Author: Paul Handover

The book! Part Four: The process of change.

“They didn’t bring us here to change the past!”

That opening quote to this chapter comes from the blockbuster film Interstellar that was drawing in the crowds when I was up to my neck in the first draft of the book. Jean and I had taken an afternoon off, together with neighbours, Dordie and Bill, to go and watch it. It was the middle of November, 2014.

I’ll resist the temptation to include a review of the film in this place; this is meant to be a book about what we can learn from dogs! But there were two spoken lines that really jumped off the screen at me; one of them being the opening quote to this chapter.

Why did that opening quote strike me so forcibly?

Simply because when it comes to making deep, fundamental changes in who we are, how we see ourselves and, flowing from that, how we behave, or better put, how we wish to change how we behave, we have to change the past.

Sorry, I was being ‘tricky’; we can’t change the past in any real sense! But what we can change is our understanding of our past and how it made us the person we are; at this present moment in our life. That self-understanding is paramount before we set out along any journey of personal change. That was my motivation in recounting, in the opening chapter of Part Four, my discovery of my fear of rejection that for so many years had remained out of sight; albeit not quietly so within me.

Before continuing, I am minded to issue a ‘health’ warning. My writings and my conclusions are purely and solely my personal view of my life and the world as I see and experience it. Don’t empower me with talents and skills that I don’t have! Phew!

Moving on.

Anyone who has attempted a change in their behaviour, from a New Year’s Resolution, to a metaphorically large slap on the wrist for being dumb about some aspect of their life, will appreciate the difficulty of achieving a lasting change in behaviour. Changing our behaviour is rarely simple, straightforward or even, surprisingly, logical. Very often it requires a major commitment of time, effort and, perhaps most importantly of all, an emotional commitment.

The other vital thing to appreciate is that what works for one person, in all likelihood, will not work for another. Even trickier than that; what worked for you one time, may not work another time! That, just for the avoidance of doubt, is not me downgrading the need for change, when your intuition is saying to you that a change or two wouldn’t do any harm at all! Not at all!

So don’t worry about it not ‘speaking’ to you clearly in the first instance, in the sense of you not being clear as to how it is that you need to change, just embrace the fact that it is a process of trial-and-error, and keep reminding yourself why it is that you wish to change an aspect or two of your behaviour.

This important aspect of being relaxed about achieving change for yourself is more easily understood, as in understood rationally, when one takes an overview of the models (note the use of the plural) of change as used by therapists, physicians, and teachers. The researchers, that therapists and others base their knowledge and understanding upon, have multiple theories to explain how change occurs.
One of these theories, a popular one known as the Stages of Change model, demonstrates that change is rarely easy and often requires a gradual progression of small steps toward a larger goal.
In other words, only through understanding the elements of change, the stages of change, and the ways to work through each stage, can help one achieve a lasting behavioural change.

I’m not going to go much further because I’m conscious of potentially over-stepping boundaries. This is a book about learning from dogs, not an amateur self-help manual on change!

But I do want round off with the following; the product of my research and from speaking to a couple of professionals in the field of change.

Apparently, about 20 years ago, two researchers into alcoholism, Carlo C. DiClemente and J. O. Prochaska, proposed a multi-stage model of change. Their aim was to help professional ’change consultants’ understand their clients who had problems of addiction and how to motivate those clients to change. It was a model that was not based on theories but on the observations by DiClemente and Prochaska into how people tackled problem behaviours such as smoking, overeating and excessive drinking.

The multiple stages of the model were called: precontemplation; contemplation; determination; action; maintenance and termination. Six stages in all.

I’m only going to dip into that first stage: Precontemplation.

Precontemplation

Individuals in the precontemplation stage of change are not even thinking about changing their drinking behavior. They may not see it as a problem, or they think that others who point out the problem are exaggerating.

There are many reasons to be in precontemplation, and Dr. DiClemente has referred to them as “the Four Rs” —reluctance, rebellion, resignation and rationalization:

Right that’s enough from me. But for anyone that would like to read the full article by M. Gold (2006) Stages of Change, there’s a footnote [APA Reference Gold, M. (2006). Stages of Change. Psych Central.] that includes a link to a website that can offer you more detailed information about this multi-stage approach to change; indeed has the full article from Mark Gold, MD.

It’s never too late to change.

Oh, nearly forgot! I noted that the film Interstellar offered “two spoken lines that really jumped off the screen at me”, using one, “They didn’t bring us here to change the past!”, as the opening line of this chapter. The second spoken line couldn’t be more appropriate to close a chapter entitled: The process of change.

“We all want to protect the world, but we don’t want to change.”

Scottish blood in ma veins.

Share a smile with me!

Another long day of writing left me with little time to do anything other than go through my blog folder and pick out something delightful for today. I didn’t have far to go, for dear friend, Bob Derham, recently sent me the following:

An Arab Sheik was admitted to Hospital for heart surgery, but prior to the surgery, the doctors needed to have some of his blood type stored in case the need arose.

As the gentleman had a rare type of blood, one that couldn’t be found locally, so, the call went out. Finally a Scotsman was located who had the same rare blood type. The Scot willingly donated his blood for the Arab.

After the surgery, the Arab sent the Scotsman, as appreciation for giving his blood, a new BMW, a diamond necklace for his wife and $100,000 US dollars.

A couple of days later, the Arab had to go through a corrective surgery procedure. Once again, his doctor telephoned the Scotsman, who was more than happy to donate more of his blood.

After the second surgery, the Arab sent the Scotsman a thank-you card and a box of Quality Street chocolates. The Scotsman was a little disappointed that the Arab did not reciprocate his kind gesture of more donated blood as he had the first time around.

He decided to telephone the Sheik and asked him: “I thought you would be generous again, that you would give me another BMW, diamonds and money, but you only gave me a thank-you card and a box of Quality Street chocolates.”

There was a pause and then the Arab replied: “Aye laddie, but I now have Scottish blood in ma veins“.

oooo

Don’t blame me! I just published it! 😉

The book! Part Four: Of change in thoughts and deeds

Setting the scene

Well done for getting through Part Three: Mankind in the 21st century, and a number of the challenges of our present times! I don’t mean that to come over in a flippant manner but it must have been tough reading; it certainly was tough writing for this scribe! Then again, from way back yonder from my days of selling during the 70s and 80s, comes that old saw about not being able to embrace a new idea if one doesn’t really understand the issues, as in the strengths and weaknesses, of the existing situation.

Change is a fascinating subject and one that even the briefest trawl through the internet reveals a wealth of material. But the theme of change here in Part Four is about change at an individual level and not anything to do with organisations; let alone countries. And as such, in terms of how we understand the need for change as individuals, it seemed pertinent to offer this personal anecdote as a way of setting the scene.

You will recall that in Part One – Man and Dog, there was a chapter headed Unsettled times. In that chapter I wrote about learning that my previous wife informed me that she was having an affair with another man, this revelation taking place on December 20th, 2006, fifty years to the day of my father’s death on December 20th, 1956.
I also mentioned that earlier on in 2006 I had started mentoring a Jon Lavin as he was going through a major transition in his counselling practice. Jon was living a few miles from where I was living in South Devon and was, and still is, a psychotherapist, or to put it more accurately, a UKCP accredited therapist and NLP Practitioner.

Thus in a state of some emotional turmoil, I rang Jon early on in 2007 and asked if I might be his client! Jon was initially reluctant to agree to that, simply because he and I had started developing a relationship in another context, within a completely different perspective, as in me coaching him in the ways of developing his own business. As Jon made clear, he was worried that our existing relationship might get in the way of a very different relationship; one where I was trying to understand the catastrophe that had just taken place in my private life.

I was pretty insistent on wanting, needing, to see Jon; as you might imagine. Thankfully, Jon did agree after giving it some thought but on the strict understanding that if he was concerned about how the counselling relationship was progressing that I had to agree, agree before we started our sessions, that he had the right to terminate the relationship. Of course, I agreed. Without a moment’s hesitation.

Thus Jon and I started my personal counselling relationship soon after.

Naturally, Jon wanted to learn more about my emotional background and gently, when it felt right, asked me to explain the circumstances of my father’s death back in 1956. That was easy for me for the memories of that time had never dimmed.

That I had turned twelve back in November, 1956 and had started that previous September at my new secondary school; Preston Manor Grammar School. At the time of my birthday in November, 1956, I was only vaguely conscious of my father having been ill for a while. Not ill for months and months but bedridden for a few weeks. My father was fifty-five years old and had always been a gentle, caring father to me and my younger sister, Elizabeth.

Then just a few weeks further on, on the evening of the 19th December, when I was tucked up in bed, next door to my parent’s bedroom, my mother came into my bedroom to say goodnight to me; a perfectly ordinary and routine event. But on this particular evening, there was an unmistakeable sadness about her and rather than promptly coming up to me and kissing me goodnight, she sat down on the edge of my bed, just where my knees were under the sheet and bedspread.

I could still recall so clearly Mum giving a deep sigh, a sigh that seemed to confirm what I feared and, somehow, knew in my heart: that his illness might be serious. Mum turning and reaching out with her right hand so that she could hold my right arm that lay on top of the bedspread. “Paul, you do know that your father is not very well, not very well at all. I’m sorry to tell you that he may not live for very much longer.” Words that have never left me.

Mum then leaning forward, kissing me goodnight, and leaving my bedroom, turning the light out as she closed the door. Me falling asleep within moments of the closing of that bedroom door.

My father died that same night: my mother calling the doctor who attended, confirmed the death, issued the death certificate and arranged for my father’s body to be removed from our home.

It all taking place before daybreak. It all taking place as I slept on.

In the morning, my father was no longer part of my life.

As one could easily imagine, the following days were surreal, yet all of my life I have had no recollection of any emotions at all.

Going back to the death of my father, it was thought that my father’s funeral, a cremation, would be too upsetting for me and my sister so we didn’t attend the funeral.

The only other recollection from those times was being teased and bullied at my new school, the one that I had started a few months previously, because I was prone to bouts of crying. I also recall that one day in the playground, surrounded by a group of jeering and taunting boys, I had snapped and gone for the ring leader in a wild frenzied physical attack. Both he and I receive the cane from the headmaster but at least the teasing was brought to an end.

So all of this was spoken of to Jon in those early days of 2007!

Jon gently explored my feelings, wondering what were my emotional echoes from over fifty years ago. I’m not sure I voiced anything particularly revealing.

Then, in a change of tack, he asked me how my own son might have felt if he, my son, had endured the same tragedy at the same age and experienced the death of me, his father, in a similar fashion, and, in addition, not been able to go to the funeral.

It was a straightforward question but one that had me disappearing into my own inner thoughts for some time, Jon sitting quietly in his armchair just next to me, me only half aware that time seemed to have come to a halt. As if for the first time in my life since that dreadful day in 1956 I had the courage to listen to my deep inner voice, to sense my most inner feelings.

I stuttered, “My son would be angry, angry that one of the key events in the life of any person, the death of a parent, no more than that, the death of a son’s father, no that’s still not right; the death of his father, had been denied him.”

Jon looked at me, in a way that seemed to connect with me very strongly. Then he quietly asked, “What other feelings might you expect your son possibly to have?”

Again, another long silence, and then I said, feeling strongly that something very important was about to happen: “He would feel left out. Overlooked. Denied the experience of something irreplaceably important. He would feel emotional rejection; in spades!”

As those last words, quietly and clearly, left my lips, the most incredible sensation overtook me, both without and within me, encompassing me totally, the awareness that for the first time in my life, with me now sixty-three-years old, something that had been emotionally and psychologically hidden from me for fifty-one years, was now out in the open.

The clear knowledge that the circumstances surrounding my father’s death and my subsequent decline in my school performance had left me with a long-term psychological ‘dysfunction’; a certainty that I had been emotionally rejected way back in the Winter of 1956-57. A certainty, for sure, yet an understanding of myself that, hitherto, had been out of sight of my conscious mind, hidden deep inside of me, until this moment, this precious moment, in time.

Jon remained still and quiet as I continued to turn over in my mind this inner discovery. The realisation that, incredibly, for fifty years, my emotional response to my father’s death had remained totally out of my consciousness yet, nonetheless, had influenced me in very real and tangible ways; ways both negatively and positively that came to me almost immediately.

That the negative influence was that I was drawn to any woman who offered me love and affection and, therefore, I was emotionally unable to understand, to judge as it were, whether she had the potential to be a match as a life-long partner, however good a person she might be. I was doing anything to avoid emotional rejection!

The positive influence was that I tried very hard to please others (still do) so as to avoid their rejection, and had successful careers in selling for IBM UK, later starting and building a successful business in the early days of personal computing and, then, when my company was sold in 1986 becoming a freelance journalist and business coach.

So it took a chance association with Jon in those early weeks of 2007 to make me understand a fundamental lesson, one that had its roots fifty years previously, back in those early weeks of 1957. The lesson that we may only fully embrace change when we fully know just who we are. In other words, if there’s the tiniest voice inside you telling you that there may be some hidden nooks and crannies within you, psychologically and emotionally speaking, then some time spent with the appropriate ‘mentor’ will be the best investment you ever made.

There was a second reward from that self-awareness that arose in 2007. Namely, that in the December of that year, while the guest of dear Californian friends, enjoying a Christmas vacation in their holiday home in San Carlos, Mexico, I met Jean. Jean had been married to an American, Ben, for many years, latterly the two of them living permanently in San Carlos. Ben had died in 2005. Jean was born an Englishwoman, born in Dagenham in Essex. I had been born in Acton, North London. As the crow flies, the distance from Dagenham to Acton is twenty-three miles.

Jean and I met on December 15th, 2007. I was now emotionally unencumbered and able to give my full love to her and receive her full love for me. Jean and I were married in Payson, Arizona on November 20th, 2010. Now we live in a rural part of Oregon with our dogs and horses. It is a life together that is everything that any man could ever dream of.

The power of change!

oooo

It is only right for me to mention that the above is entirely my own work and while it is my best recollection of a series of true events, the chapter has not been previously seen or endorsed by Jon.

The beauty of flight.

Not, perhaps, in quite the way you might be anticipating!

A couple of weeks ago, I forwarded an item to my son, an airline Captain for some years now, that I read on the Big Think website. It was an item called The Accidental Beauty of Flight Paths.

The Accidental Beauty of Flight Paths
by FRANK JACOBS NOVEMBER 5, 2014

There is more between heaven and earth than bird migrations and weather fronts. These maps capture the poetic beauty of something utterly mundane and usually invisible: the flight patterns of the planes that bring us from airport A to airport B.

We live in the age of mass air travel. At any given moment, there are about 10,000 commercial planes airborne, carrying an estimated half a million passengers across the skies. We also live in the era of Big Data. Which means that the movements of those thousands of planes can be followed in real time on websites such as Plane Finder and Flightradar24.

London and the pretty holding patterns around its airports: Heathrow (LHR), Gatwick (LGW), City (LCY), Luton (LTN), Stansted (STN) and Southend-on-Sea (SEN).

You can read the full article here.

Alex, my son, then replied with a link to this item on the UK NATS website: Take a guided tour around UK airspace.

The skies above the UK have been brought to life like never before in a video showing a day of air traffic in less than three minutes.

Created from actual radar data showing over 7,000 flights, the video graphically illustrates the daily task facing air traffic controllers and the airspace features that help make it all work.

It finishes with an overview of the structure of UK airspace, highlighting the major air routes and showing how this ‘invisible infrastructure’ helps underpin the entire operation.

Matt Mills, NATS Head of Digital Communications, said: “We’ve made data visualisations in the past, but we wanted to now take people on a deeper journey into what makes UK airspace work and some of its important features.

Airspace might be the invisible infrastructure, but it is every bit as important as the airports and runways on the ground.”

Created by air traffic management company, NATS, the video takes viewers on a unique tour of some of the key features of UK airspace – from the four holding stacks over London and the military training zones above Wales, to the helicopters delivering people and vital supplies to the North Sea oil and gas rigs.

It is a fascinating video.

The book! Part Three: Greed, inequality and poverty

Note:

I read this out aloud to Jeannie last night, as I do with every post that is published, and found this chapter really didn’t flow. I’m making the mistake of including too many words of direct quotations, many of which are not easy to follow.

So just wanted to let you know that if this strikes you the same way, you are not alone! 😉

It is, of course, just the first draft, but nonetheless …. wanted you to read this first.

oooo

Greed, inequality and poverty

Just three words: greed; inequality; poverty.

Just three words that metaphorically come to me like a closed, round, wooden lid hiding a very deep, dark well. That lifting this particular lid, the metaphorical one, exposes an almost endless drop into the vastness of where our society appears to have fallen.

That this dark well, to stay with the metaphor, is lined with example after example of greed, inequality and poverty is a given.

One might conclude that examining any of those examples is pointless, not in terms of the reality of our world, but in terms of influencing the views of a reader. If you are a reader who is uncertain about the current levels of greed, inequality and poverty then it’s unlikely that a few examples, or a few hundred examples, are going to change minds. (One might argue that you wouldn’t be reading this book in the first place!)

Thus when I was digging around, looking for insight into how and why we, as in society, are in such times, I was looking for core evidence. Very quickly, it struck me that the chapter title really should simply have been: Inequality. Because inequality, by implication, is the result of greed and results in poverty.

In November, 2014, at the time I was drafting this book, a new report was issued by the Center of Economic Policy Research (CEPR) on the latest (American) Survey of Consumer Finances. It painted a picture very familiar to many: the rich becoming richer while those with less wealth are falling further and further behind.

David Rosnick of the CEPR, and one of the report co-authors, made this important observation:

The decline in the position of typical households is even worse than the Consumer Finances survey indicates. In 1989, many workers had pensions. Far fewer do now. The value of pensions isn’t included in these surveys due to the difficulty of determining what they are worth on a current basis. But they clearly are significant assets that relatively few working age people have now.

Sharmini Peries, of The Real News Network, in an interview with David Rosnick, asked:

PERIES: David, just quickly explain to us what is the Consumer Finance Survey. I know it’s an important survey for economists, but why is it important to ordinary people? Why is it important to us?

ROSNICK: So, every three years, the Federal Reserve interviews a number of households to get an idea of what their finances are like, do they have a lot of wealth, how much are their house’s worth, how much they owe on their mortgages, how much they have in the bank account, how much stocks do wealthy people own. This gives us an idea of their situations, whether they’re going to be prepared for retirement. And we can see things like the effect of the housing and stock bubbles on people’s wealth, whether they’ve been preparing for eventual downfalls, how they’ve reacted to various economic circumstances, how they’re looking to the long term. So it’s a very useful survey in terms of finding out how households are prepared and what the distribution of wealth is like.

PERIES: So your report is an analysis of the report. And what are your key findings?

ROSNICK: So, largely over the last 24 years there’s been a considerable increase in wealth on average, but it’s been very maldistributed. Households in the bottom half of the distribution have actually seen their wealth fall, but the people at the very top have actually done very well. And so that means that a lot of people who are nearing retirement at this point in time are actually not well prepared at all for retirement and are going to be very dependent on Social Security in order to make it through their retirement years.

PERIES: So, David, address the gap. You said there’s a great gap between those that are very wealthy and those that are not. Has this gap widened over this period?

ROSNICK: It absolutely has. As, say, the top 5 percent in wealth, the average wealth for people in the top 5 percent is about 66 percent higher in 2013, the last survey that was completed, compared to 1989. By comparison, for the bottom 20 percent, their wealth has actually fallen 420 percent. They basically had very little to start with, and now they have less than little.

PERIES: So the poorer is getting poorer and the richer is getting extremely richer.

ROSNICK: Very much so.

To my way of thinking, if in the period 1989 through to 2013 “the average wealth for (American) people in the top 5 percent is about 66 percent higher” and “for the bottom 20 percent, their wealth has actually fallen 420 percent” it’s very difficult not to see the hands of greed at work and a consequential devastating increase in inequality.

In other words, the previous few paragraphs seemed to present, and present clearly, the widening gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, comparatively speaking, and that it was now time for society to understand the trends, to reflect on where this is taking us, if left unchallenged, and to push back as hard as we can both politically and socially.

I wrote that shortly before another item appeared in my email ‘in-box’ in the middle of November (2014), a further report about inequality that, frankly, emotionally speaking, just smacked me in the face. It seemed a critical addition to the picture I was endeavouring to present.

Namely, on the 13th October, 2014, the US edition of The Guardian newspaper published a story entitled: US wealth inequality – top 0.1% worth as much as the bottom 90%. The sub-heading enlarged the headline: Not since the Great Depression has wealth inequality in the US been so acute, new in-depth study finds.

The study referred to was a paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, based on research conducted by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. The paper’s bland title belied the reality of the research findings: Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913.

As the Guardian reported:

Wealth inequality in the US is at near record levels according to a new study by academics. Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1% has increased from 7% to 22%. For the bottom 90% of families, a combination of rising debt, the collapse of the value of their assets during the financial crisis, and stagnant real wages have led to the erosion of wealth. The share of wealth owned by the top 0.1% is almost the same as the bottom 90%.

The picture actually improved in the aftermath of the 1930s Great Depression, with wealth inequality falling through to the late 1970s. It then started to rise again, with the share of total household wealth owned by the top 0.1% rising to 22% in 2012 from 7% in the late 1970s. The top 0.1% includes 160,000 families with total net assets of more than $20m (£13m) in 2012.

In contrast, the share of total US wealth owned by the bottom 90% of families fell from a peak of 36% in the mid-1980s, to 23% in 2012 – just one percentage point above the top 0.1%.

The report was not exclusively about the USA. As the closing paragraphs in The Guardian’s article illustrated:

Among the nine G20 countries with sufficient data, the richest 1% of people (by income) have increased their income share significantly since 1980, according to Oxfam. In Australia, for example, the top 1% earned 4.8% of the country’s income in 1980. That had risen to more than 9% by 2010.

Oxfam says that in the time that Australia has held the G20 presidency (between 2013 and 2014) the total wealth in the G20 increased by $17tn but the richest 1% of people in the G20 captured $6.2tn of this wealth – 36% of the total increase.

I find it incredibly difficult to have any rational response to those figures. I am just aware that there is a flurry of mixed emotions inside me and, perhaps, that’s how I should leave it. Nonetheless, there’s one thing that I can’t keep to myself and that this isn’t the first time that such inequality has arisen, the period leading up the the Great Depression of the 1930s comes immediately to mind, and I doubt very much that it will be the last.

Unless!

Unless the growing catalogue of unsustainable aspects of this 21st century, a few of which have been the focus of this Part Three, brings about, perhaps in many different ways, a force for change that is unstoppable.

But before that is explored in Part Four, there is the one final element of the greed, inequality and poverty theme of this chapter that must be aired; the issue of poverty.

Contrary to my anticipation, the figures for poverty trends can be read in many ways and don’t give a clear-cut uniform picture. Nevertheless, it does’t take a genius to work out that the future, especially for young people, could be alarming.

Today, the poor people are the young. Today, the young are heading into a future that has many frightening aspects.

Take the present population numbers, the mind-boggling scale of the use of energy in these times, not to mention the levels of debt across so many countries (on the 14th November, 2014, the Federal Debt of the USA was about $18,006,100,032,000), possible unsustainable global climate change trends, and is it any wonder that those born in the period 1928 to 1945 (I was born in 1944), the generation that has been called the Silent Generation, must be wondering what the future holds for their children and grandchildren and what they or anyone can do today and tomorrow, to prevent these future generations sinking into oblivion.

I came across a quotation from Simon Caulkin, the award winning management writer: “It’s all the product of human conduct!”

Yes, Simon is right. Only human conduct will find that sustainable, balanced relationship with each other and, critically, with the planet upon which all our futures depend. Yet, something nags at me; a half-conscious doubt that starts with the word ‘but!’ Not that it doesn’t all come down to human conduct; not a moment’s hesitation on that one. But there’s still that half-conscious doubt. A doubt that starts to take shape on the back of that wonderful quotation from Einstein: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Then from that half-conscious place in one’s head comes another word. The word: Faith. Faith in us, as in faith in humanity. Faith that not only can we change our relationship with ourselves, with our communities and, above all, with our planet, but that we will. Faith that we, as in mankind, will embrace the many beautiful qualities of the animal that is so special to so many millions of us: our dogs. Not just embrace but pin our future on the premise that adopting the qualities of love, trust, honesty, openness and more, qualities that we see daily in our closest animal companions, is our potential salvation.

Thus comes the end of this set of depressing aspects of our 21st century. Time to move on in this story of learning from dogs and envelope ‘Of change in thoughts and deeds’; the title of the next section of this book. For we truly need a change to a better future.

There are dogs, and dogs, and Jesse!

As Dan said in the email to me that included the YouTube link ….

“If I ever get another dog, this is the one I want.”

It’s been watched over eleven million times, and no wonder!

The book! Part Three: Population and Energy.

Why a chapter on population and energy?

Because in a very real sense it is the measure of how many live on this planet and how much energy is used for our own purposes that brings into stark consideration the fundamental, inviolate rule: that we cannot sustain an existence that isn’t in balance with what our planet can provide for us. ‘Us’ of course meaning every living thing on the planet.

The story of our energy use is scary to the extreme. By using the term ‘our energy use’ I am offering it as a label, so to speak, for the number of people multiplied by the energy each person is using.

So, first let us start with global population.

The world did not reach a population of one billion until 1800. One hundred and twenty-three years later, in 1927, that global population figure passed two billion persons. That, in itself, isn’t remarkable. But what was remarkable was the continuing growth.

Thirty-three years later, in 1960, the global population reached three billion.
Twenty-four years later, in 1974, the population reached four billion.
Thirteen years later, in 1987, the world population is up to five billion.
Twelve years on, in 1999, up to six billion persons in the world.
Then just another thirteen years on for the population to reach, in 2012, seven billion.

Now that is not a cast-iron guarantee that the growth will continue on and on in a similar fashion. Recall that old saying, “I can predict anything except those matters involving the future!”

Indeed, the UN’s Economic & Social Affairs Department, in a report issued in 2013, under the title of World Population Prospects – 2012 Revision, offered in Figure 1. Population of the world, 1950-2100 (Page XV of the summary.), four possible outcomes, “according to different projections and variants.” Those being Medium; High; Low and Constant-fertility. Just to pick the extremes projected, a Constant-fertility growth would bring the global population in 2100 to twenty-eight billion persons, and a Low growth future delivering more or less today’s global population of seven billion persons.

What is the maximum carrying capacity of the planet? A number of estimates of the carrying capacity have been made with a wide range of population numbers. A 2001 UN report said that two-thirds of the estimates fall in the range of 4 billion to 16 billion (with unspecified standard errors), with a median of about 10 billion. More recent estimates are much lower, particularly if resource depletion and increased consumption are considered.

Now if seven billion people might be (and I do stress ‘might be’) more than Planet Earth can sustain today, then don’t even start to go to future population levels of the order of sixteen billion (High) or twenty-eight billion (Constant-fertility)!

However, this is a chapter on population and energy, not just population per se. Population growth is only one part of a complex energy nightmare. A huge nightmare. We must look at the other factor: our energy use. It is both a cause and a consequence of the population numbers.

The energy used by each person, measured in kilowatts on an annual basis, remained pretty constant right up to the middle of the Industrial revolution. For example, in 1800, the energy use per person was less than two kilowatts (A kilowatt is a thousand watts) of power a year. Today, that low figure from 1800 is almost beyond imagination in terms of the energy used today!

The Industrial revolution changed everything; irrevocably. By the end of that century, 1900, while the energy use per person was slightly up, the global population was steadily increasing; as explained a few paragraphs back. Thus the total energy being used in 1900 was the sum of energy used per person times the number of persons worldwide.

As it logically is the same total calculation used coming forward to the year 2000; where the energy use per person is up to three or four kilowatts a year (the chart being used was difficult to read precisely) and the population is now around seven billion! Seven billion people using three to four kilowatts of power produces a global use of energy of fifteen terawatts (The terawatt is equal to one trillion watts!) That’s fifteen trillion watts of energy!

Once more, looking into the future is challenging; to say the least. The awareness and uptake of solar electricity panels is expanding; the idea of cars being powered by other means than petroleum fuels is becoming a reality but the broader picture of total energy used across the world reveals an intense dependency of energy for some time. Indeed, we can use the UN’s forecast of population growth out to 2050 to construct a prediction of future energy needs, again on an energy per person energy equivalent.

This shows total global energy use peaking about now (2015), to the tune of 80 gigajoules per year (The equivalent of 22 megawatt-hours per year), of which 80 percent is from the use of fossil fuels, then slowly declining by 2050 to 30 gigajoules per year, of which nearly 70 percent would be from the use of non-fossil fuels.

Indeed, you may have heard about recent declines in energy consumption in both Europe and the US, but these declines have been more than offset by increases in energy consumption in China, India, and the rest of the “developing” world.

To put this into some form of historical perspective, using the assumptions chosen, the world per capita energy consumption in 2050 would be about equal to what the world per capita energy consumption was back in 1905.

Assuming we haven’t trashed the planet before then!

Never looking backwards!

“They didn’t bring us here to change the past!”

That quote is from the film Interstellar. Last Thursday, Jean and me, with our neighbours Dordie and Bill, went into Grants Pass to watch the film. Speaking for myself, even after three days have passed, I still haven’t settled on a clear opinion of the film. Don’t get me wrong, it was a magnificent production and held one’s attention for every minute of the three-hour performance.

All of which is a preamble for an insightful essay from George Monbiot published on November 11th and republished here with George’s kind permission.

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Better Dead Than Different

Our visions of the future are defined, like the film Interstellar, by technological optimism and political defeatism.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12th November 2014

“It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are,” the hero of Interstellar complains. “Explorers, pioneers, not caretakers … We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it.” It could be the epigraph of our age.

Don’t get me wrong. Interstellar is a magnificent film, true to the richest traditions of science fiction, visually and auditorally astounding. See past the necessary silliness and you will find a moving exploration of parenthood, separation and ageing. It is also a classic exposition of two of the great themes of our age: technological optimism and political defeatism.

The Earth and its inhabitants are facing planetary catastrophe, caused by “six billion people, and every one of them trying to have it all”, which weirdly translates into a succession of blights, trashing the world’s crops and sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere. (When your major receipts are in the US, you can’t afford to earn the hatred of the broadcast media by mentioning climate change. The blight, an obvious substitute, has probably averted millions of dollars of lost takings).

The civilisational collapse at the start of the film is intercut with interviews with veterans of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Their worn faces prefigure the themes of ageing and loss. But they also remind us inadvertently of a world of political agency. Great follies were committed but big, brave things were done to put them right: think of the New Deal and the Civilian Conservation Corps (1). That world is almost as different from our own as the planets visited by Interstellar’s astronauts.

They leave the Earth to find a place to which humans can escape or, if that fails, one in which a cargo of frozen embryos can be deposited. It takes an effort, when you emerge, to remember that such fantasies are taken seriously by millions of adults, who consider them a realistic alternative to addressing the problems we face on Earth.

NASA runs a website devoted to the idea (2). It claims that gigantic spaceships, “could be wonderful places to live; about the size of a California beach town and endowed with weightless recreation, fantastic views, freedom, elbow-room in spades, and great wealth.” Of course, no one could leave, except to enter another spaceship, and the slightest malfunction would cause instant annihilation. But “settlements in earth orbit will have one of the most stunning views in our solar system – the living, ever-changing Earth.” We can look back and remember how beautiful it was.

And then there’s the money to be made. “Space colonization is, at its core, a real estate business. … Those that colonize space will control vast lands, enormous amounts of electrical power, and nearly unlimited material resources. [This] will create wealth beyond our wildest imagination and wield power – hopefully for good rather than for ill.”(3) In other words, we would leave not only the Earth behind but also ourselves.

That’s a common characteristic of such fantasies: their lack of imagination. Wild flights of technological fancy are accompanied by a stolid incapacity to picture the inner life of those who might inhabit such systems. People who would consider the idea of living in the Gobi Desert intolerable – where, an estate agent might point out, there is oxygen, radiation-screening, atmospheric pressure and 1g of gravity – rhapsodise about living on Mars. People who imagine that human life on Earth will end because of power and greed and oppression imagine we will escape these forces in pressure vessels controlled by technicians, in which we would be trapped like tadpoles in a jamjar.

If space colonisation is impossible today, when Richard Branson, for all his billions, cannot even propel people safely past the atmosphere(4), how will it look in a world that has fallen so far into disaster that leaving it for a lifeless, airless lump of rock would be perceived as a good option? We’d be lucky in these circumstances to possess the wherewithal to make bricks.

Only by understanding this as a religious impulse can we avoid the conclusion that those who gleefully await this future are insane. Just as it is easier to pray for life after death than it is to confront oppression, this fantasy permits us to escape the complexities of life on Earth for a starlit wonderland beyond politics. In Interstellar, as in many other versions of the story, space is heaven, overseen by a benign Technology, peopled by delivering angels with oxygen tanks.

Space colonisation is an extreme version of a common belief: that it is easier to adapt to our problems than to solve them. Earlier this year, the economist Andrew Lilico argued in the Telegraph(5) that we can’t afford to prevent escalating climate change, so instead we must learn to live with it. He was challenged on Twitter to explain how people in the tropics might adapt to a world in which four degrees of global warming had taken place. He replied: “I imagine tropics adapt to 4C world by being wastelands with few folk living in them. Why’s that not an option?”(6)

Re-reading his article in the light of this comment, I realised that it hinged on the word “we”. When the headline maintained that “We have failed to prevent global warming, so we must adapt to it” (7), the “we” referred in these instances to different people. We in the rich world can brook no taxation to encourage green energy, or regulation to discourage the consumption of fossil fuels. We cannot adapt even to an extra penny of tax. But the other “we”, which turns out to mean “they” – the people of the tropics – can and must adapt to the loss of their homes, their land and their lives, as entire regions become wastelands. Why is that not an option?

The lives of the poor appear unimaginable to people in his position, like the lives of those who might move to another planet or a space station. So reducing the amount of energy we consume and replacing fossil fuels with other sources, simple and cheap as these are by comparison to all other options, is inconceivable and outrageous, while the mass abandonment of much of the inhabited surface of the world is a realistic and reasonable request. “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger”, David Hume noted (8), and here we see his contemplation reified.

But at least Andrew Lilico could explain what he meant, by contrast to most of those who talk breezily about adapting to climate breakdown. Relocating cities to higher ground? Moving roads and railways, diverting rivers, depopulating nations, leaving the planet? Never mind the details. Technology, our interstellar god, will sort it out, some day, somehow.

George: this is a formula for the deferment of hard choices to an ever-receding neverland of life after planetary death.

No wonder it is popular.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.cityprojectca.org/blog/archives/5392

2. http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov

3. http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/

4. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/01/sir-richard-branson-space-tourism-project-doubt

5. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10644867/We-have-failed-to-prevent-global-warming-so-we-must-adapt-to-it.html

6. http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/james-blog/2337458/climate-adaptation-lobby-is-reckless-dangerous-and-partly-right

7. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10644867/We-have-failed-to-prevent-global-warming-so-we-must-adapt-to-it.html

8. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hume/david/h92t/B2.3.3.html

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Do go and see Interstellar!

Picture parade seventy.

First set of wonderful dog pictures from neighbours, Jim and Janet!

This is what being a loving parent is all about!

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Difficult to pick a favourite!

Happy Sunday everyone! (And Happy Birthday to my dear sister, Eleanor, who lives in South Africa!)

Saturday sayings!

Courtesy of Bob Derham from back across the ‘pond’.

Sure you will love these just as much as Jean and I did!

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APHORISM: A SHORT, POINTED SENTENCE EXPRESSING A WISE OR CLEVER OBSERVATION, OR A GENERAL TRUTH.

The nicest thing about the future is … that it always starts tomorrow.
Money will buy a fine dog, but only kindness will make him wag his tail.
If you don’t have a sense of humor, you probably don’t have any sense at all.
Seat-belts are not as confining as wheelchairs.
A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you’re in deep water.
How come it takes so little time for a child who is afraid of the dark to become a teenager who wants to stay out all night?
Business conventions are important … because they demonstrate how many people a company can operate without.
Why is it that at class reunions you feel younger than everyone else looks?
Scratch a cat …. and you’ll have a permanent job.
No one has more driving ambition than the teenage boy who wants to buy a car.
There are no new sins; the old ones just get more publicity.
There are worse things than getting a call for a wrong number at 4 a.m. – like, it could be the right number.
No one ever says “It’s only a game” when their team is winning.
I’ve reached the age where ‘happy hour’ is a nap.
Be careful about reading the fine print … there’s no way you’re going to like it.
The trouble with bucket seats is that not everybody has the same size bucket.
Do you realize that, in about 40 years, we’ll have thousands of old ladies running around with tattoos – and rap music will be the Golden Oldies!
Money can’t buy happiness – but somehow it’s more comfortable to cry in a Rolls Royce than in an old banger.
After 60, if you don’t wake up aching in every joint, you’re probably dead..
Always be yourself because the people that matter don’t mind …. and the ones that mind don’t matter.
Life isn’t tied with a bow … but it’s still a gift.

and REMEMBER …”POLITICIANS AND NAPPIES SHOULD BE CHANGED OFTEN AND FOR THE SAME REASON.”

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Have a wonderful week-end!

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Greed, inequality and poverty

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Better Dead Than Different

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