Tag Archives: Quadra Project

Animals

The Quadra Project: Biological Wonders – Part 3

Click here to access part one of this series and here for part two .

• A species of weaver ant found from India to northern Australia
(Oecophylla smaragdina) makes its nests by curling leaves into loops.
The leaves, however, are too stiff for any single ant to accomplish this feat. To solve this problem, the ants form a chain of up to 17 individuals. Using their mandibles, each ant grabs the abdomen of the previous ant, and they all pull together to bend the leaves. Using this tug-of-war strategy, the ants are able to pull up to 100 times their individual body weight (New Scientist, 23 August, 2025).

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Politics

The Quadra Project – The Dark Tetrad – Part 2

In Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, Dr.
Luke Kemp attributes the cause of civilizational failures in 400
societies over the course of 5,000 years of history to the
contaminating effects of leaders who possess the “dark triad” of
narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellian manipulation. A related but
equally intriguing perspective comes from Dr. Leanne ten Brinke, a
professor of psychology and director of the University of B.C.’s Truth
and Trust Lab, who has done extensive studies on the behaviour of
convicted criminals (University of British Columbia Magazine,
Spring/Summer 2025, “The ‘Strongmen’ Who are Breaking Democracies” by Jared Downing).

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Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: A Moment for Methane

Carbon dioxide (CO2—a single atom of carbon with two attached atoms of oxygen) gets most of the attention as the cause of global warming
because it can persist in the atmosphere for centuries. Methane is a
gas (CH4—a single carbon atom with four attached atoms of hydrogen)
that deserves attention, especially because every portion of a degree
is crucial in avoiding the worst consequences of global warming.

Although methane persists in the atmosphere for only about 20 years,
it is about 80 times more warming than carbon dioxide, so its
importance in the short term is critical. “Cutting methane is the
single most important strategy in slow near term warming,” says
Durwood Zaelke, the president of the Institute for Governance and
Sustainability (The Guardian Weekly, November 21, 2015). Its
pre-industrial atmospheric concentration was about 715 parts per
billion, and its 2025 level is presently measured at about 1930 ppb,
an increase of nearly 270%. Because of the short life of methane,
these high levels are maintained and increased by the continuous and
rising rate of emissions.

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Health

Toxic Positivism – The Quadra Project

“That we should always look on the bright side has gone too far and may be damaging our wellbeing.” This is the opinion expressed by Conor Feehly in “The Happiness Trap” (New Scientist, June 8, 2024).

The problem with repeatedly chanting such mantras as “I am a lovable person” or “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better,” explains Feehly, is that they don’t work. Assertions such as “happiness is a choice” and that “I am in control of my emotions” turn out to be fallacies. “It’s going to be okay” may be false optimism. Devising strategies to avoid negative emotions is what Susan David of the Harvard Medical School calls “the tyranny of positivity”. Psychologists have found that these exercises in self-affirmation are ultimately ineffective primarily because they aren’t believed by those who are reciting them. The long-term effects are really to cause damage because they create a world of illusions, described as “toxic positivism”.

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Nature

Soil – The Quadra Project

When algae first emerged from the oceans some 480 million years ago to become plants, they had no roots, so they established a symbiotic relationship with fungi, which were essentially nothing but roots. The fungi had the capability of extracting critical moisture and minerals from the ground, while the algae could photosynthesize sugars from sunlight, so the two organisms established a mutually beneficial partnership. This is a subject that has been explored by Dr. Suzanne Simard in her seminal book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Rupert Sheldrake has explored the mysterious world of fungi even further in his remarkable book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds. And George Monbiot has added further dimensions to this fascinating subject in Regenesis, in which he examines the complexity of life systems in soils. Chapter 1, “What Lies Beneath”, is particularly illuminating.

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