I once apologised to a tree.
There’s some science there if you’ll hear me out.
We had an augur on the back of a tractor trying to sink a hole for a gate post just a little too close to a small gum tree.
The tree’s roots grabbed the 150kg augur three feet down and didn’t let go.
We tried everything for hours until it got dangerous.
I had cursed that same tree the day before when I copped a scratch from a branch as I passed it by.
So, I decided to now apologise to the tree for ripping off the offending limb in my rage.
The tree let go of the auger immediately, leaving me too embarrassed to share the anecdote.
Three threads of improving agriculture are science, belief and what’s known as the ‘woo-woo’, and I wager that all three are interwoven.
Consider Edward Jenner, who is almost single-handedly responsible for extending our life expectancy by several decades.
For 34 years he observed milkmaids, based on overhearing one who boasted she had never caught smallpox (London’s then plague) because she had already had the relatively harmless cowpox.
It was a common ‘belief’ among country folk; it was an example of woo-woo.
Plenty of painless pus passed persistently, providing protection aplenty.
The rest is history: Jenner injected a bit of cowpox pus into a small boy who recovered quickly, only to then survive Dr Jenner stabbing him with smallpox pus.
Imagine the paperwork.
The Latin word for cow is vacca.
Vaccination was born and the human life span raised from 27-and-a-half.
Jenner turned woo-woo into a science.
My apology to the tree was rooted in a book (and a pun) in which science meets Indian mysticism.
None of the experiments in Tompkins and Bird’s 1973 best seller The Secret Life of Plants that vouched for plants having ‘feelings’ have been replicated sufficiently because of ‘this-project-has-no-economic-outcome’ lack of funding.
However, at university we wired up plant leaves to electronic sensors to measure ‘action potentials’ which are a plant’s nearest thing to a nerve impulse.
Tompkins and Bird describe experiments where action potentials were observed when a philodendron leaf was cut. Fair enough.
Then experiments showed the action potentials firing up before the cut took place.
And then (into woo-woo we venture) the plants responded when the scientist entered the glass house with one intent and then changed their mind at the last minute to find the alternate plant let it be known that it knew what was coming.
Make of that what you will.
Today we see endless cases of farming improvement via biodiversity and ecology, words that once may have been taboo among our monoculture agriculture ancestors.
Similarly, I have read dozens of scientific papers which bust open Chinese herbal medicine beliefs and identify the very chemicals that do exactly what centuries of Chinese lore has told us they do.
(Keep an eye on alfalfa; as in eat as much as you can fit into a sandwich.)
And, as expected, the woke elite have finally found another territory where they can be offended.
We can’t call it ‘woo-woo’.
Despite surviving 300,000 years of traumatic challenges that include large dangerous animals (until we could fell them with a tiny arrow), some of us can’t handle words.
Apparently, ‘woo-woo’ debases indigenous peoples’ view of the world.
Well, it did until last week: I contacted the instigator of this concept and they saw things from my perspective, namely that Europeans brought more (rubbishy) woo-woo to the colonies.
The initial critical use of the word (think ‘mumbo-jumbo’) has become a label of respectful credibility, emptying it of cynicism by its mere use, validating it.
Warwick Schillar uses both the word and the concept with startling results for horses all over the world.
As woo-woo shifts across the spectrum towards science, may woke slide backwards into the abyss.
Before abyss gets banned. Maybe too deep?
Andy Wilson writes for Country News. He is a pre-peer review science editor in a range of fields and has a PhD in ecology from the University of Queensland.