Richard M., a close friend for more than forty years, recently sent me a hilarious story. Richard prefaced the story with a quotation from the late Bernard Levin.
Some of the readers of Learning from Dogs may not be familiar with Mr. Levin. I can do no better than to quote the WikiPedia entry:
Henry Bernard Levin CBE (19 August 1928 – 7 August 2004) was an English journalist, author and broadcaster, described by The Times as “the most
Bernard Levin c. 1980
famous journalist of his day”. The son of a poor Jewish family in London, he won a scholarship to the independent school Christ’s Hospital and went on to the London School of Economics, graduating in 1952. After a short spell in a lowly job at the BBC selecting press cuttings for use in programmes, he secured a post as a junior member of the editorial staff of a weekly periodical, Truth, in 1953.
Levin reviewed television for The Manchester Guardian and wrote a weekly political column in The Spectator noted for its irreverence and influence on modern parliamentary sketches. During the 1960s he wrote five columns a week for The Daily Mail on any subject that he chose. After a disagreement with the proprietor of the paper over attempted censorship of his column in 1970, Levin moved to The Times where, with one break of just over a year in 1981–82, he remained as resident columnist until his retirement, covering a wide range of topics, both serious and comic.
Levin became a well-known broadcaster, first on the weekly satirical television show That Was The Week That Was in the early 1960s, then as a panellist on a musical quiz, Face the Music, and finally in three series of travel programmes in the 1980s. He began to write books in the 1970s, publishing 17 between 1970 and 1998. From the early 1990s, Levin developed Alzheimer’s disease, which eventually forced him to give up his regular column in 1997, and to stop writing altogether not long afterwards.
Anyway, that quotation from Bernard Levin was, “You’ll never see a thin lawyer or a fat litigant.” In the case of the following story, no doubt both lawyers were paid!
Enjoy!
ooOOoo
Not the cigars in the story!
This took place in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against, among other things, fire.
Within a month, having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars, the lawyer filed a claim against the insurance company.
In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost ‘in a series of small fires.’ The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason, that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.
However, the lawyer sued and WON!
Delivering the ruling, the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer held a policy from the company, in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable ‘fire’ and was obligated to pay the claim.
Rather than endure a lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the cigars that perished in the ‘fires’.
BUT IT DIDN”T END THERE!
After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!! With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.
(This true story won First Place in last year’s Criminal Lawyers Award contest.)
ooOOoo
Perhaps this offers a small clue as to why this Englishman, having now lived in America for more than four years, still finds his new homeland a little strange!
Some days, one just wonders about a world that appears to be stark, raving mad!
One of the fundamental things that mankind is not learning from dogs, or from other animals for that fact, is having a sensitivity to danger.
Even happy, domesticated dogs, as with cats, are incredibly quick to pick up on something that just doesn’t ‘feel right’!
For example, take what was written here last Wednesday. About the extreme madness of our dependency on oil for our food!
Why is there no outcry?
Just recently, NOAA reported that “April 2014 was tied with April of 2010 as being the warmest April on record globally for land and ocean surface combined. NOAA also said that – globally – the January 2014 to April 2014 period was the 6th warmest Jan-Apr period on record.”
Why is there no outcry?
Just ten days ago, I wrote a post under the title of The nature of delusions. Included in that post was an essay from George Monbiot he called Are We Bothered? His proposition being, “The more we consume, the less we care about the living planet.”
Part of me hates the way that this blog often touches on pain and negativity but my motivation is simply that doing nothing, ignoring what is so wrong in the world, would be the height of irresponsibility.
All of which is a preamble to another George Monbiot essay. Mr. Monbiot is a powerful writer as his many essays demonstrate. But this latest one from him is one of the most powerful essays in a very long time.
It’s not a comfortable read. But sure as hell, it’s a must read!
Why collapse and salvation are hard to distinguish from each other.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th May 2014
Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham (1).
Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It’s 2.5 billion billion solar systems (2). It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.
To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues were miraculously to vanish, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.
Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained (3). But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.
It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and the pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, as the most accessible reserves have been exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition.
On Friday, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable (4), the Ecuadorean government decided that oil drilling would go ahead in the heart of the Yasuni national park (5). It had made an offer to other governments: if they gave it half the value of the oil in that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in the ground. You could see this as blackmail or you could see it as fair trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are rich: why, the government argued, should it leave them untouched without compensation when everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for $3.6bn and received $13m. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company with a colourful record of destruction and spills (6), will now enter one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of rainforest is said to contain more species than exist in the entire continent of North America (7).
The UK oil company Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa’s oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (8); one of the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, of chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain, where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the south-east (9), the government fantasises about turning the leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this end it’s changing the trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to local people (10,11). These new reserves solve nothing. They do not end our hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.
The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.
Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in ten years (12). The trade body Forest Industries tell us that “global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow.” (13) If, in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?
Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don’t need. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fantasies about the colonisation of space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced (14).
As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year’s predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we were miraculously to reduce the consumption of raw materials by 90% we delay the inevitable by just 75 years(15). Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.
The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st Century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.
Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.
2. Grantham expressed this volume as 1057 cubic metres. In his paper We Need To Talk About Growth, Michael Rowan translated this as 2.5 billion billion solar systems. (http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/). This source gives the volume of the solar system (if it is treated as a sphere) at 39,629,013,196,241.7 cubic kilometres, which is roughly 40 x 1021 cubic metres. Multiplied by 2.5 billion billion, this gives 1041 cubic metres.
Since posting this, I’ve received the following clarifications:
From Jacob Bayless:
“… about the volume of the solar system — there is no agreed-upon definition of its diameter, which is why the figures vary wildly. (There are also two definitions of ‘a billion’, which adds to the confusion). Using the radius of Neptune’s orbit, as the farthest ‘planet’ from the sun, gives the 2.5 billion billion figure:
The orbit of Neptune is 4.5 x 10^12 m radius, which yields a 4 x 10^38 cubic m sphere. Multiplying this by 2.5 x 10^18, or “2.5 billion billion”, gives 10^57 cubic m. So that calculation checks out.
The heliopause radius would be another possible way to measure the solar system radius; it’s 4 times as far and thus 64 times the volume.”
From Geoff Briggs:
“Michael Rowan has taken the size of the solar system to be the orbit of Neptune, which is kind of understandable, but the sun’s influence extends a LOT further than that, so his estimate is correspondingly significantly overstated (ie the extra billion).
The 39,629,… cubic km figure from yahoo answers is based on a correct calculation in light years, but then a massive cock-up in the conversion to cubic km. The author seems to have assumed that a light year is about 21,000,000m, which is off by about eight orders of magnitude. 4.2 cubic light years is about 3.6 x 10^39 cubic km (and hence about 3.6 x 10^48 cubic metres).”
From Andrew Bryce:
“Starting volume of Egyptian possessions = 1 m3
after 3000 years volume = 1 x (1.045)^3000
= 2.23 x 10^57 m3
Assume the radius of the solar system is 50 AU (the distance to the Kuiper belt)
1 AU = 1.496 x 10^11 m
radius of the solar system = 50 AU = 7.48 x 10^12 m
volume of solar system = 4/3 x pi x r^3
= 1.75 x 10^39 m3
so the Egyptian possessions would require 2.23 x 10^57 / 1.75 x 10^39 solar systems
= 1.27 x 10^18
= about 1.27 billion billion solar systems
If you consider the radius of the solar system to be 40 AU (about the mid point of the orbit of Pluto), then you would get a figure of about 2.5 billion solar systems.”
But: “if you round off the volume of possessions to exactly 10^57 m3, and you assume the radius of the solar system to be 30 AU (the orbit of Neptune), then you would also get a figure of around 2.5 billion billion solar systems (well, 2.64 billion billion), which might be where the calculation came from. That would be a better definition for the size of the solar system, because it has a neatly defined edge.”
3. EA Wrigley, 2010. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University Press.
12. Philippe Sibaud, 2012. Opening Pandora’s Box: The New Wave of Land Grabbing by the Extractive Industries and the Devastating Impact on Earth. The Gaia Foundation. http://www.gaiafoundation.org/opening-pandoras-box
Yesterday’s post spelled out in letters bold, so to speak, the madness of our present relationship with food. As in the blindness of the vast majority of consumers when it comes to our consumption of food. Such as the blindness of Americans, for example! Presuming that few are aware that feeding all of us Americans accounts for about 15% of US energy use, [1] and the average food item travels more than 5,000 miles from farm to fork. [2]
So it’s encouraging to see that there are signs of hope.
For example, in the UK, Martin Crawford has a wealth of information about forest gardening on his website The Forest Garden.
Welcome to the Forest Garden.
Inspired by the effortless abundance in nature we believe that forest gardens are the best way to produce local wholesome organic food, timber products and a myriad of other natural non-wood items. Forest gardens, with careful design and management, also improve degraded soils and create wildlife havens, employment and beauty. We love this way of gardening and farming with nature, we hope you do too.
We’ve just started to create the largest Forest Garden site in UK so please check back regularly to see how we’re getting on.
And Martin’s thirteen-minute video on the topic is pure inspiration.
Then in the USA, we see the increasing power of the voice of such organisations as the Post Carbon Institute whose mission statement reads:
Post Carbon Institute provides individuals, communities, businesses, and governments with the resources needed to understand and respond to the interrelated economic, energy, environmental, and equity crises that define the 21st century. We envision a world of resilient communities and re-localized economies that thrive within ecological bounds.
Still in the USA but much closer to home, indeed just a four-minute drive away, is Sweet Water Farm.
A picture from Sweet Water Farm.
Sweet Water Farm is a small family owned and operated farm located in beautiful Hugo, Oregon near the base of Mt. Sexton. Sam and Denise work the fields with their son Ari and daughter Ivory overseeing the operation. Our mission is to provide healthy food to our community while take care of the place we call home.
Secondly, by reading the article in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper back in February, 2009. From which I quote:
More than 96 per cent of all the food grown in Britain is reliant on synthetic fertiliser. Without it we’d be in serious trouble.
But without artificial fertiliser there’s not enough nutrients for the crops to grow, and without ploughing there is nothing to aerate the soil. So how can we manage without them?
The answers are in nature. As Charles Darwin pointed out, earthworms have been ploughing and aerating the soil for millions of years. And as for fertilisers, just look at how a forest flourishes: by using the natural fertility created by billions of living microbes, fungi, plants and animals.
Yesterday’s introduction to today’s essay was predominantly the film made by Rebecca Hosking investigating how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low-energy farm for the future. Rebecca discovering, unsurprisingly, that nature holds the key.
The film highlighted the degree to which our modern system of food production and distribution is dependent on oil. I am sure that Jean and I were far from alone in not fully appreciating just how much oil is used in agriculture. Let’s start with the UK.
Following the oil crisis in 1973, a book was published in 1978 by B.M. Green under the title of Eating Oil (1). In 2005, Norman Church wrote an essay over at the website 321energy.com in which he referred to that book. Here’s some of what he wrote.
The aim of the book [Eating Oil] was to investigate the extent to which food supply in industrialised countries relied on fossil fuels. In the summer of 2000 the degree of dependence on oil in the UK food system was demonstrated once again when protestors blockaded oil refineries and fuel distribution depots. The fuel crises disrupted the distribution of food and industry leaders warned that their stores would be out of food within days. The lessons of 1973 have not been heeded.
Today the food system is even more reliant on cheap crude oil. Virtually all of the processes in the modern food system are now dependent upon this finite resource, which is nearing its depletion phase.
The article is a ‘must-read’ for anyone who wants to understand better the approaching crisis and the madness of present behaviours. Take this, for example (my emphasis):
One indicator of the unsustainability of the contemporary food system is the ratio of energy outputs – the energy content of a food product (calories) – to the energy inputs.
The latter is all the energy consumed in producing, processing, packaging and distributing that product. The energy ratio (energy out/energy in) in agriculture has decreased from being close to 100 for traditional pre-industrial societies to less than 1 in most cases in the present food system, as energy inputs, mainly in the form of fossil fuels, have gradually increased.
However, transport energy consumption is also significant, and if included in these ratios would mean that the ratio would decrease further. For example, when iceberg lettuce is imported to the UK from the USA by plane, the energy ratio is only 0.00786. In other words 127 calories of energy (aviation fuel) are needed to transport 1 calorie of lettuce across the Atlantic. If the energy consumed during lettuce cultivation, packaging, refrigeration, distribution in the UK and shopping by car was included, the energy needed would be even higher. Similarly, 97 calories of transport energy are needed to import 1 calorie of asparagus by plane from Chile, and 66 units of energy are consumed when flying 1 unit of carrot energy from South Africa.
Just how energy inefficient the food system is can be seen in the crazy case of the Swedish tomato ketchup. Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology analysed the production of tomato ketchup (2). The study considered the production of inputs to agriculture, tomato cultivation and conversion to tomato paste (in Italy), the processing and packaging of the paste and other ingredients into tomato ketchup in Sweden and the retail and storage of the final product. All this involved more than 52 transport and process stages.
References:
1: Green, B. M., 1978. Eating Oil – Energy Use in Food Production. Westview Press, Boulder, CO. 1978.
2: Andersson, K. Ohlsson, P and Olsson, P. 1996, Life Cycle Assessment of Tomato Ketchup. The Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology, Gothenburg.
But, surprise, surprise, it’s no different here in the USA!
The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. Estimates of the net energy balance of agriculture in the United States show that ten calories of hydrocarbon energy are required to produce one calorie of food. Such an imbalance cannot continue in a world of diminishing hydrocarbon resources.
References:
1: Dale Allen Pfeiffer is a geologist and writer from Michigan, U.S. who has investigated and written about energy depletion and potential future resource wars.
Over at The Wolf at the Door British website (1) author Paul Thompson, another Devonian, offered this article about peak oil and farming (and 1 hectare is 2.47 acres):
AGRICULTURE
When we think of the problems associated with peak oil, our first thoughts may turn to transport, electricity, or plastics. The use that tends not to come to mind, yet could be the most devastating of them all, is agriculture.
The Diesel Farm
Tractor Oil and gas are essential to modern farming. The most obvious use is to run the tractors and machines. Car drivers can switch to public transport, lorries can move their goods (partially, at least) to railways, but the only option for a tractor or combine harvester is a horse or an ox. Clearly modern agriculture could not switch to an animal-power-based system and hope to continue with modern yields. A tractor can plough in an hour an area that a horse would take a day to (0.9–1 hectare). The horse also needs more skill and you have to put aside some of your crop to feed it. Imagine trying to gather the harvests of the vast fields of maize and wheat of the USA using only horse- and human-power.
But diesel is only one of the uses for oil and gas. Another, possibly more important use, is petrochemicals.
Petrochemicals
Nitrogen is one of the most important elements in fertilisers. In the most common method, the Haber-Bosch process, hydrogen is combined with nitrogen to form ammonia. It requires high temperatures and strong atmospheric pressure, therefore a great deal of energy. The nitrogen is taken from the atmosphere while the hydrogen is obtained from natural gas. The process became economical in the 1920s and since then, fertilisers have become indispensable. Worldwide use of commercial fertiliser more than doubled between the late 1960s and early 1980s.
The use of fertilisers allows farmers to grow the same crops each year, rather than rotating (previously farmers planted fields with legumes that restored nitrogen to the soil.)
Oil and gas are also used in the production of many herbicides and pesticides.
References:
1: There is a note from Paul on the home page, “I created this site several years ago and do not have the time any longer to keep it updated. Therefore you will find that the data is only relevant up to around 2006 and some of the links will no longer be correct. However the principles of peak oil still apply and I have left the site online as a useful introduction to the problem that hasn’t gone away.”
Alright! That’s enough to upset anyone!
Thankfully, there are a number of positive moves going on all over the world and tomorrow I will conclude the essay with details of those positive happenings!
How food and carbon-based energy are irresistibly woven together.
Jean and I watched this BBC Nature programme the other evening. Not directly from the BBC but because it has been uploaded to YouTube and thence was promoted on Top Documentary Films.
The film is 48-minutes long and, frankly, there’s not much point in reading the rest of the post until you have viewed the film!
Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key.
With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family’s wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year’s high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is.
Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.
Nature holds the key!
So, rather than tempt you to read on and not watch the film, that’s all you are getting for today! 😉
Settle yourself down somewhere comfortable and watch the film.
Today is Memorial Day for all Americans that have died while serving their country.
Just a short preamble.
I was born in London six months to the day before the day on which the second world war ended. On that day in early May, 1945 my mother breathed a sigh of relief and knew I was going to live! The fact that I am writing this post does rather confirm that! 😉
Not only is this the year of my seventieth birthday (but, PLEASE, don’t remind me!) but my mother is also still alive and well and is coming to see Jean and me in our Oregon home in ten weeks time.
I served as a Radio Operator in the Royal Naval Reserve between 1963 and 1968. That is the totality of my military experiences. Ergo, I have been more than fortunate not to have experienced military conflict at any time in my life.
So today’s post is just something gentle to remind us all of the advantages of freedom for humans and animals alike.
The Bear
An orphan bear cub hooks up with an adult male as they try to dodge human hunters.
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Writers: James Oliver Curwood (novel), Gérard Brach (screenplay)
Stars: Tchéky Karyo, Bart the Bear, Youk the Bear
Sometimes less says more: a growl or a snarl can be worth a thousand words. Without any verbal dialogue, the raw emotions of the wilderness are vivid in this segment of The Bear, a film about the actions of animals in relation to humans. In this suspenseful part of the story, a cub is hunted by a mountain lion who shows no mercy. Without any verbal dialogue, the raw emotions of the wilderness shine through.
Film Reviews:
Storytelling doesn’t get much purer than this–a film with virtually no dialogue and not a minute that isn’t fascinating, either for the plot it pursues or the way director Jean-Jacques Annaud gets his ursine stars to do what he wants. The story deals with a young cub who, after his mother is killed in a landslide, bonds to a lumbering male Kodiak. The two of them then must cope with an invasion of hunters into their territory – and Annaud makes it clear whose side he’s on. Aside from stunning scenery, the film offers startlingly close-up looks at bear behavior. They say the best actors are the ones that let you see what they’re thinking, a trick Annaud manages with his big, furry stars. – Marshall Fine
The Bear has all the marks of a classic. Lauded by animal rights groups for its respect for the integrity of all species, it manages to speak out eloquently against the senseless hunting of wildlife without having to depict killing to make its point. Instead, it emphasizes the ties that bind the human and animal worlds together. – Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
May your day wherever you are in the world be a peaceful one.
Learning from Dogs 