out swathes of depleted pastures. It feels like everyone is closing shop, drawing in, sending and storing their wares within and under for the winter. The shortening days have farewelled the blistering, harsh light of our searing summer sun replacing it with a softened, invitingly warm glow that beckons you into it. Like a long awaited reunion of dear friends you can finally, confidently and joyously bask under a stream of photons without risking your future. The sun feels glorious. It’s a brief autumnal pleasure in these deep southern latitudes of lutruwita/Tasmania, the liminal moment between the earth’s extreme angles that allows just the right quality and quantity of light for comfort and pleasure. The point where the intensity of UV streaming from directly overhead is reduced but not so low as in the depths of winter when the light can barely make it over the horizon. Your beans call out to you, they are ready to harvest now, another autumnal pleasure.

Grown from seeds your friend gave you from their collection, these purple king beans signify your reentry into relationship with food plants after a long, frustrating few years with an impatient incapacity to garden. These beans have grown, not thrived but grown - like you, not thrived, but grown. They have spent the summer climbing into the sun transforming gases into life and now like so many plants in autumn they are ready to pass their nutrients, and progeny on. You pick a bean long and slim, their deep velvetty violet skin a royal coat that mysteriously turns to green when cooked. The smooth pencil-like feeling in your fingers triggers an early memory of standing next to your first best friend, your Nana, her big heart hidden under a floral apron as you help her top and tail a mountain of beans destined to be cooked beyond recognition - 80’s style.

Image credit Gardenerd: Organic Edible Gardening free tips, information and advice

You crunch down on this bean and it snaps satisfyingly between your teeth. You hear and feel the juices ricochet out. Wow. That’s a damn fine bean. Vital. You feel truly ecstatic chewing it between your teeth, your taste buds dancing as the juices of protein packed embryos burst inside your mouth like the explosions of early stars where the elements in your bean were initially formed. Yes! You’re reminded that’s right - beans = Nitrogen! An element formed by the stars during nucleosynthesis about 300000 years after the formation of our universe. So beginning its long journey to somehow becoming the most abundant gas in earth’s atmosphere and a core element in most energetic processes of life. Everywhere and essential, a cycle that up until 2.7 billion years ago was controlled by atmospheric reactions and slow geological processes when these transformations then became integrated and orchestrated by a select constellation of microbes. “Without nitrogen there would be no life on earth – no chlorophyll, no haemoglobin, no plants or animals. Carbon provides the basic skeleton of organic matter but nitrogen allows that matter to take on different forms and roles. Amino acids, proteins, DNA – all of them are nitrogen compounds. It is in our blood and the air we breathe. It is why the sky is blue and the atmosphere is stable. Like the microbes, nitrogen is everywhere and yet invisible”.

Out of the direct reach of plants and things that eat plants like you, it wasn’t until 100 million years ago that plants apparently developed a predisposition for potential nitrogen fixing symbiosis with bacteria. A predisposition for symbiosis passed onto us but currently overlooked and buried by our modern industrial complex and extractivist paradigm. We can do it too you think - parasite to symbiont, Anthropocene to Symbiocene.

Rhizobium Bacteria In Root Cell
False-colour transmission electron micrograph of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria (red), Rhizobium leguminosarum, in the cell of a root nodule of the pea plant, Pisum sativum. The large structure (yellow/green) is the cell nucleus. It is surrounded by Rhizobium bacteroids, enlarged forms of the bacteria that occur once they have entered the root of the plant. The bacteroids release an enzyme, nitrogenase, which converts atmospheric nitrogen into a usable organic form - something the plant cannot do for itself. Around each bacteroid is a transparent envelope (blue) provided by the plant tissue. Magnification x2400 at 6x4.5cm size.
by **Dr Jeremy Burgess**

And then 60 million or so years ago legumes like your king bean developed their intimate relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria. Legumes! God - such immense characters in the multiple stories of bringing nitrogen to life - or is it life to nitrogen? The paramedics of the plant world. Bringing nitrogen, the most abundant yet ever elusive, least accessible yet critical element for life on our planet back to the wider community of life. You think about that precious nitrogen packed inside the cells of your bean and how it was formed billions of years ago inside stars and is now stuck between your teeth. Was it just floating around the atmosphere a mere 5 - 10 days ago? Incredible. What an incomprehensibley long and entangled journey these atoms have been on to get to your bean. Where were they just before they were breathed into being by the soil and taken in by the rhizobium - the bacterial communities inhabiting the roots of your bean plant, indicating their presence with juicy pink nodules.

Root Nodule By Dr Jeremy Burgess
Root nodule. Coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of a root nodule on a pea plant (Pisum sativum) caused by the nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria Rhizobium leguminosarum. The plant and the bacteria have a symbiotic relationship. The bacteria converts (fixes) atmospheric nitrogen in the soil to ammonia. The plant cannot carry out this process itself, but it is vital for the production of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. In return the plant passes carbohydrates produced during photosynthesis to the bacteria for use as an energy source. The bacteria enters the plant through its root hairs, where an infection thread leads it to the nodule. Magnification x120 when printed 10 centimetres wide.

You think about those bacteria living peacefully inside their secure underground home and those moments when plants first convinced them to stick around… Or was it vice versa. Or was it when the truce and treaty was first called on a long standing feud and territorial battle. You think about those times when this important symbiosis occurred meaning plants had their own supply of this essential element, an element so abundant yet so inaccessible for such a long time now gifted by the smalls in exchange for a home and gifted to you in exchange for [insert your own contribution/commitment]. Maybe it’s magic, maybe it's lore, maybe it just is.

**Sturt desert pea** One family of plants, the legumes, are special because they are the only plants that can form a symbiosis with certain bacteria from the soil, these bacteria are called rhizobia. Rhizobia contain an enzyme called nitrogenase, that can convert the nitrogen in the atmosphere into ammonium, a form of nitrate that plants can take up and use. With this trick, legumes are the only plants that can utilize nitrogen from the air as fertilizer.
by jennah Felix
uses watercolors and natural pigments that compliment her fine lined pieces. Drawn to the shapes and toughness of Australian flowers her works play with light and shadow. She uses micron pen watercolor and other inks and pigments in her pieces.

Every cell in every living organism needs nitrogen but it was unreachable without microbes. For eons, the gift of nitrogen to plants was a living process determined primarily by the complex activities of nitrogen-fixing, nitrifying, and denitrifying bacteria. You think about the life and relationships between and with the more than human and although you're not into encouraging a popularity contest among organisms is with trying to understand what microbiologist Tom Curtis means even he says ‘I make no apologies for putting microorganisms on a pedestal above all other living things. ..if the last blue whale choked to death on the last panda, it would be disastrous but not the end of the world. But if we accidentally poisoned the last two species of ammonia-oxidizers, that would be another matter. It could be happening now and we wouldn’t even know.’ (Nature Reviews Microbiology, vol 4, p 488). And what Siv Watkins of https://www.microanimism.com/ means means when she says “First to evolve, last to die - everything begins and everything began with the microbes”. All of the microbes, small but powerful. All of the microbes in your own body helping you right now, to process this element, nitrogen - some to be used for building muscles and some just expelled as waste …or could it be a gift? Where does this excess nitrogen go? And the excess nitrogen of everyone around you? Does it make it back to our food plants? Back into the atmosphere? How do we get it back out of the atmosphere and able to be used by humans? How is MY nitrogen cycle impacting the planet?

You think about humans bypassing this ecological limit and the ongoing implications of this. You think about the moments when we were finally able to wield the power to transform atmospheric nitrogen and manipulate this biogeochemical cycle in order to supply as well as create a growing demand and desire for nitrogen for use in agriculture and of course, war. Now we have doubled the amount of nitrogen in the biosphere, altering the Nitrogen cycle. One human in particular comes to mind in this story. Fritz Haber who invented a process for making industrial fertilizers AND explosives from atmospheric nitrogen. The Haber-Bosh process enabled the huge increase in food production during the Green Revolution resulting in massive population increases. Our global food system is now dependent on inorganic nitrogenous fertilizers. Nitrogen is the building block of proteins and half of the nitrogen that forms the proteins in your body has come from nitrogen fertilizers used to grow our food. Our farmers import the nitrogen then we literally flush it away with over 80% of it going to waste. It takes a lot of energy but humans have stretched the nitrogen cycle linearly through human society like an overstretched rubber band. Like all things, eventually, it snaps converting back to gases with the unpredictable recoiling motions leading to cascading and interconnecting problems, from air pollution, water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, stratospheric ozone depletion, biodiversity loss and soil acidification. From deadly particles that embed themselves in our lungs to disrupting the chemical communication between organisms like cotton and the predatory wasps they call on for help. We need to make the nitrogen pollution visible and return the reigns to the microbes.

And what of Haber’s story - it’s a cautionary tale of entanglement indeed. A man whose long relationship with gases doesn’t just end with the legacies of nitrogen. Gases envelop his life like the amorphous, undetectable gaseous cloud they are, whose impacts flow in and across generations. Haber developed and then personally released the first chemical weapons in World War I, poisonous chlorine gas that killed thousands of people. In his personal life these events were followed by the suicide of first his wife and later his son and then after his death his extended family die in carbon monoxide gas chambers in the second World War. Gases are defined as fluids that have neither independent shape nor volume but tend to expand indefinitely. This scientific description of gases provides an almost poetic narrative for tracing gases and the impacts of their transformations. It's important we make them visible, listen and pay heed to their odysseys.

You look down at the remainder of your bean, marveling at the complex and overwhelming tales it tells you, your lungs expanding, then pausing, holding the air momentarily as you attempt to take on the immensity of their story now intimately intertwined with yours. The air comes rushing out of your lungs emphatically as you exhale an acknowledging, cathartic breath. A breath that confirms your commitment to curiosity and the responsibility and response ability that comes with it. A deep, nourishing, awe inspired exhalation…an exhalation of millions of gas molecules. You feel them escape, visualising all of those wonderful carbon atoms rebirthing into the air around you and you wonder where they are going and where they have come from ……………Hmmm looks like it’s going to be a long day, lucky there are beans aplenty and the autumnal sun is shining.