This has been very widely reported but nevertheless it’s a great story about the devotion of dogs to humans, and in return, the way that so many people recognised the need for help for the badly injured dog.
Readers will recall that the dog, Kabang, suffered massive injuries back in December 2011 when she jumped into the path of a motorcycle, stopping it from running over her owner’s daughter and niece in Zamboanga, a city in the Southern Philippines.
Here’s a video that was published back in October last year that explores the circumstances of the dog’s actions and the public’s response.
“A dog who became an international cause celebre after her snout was sliced off saving two young girls in the Philippines was examined by veterinarians Thursday at UC Davis, a milestone event in a remarkable humanitarian effort to help a canine heroine.
The mixed-breed dog, named Kabang, became an unlikely star in the Philippines after she reportedly threw herself into the path of a speeding motorcycle just as it was about to hit two young girls crossing a roadway in Zamboanga City.
The lunge, by all accounts, saved the lives of the daughter and niece of Kabang’s owner, but cost the dog her snout and upper jaw, which was sheared off when she got tangled in the motorcycle’s spokes. The gruesome injury puts her in grave danger of developing an infection. At minimum, the gaping wound must be closed, a delicate procedure that is beyond the capability of veterinarians in the Philippines.”* Would you prolong your dog’s life even if it were that costly? Ana Kasparian, John Iadarola, and Jayar Jackson break it down.
DAVIS (CBS13) – Kabang, the Philippine dog that suffered a severely injured snout and upper-jaw while saving two girls from being hit by a motorcycle, has been released from the hospital.
The dog was brought to the veterinary medicine teaching hospital at UC Davis in October 2012 to be treated for the injury that left her with a gaping wound where her snout had been. But veterinarians found she had heartworm disease and a type of infectious cancer. A team of UC Davis veterinarians specializing in oncology; infectious diseases; dental, oral and soft-tissue surgery; internal medicine; and outpatient care was assembled to treat Kabang, according to the UC Davis News Service.
“We were able to treat all of the complications that arose with the best specialists available,” Verstraete said Professor Frank Verstraete, chief of the hospital’s dentistry and oral surgery service.
I read a recent article posted by Rob Hopkins on the Transition Culture blogsite, a blog that I subscribe to. Those who are unfamiliar with Rob, the Transition Culture site has his background, from which I quote this snippet:
Rob Hopkins, with a familiar Totnes building in the background.
“Rob Hopkins brings humour, imagination and vision to the great challenges of our time, and argues that what is needed, above all else, at this time in history, is “engaged optimism”. The rapidly-spreading Transition movement which he was pivotal in establishing, is an embodiment of that. Nicholas Crane, presenter of BBC2’s recent ‘Town’ series, recently referred to Transition as “the biggest urban brainwave of the century”.
Anyway, back to the article. It struck me as so absurd that I tried my hand at asking Rob for permission to republish. Back, almost immediately, came his positive reply. Thank you, Rob.
Oh, and before going to Rob’s article, for those that, like me, are a bit rusty on the composition of the G8, here’s a Wikipedia extract:
The Group of Eight (G8) is a forum for the governments of the world’s eight wealthiest countries. The forum originated with a 1975 summit hosted by France that brought together representatives of six governments: France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, thus leading to the name Group of Six or G6. The summit became known as the Group of Seven or G7 the following year with the addition of Canada. The G7, that is active even after the creation of the G8, is composed by 7 of 8 of the wealthiest countries on Earth (as net wealth and not GDP). In 1997, Russia was added to the group which then became known as the G8. The European Union is represented within the G8 but cannot host or chair summits.
Now without any further ado, here is that article.
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12 Jun 2013
Why even the G8 prefer vibrant, diverse local economies really …
If there was one picture that captured the times we are living through it is this. It appeared on the BBC website recently with the following caption:
Kevin McGuire walks his dog past a vacant shop in Belcoo, Northern Ireland. The empty shop is one of a number that have had graphics placed on the windows to make them look like working shops ahead of the G8 summit which takes place nearby later this month.
Let’s take that a bit more slowly. Here is a shop, one of many that has gone out of business due, among other things, to the growth-fixated policies of the G8, situated in a place G8 ministers will be driven past en route to their summit. Rather than their being able to see how things are actually unfolding in the real world, the division and misery being caused by their approach to the economy, the windows have been plastered with stickers that present it as a fully-stocked, thriving shop. As singer/comic Mitch Benn put it on BBC Radio 4′s The Now Show on Friday, ”the last thing you’d want would be for a bunch of people meeting to fix the economy to see how bad the economy’s got”.
County Fermanagh’s district council sanctioned the fake retail units as part of a £1m makeover before it hosts the G8 summit. The event takes place on 17 and 18 June at the Lough Erne golf resort near Enniskillen. The chief executive of Fermanagh District Council has defended the optical illusion.
“It was aimed at undeveloped sites at the entrance to the town and then right throughout the county in terms of the other towns and villages, looking at those vacant properties and really just trying to make them look better and more aesthetically pleasing,” says Brendan Hegarty
Here’s the thing that fascinated me most though. It’s the kind of shop they chose to portray it as. They didn’t print up large stickers that would present the shop as being a Tesco Metro, a Sainsbury’s Local, an Aldi perhaps, or even branch of one of the banks that contributed significantly to our getting into this mess in the first place. They didn’t make one huge sticker, one false façade, that showed a new shopping precinct, glittering with all the usual chain stores that dominate every such precinct. Or a Travelodge perhaps. Rather they set out deliberately and in considerable detail to portray the kind of vibrant, local, independent business that has either become extinct, or which survives in spite of, rather than because of, the policies of the G8. Here’s another one…
The windows are hung with delicious-looking hams, the display features meats and a whole range of delicious local produce, beautifully arranged. Although the cut-and-paste nature of the graphic design rather gives the game away (the same arrangements of hams appear two or three times), what they are trying to portray here is that most endangered of species, the local, independent butcher.
In the mid-1990s there were 22,000 butchers in the UK, by 2010 there were just 6,553. The independent butcher is making something of a spirited fightback though, although certainly not aided, in any sense, by the G8. The butcher that would have occupied that shop no longer exists, most likely because a supermarket opened nearby and completely shifted the balance of the Belcoo economy (any readers from Belcoo who might like to write in and tell us what led to this shop’s demise would be most welcome).
The other day I spoke to Nick Sherwood of REconomy Herefordshire, who has co-ordinated the Herefordshire Economic Evaluation (the second such piece of work, the Totnes one already being published, and Brixton’s coming soon). Our conversation will be published here soon, but one of the things that really struck me was the following:
We estimate that the top five major supermarkets in Herefordshire account for between 71% – 83% of all household expenditure on ‘brought home’ food and drink, or up to £180m annually. In addition, around £30m per year is spent in the smaller ‘chain’ supermarkets.
Their conclusion is that the true ‘local spend’ figure, i.e through local, independent businesses in Herefordshire, could be around 16% of the total. In terms of a national version of that figure, the best I can find is the figure from the Portas Review that states that 8,000 supermarkets now account for over 97% of all UK grocery sales. Although clearly other smaller supermarkets account for some of the remaining sales, let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that nationally, 3% of what we spend on groceries goes out through local and independent businesses.
I would imagine that everyone seeks an economy that is able to provide jobs, economic activity, stronger and happier communities and community resilience, while also skilfully reducing its carbon emissions on the scale required. The question of our times though, as far as I’m concerned, is whether that is best achieved by expanding the 97% of our economy currently dominated by huge supermarkets, the kinds of enterprise that the UK government and the G8 see as leading the push for growth, or protecting and enhancing the 3%?
It’s a vital question, because at the moment the push to eradicate the 3% altogether, or at least squeeze it a lot harder, continues apace. Yet that 3% is better suited to meeting those core needs of ours. As the recent report by Localise West Midlands on ‘community economic development’ states:
Our research has found strong evidence that local economies with higher levels of SMEs and local ownership perform better in terms of employment growth (especially disadvantaged and peripheral areas), the local multiplier effect, social and economic inclusion, income redistribution, health, civic engagement and well-being than places heavily reliant on inward investment where there are fewer, larger, remotely owned employers.
A study focusing on New Orleans compared 179,000 square feet of retail space that is home to 100 independent businesses to the same-sized space that is home to a single supermarket. The former generated $105 million in sales with $34 million staying in the local economy, while the latter generated $50 million in sales with just $8 million staying locally, and necessitated 300,000 square feet of parking space (see graphic below).
Santander’s ‘Market of Hope’ which I wrote about here last year is a great example of how a city can be fed by looking at large retail spaces in such a way that they boost and support the local independent economy rather than undermine it. When Sir Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco, was asked whether there was any alternative to supermarkets, replied:
“… queueing at one store than trudging down Watford High Street in the rain to another shop … is this what people actually want to go back to?”
But no, it’s not about “going back”, rather about going forward in a way that meets our needs rather than those of the City of London. What we now know is that even G8 ministers would rather pass through High Streets populated with small, independent butchers, bakers, grocers, would rather see shop windows overflowing with delicious food, trusting that the relationship they have built up with the shopkeeper over many years will mean that he/she stocks the best produce they can find. It feels right. It’s human scale. It makes sense. It’s an economy that is ours, it belongs to local people, to the local economy. Even G8 ministers would now appear to prefer a shopping experience that actually involves interacting with other human beings rather than wandering anonymously around a superstore and then cashing yourself out at the end.
The core argument of The Power of Just Doing Stuff, published on Friday, is that if we really want to achieve our goals of jobs, economic activity, stronger and happier communities and community resilience, while also skilfully reducing our carbon emissions on the scale required, we’d be better off focusing on growing the 3% rather than the 97%. It’s a pretty simple idea, and, to me at least, a blindingly obvious one, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
However, the experience is that this fightback has already begun. The explosion of new bakeries, pop-up shops, community renewable energy projects, craft breweries, independent record shops, complementary currencies and communities acquiring their own assets is already happening around us, but it needs us to get behind it, to put our shoulders, our spending power, our sheer bloody will, to making it 10%, 30% 70%. If we want a stable climate, reduced energy vulnerability, economic stability, and a healthy human culture, we really have no choice. As Maria van der Hoeven of the IEA said recently at the launch of a World Energy OutlookSpecial Report, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map, ”the path we are currently on is more likely to result in a temperature increase of between 3.6 °C and 5.3 °C”.
Fortunately, it’s a push that is life-enhancing, thrill-generating and in which we discover a resourcefulness, a kindness and a passion in ourselves that we may have forgotten was there. I’ll leave you with a quote from the book, from Helen Cunningham of DE4 Food, a social enterprise food hub in Derbyshire that grew out of Transition Matlock. The project grew from helping a local farmer with lambing and has grown into an innovative new business:
“Never in my life did I imagine that I’d be able to bring lambs into the world! It wasn’t a skill I ever expected to have. It was such a different thing from what we were doing in the rest of our lives, and I think from then we’ve all thought “OK, we can learn these new skills, we can learn how to lamb, we can learn how to grow vegetables and learn how to do Excel Profit and Loss sheets and whatever.” I think we all just really wanted to change the way we live, and change our own personal lives and to change things and live different lives ourselves as well as a different life in our community”.
You can pre-order your copy of The Power of Just Doing Stuff here.
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As has been said before, and undoubtedly will be said many times more, it really is a very strange world we live in!
Reinforcing my long-time respect for Prince Charles.
HRH The Prince of Wales, more familiarly known as Prince Charles, is a man I have longed admired and respected.
Many years ago, I worked as a volunteer teacher/mentor with what was then known as The Prince’s Youth Business Trust (PYBT). Later, it became incorporated into The Prince’s Trust. The PYBT enjoyed passionate and active support from HRH, and with good cause. Essentially, the PYBT offered socially-disadvantaged youngsters, who had very little chance of getting a job, the opportunity to be mentored on the skills of being an entrepreneur. Many of those youngsters went on to get decent jobs and many others started their own businesses, some with considerable success. Simply because thinking like an entrepreneur is impossible if you don’t have faith in your own abilities. That self-confidence shows in so many walks of life, especially when one is going through a job interview!
The Prince has also long been known for his concerns over the way we treat our planet, going right back to the days when it was regarded rather quaint by the mainstream media. But as Wikipedia reveals, “He has long championed organic farming and sought to raise world awareness of the dangers facing the natural environment, such as climate change. As an environmentalist, he has received numerous awards and recognition from environmental groups around the world.”
So it was lovely, but no great surprise, to see how well a recent speech was received on the subject of Regional Food Security given at Langenburg Castle in Baden-Wurttenberg, Germany. The full text is available on The Prince of Wales website. Let me give you a taste (whoops, pun unintended!) of what The Prince said,
Ladies and Gentlemen, if I may say so, this is a very important conference. I am sure what you have heard so far about the problems we face and the obstacles to tackling them has given you a clear context in which to be able to consider what comes next this afternoon.
The aim here is to think through how we might create a much more local model of food production and distribution. But also, how that might fit with producing healthy food using far more sustainable methods and how we might do all of this without damaging business. Indeed, how this could improve business.
As you have heard, the urgency for this comes from the fact that there is not sufficient resilience in the system as it currently stands. It may appear that things are well. Big global corporations may appear to be prospering out of operating on a global monocultural scale but, as I hope you have seen, if you drill down into what is actually happening, things are not so healthy. Our present approach is rapidly mining resilience out of our food system and threatening to leave it ever more vulnerable to the various external shocks that are becoming more varied, extreme and frequent.
So see the relevance of The Prince’s speech as he continued:
The drive to make food cheaper for consumers and to earn companies bigger profits is sucking real value out of the food production system – value that is critical to its sustainability. I am talking here about obvious things like the vitality of the soil and local eco-systems, the quality and availability of fresh water and so on, but also about less obvious things, like local employment and people’s health. It is, as I fear you know only too well, a complex business.
The aggressive search for cheaper food has been described as a “drive to the bottom”, which I am afraid is taking the farmers with it. They are being driven into the ground by the prices they are forced to expect for their produce and this has led to some very worrying short cuts. The recent horsemeat scandals are surely just one example, revealing a disturbing situation where even the biggest retailers seem not to know where their supplies are coming from. And it has also led to a very destructive effect on farming. We are losing farmers fast. Young people do not want to go into such an unrewarding profession. In the U.K., I have been warning of this for some time and recently set up apprenticeship schemes to try to alleviate the problem; but the fact remains that at the moment the average age of British farmers is fifty-eight, and rising.
One more extract from the speech:
In the U.K., as elsewhere – but particularly I think in the U.S. – the consequences of this are ever more apparent in the deteriorating state of our public health. We all know that Type 2 Diabetes and other obesity-related conditions are rapidly on the increase. The public bill for dealing with these is already massive and I am told it could become completely unaffordable if we do not see a shift in emphasis. And, of course, it will be cities that carry the heaviest part of that burden. It is a peculiar trend.
Am I alone, ladies and gentlemen, in wondering how it is that those who are farming according to organic, or agro-ecological principles – in other words, sustainably, for the long-term, by operating in a way that reduces pollution and contamination of the natural environment to a minimum and maximizes the health of soil, biodiverse ecosystems and humanity – are then penalized? They find that their produce is considered too expensive and too “niche market” to be available to everyone. How is it, then, that systems of farming which do precisely the opposite – with increasingly dire and damaging effects on both the terrestrial and marine environments, not to mention long-term human health – are able to sell their products in mass markets at prices that in no way reflect the immense and damaging cost to the environment and human health? A cost that then has to be paid for over and over again elsewhere – chiefly, in all probability, by our unfortunate children and grandchildren, whose welfare I happen to care about. Surely this is a truly perverse situation which, you would have thought, could be turned on its head to make genuinely sustainably-produced food accessible to everyone, and the polluter to pay the real costs for the side effects of industrialized food? It is to be wondered at how this state of affairs persists – and yet to suggest standing it on its head and transforming the situation is to invite the predictable chorus of vitriolic accusations that you are anti-science, anti-progress, out of touch with commercial pressures and not living in the “real world.”
Yesterday, I wrote a post I cry for the wolves. A comment from Jeremy Nathan Marks included this:
I have learned slowly that being an adult means learning to face and acknowledge the many horrors of our world. It also means -for me, anyway- recognizing that love is the one saving grace, the one remaining hope, the one promise that might be kept. And I mean love in the hear and now and not in any afterlife. Love is what animates beauty for me -a beauty that is about more than aesthetics.
Some people would perhaps think I am ridiculous for saying that I feel that wolves are my kin. But they are. To be kin doesn’t mean we have to think the same thoughts, speak the same spoken language, or even move through the world in precisely the same way. Being kin to me means that we recognize the life lived in one another. I see that life and its light and love in wolves, just as you have beautifully described. And I know people who have lived and worked with wolves have seen that mutuality in their encounters and interactions with wolves and their packs.
That is such a profound reflection.
Unwittingly, before I read that comment from Jeremy, I had added this comment:
Around 7am I went down to our pond just to enjoy the world Jean and I live in and there was a young deer grazing the field grass near the water. Slowly, I moved towards a bench seat by the edge of the pond and sat down. The deer strolled away, perhaps some 30 feet, and continued to graze. Thanks to Dordie and Bill this young, beautiful creature was perfectly comfortable with my presence.
I sat there and my mind wander back to some far-off time when a curious young wolf might have let curiousity compell it to come a little closer to a human, perhaps nibble at the bone that the human threw in its direction.
There’s a theme here. “Love in the here and now ..” from Jeremy and me being lost watching that deer; the love of that moment.
A couple of evenings ago, Jean and I watched a truly wonderful and inspiring film. The film was called What about me? 1 Giant Leap The embedded link takes you to the website for the film.
Here’s the trailer.
Following the success of their first double Grammy nominated film & album, What About Me? is the latest offering from 1 Giant Leap. This visionary project took Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman to over 50 locations as they explore through music, the complexities of human nature on a global scale, and aims to reveal how we are all connected through our creativity and beliefs, but most of all through our madness.
Through music and film, “1 Giant Leap” explores the universal complexities of human nature. Jamie Catto (Faithless co-founder) and Duncan Bridgeman set out on their journey recording musical jewels and words of wisdom with the cream of the world’s thinkers, writers and entertainers along the way. The duo traveled to the farthest corners of the planet, to ensure immense cultural diversity in this time capsule of humanity at its most inspirational.
Covering universal topics such as God, Sex, Death and Money, What About Me? features an incredibly diverse collection of collaborators from Noam Chomsky to Will Young, Maxi Jazz to Tim Robbins, Billy Connolly to Michael Stipe, Eckhart Tolle to Baaba Mal, among many others.
Encompassing a TV series, film and album, this is a poignant, emotional and entertaining time capsule of humanity at its most inspirational.
I can’t recommend too strongly that you watch the full-length film – I doubt that you will watch it and remain unchanged.
Like thousands of others I have been supporting the efforts to ensure that the US Government did not proceed with the proposal to remove wolves from endangered species protection.
Wolves are the animals that enabled early man to ‘progress’ from hunter-gatherer to the life of farming, and thence to our modern world. As I write elsewhere on Learning from Dogs,
There is no hard evidence about when dogs and man came together but dogs were certainly around when man developed speech and set out from Africa, about 50,000 years ago.
So it utterly breaks my heart to republish a recent post on The Sand County, Jeremy Nathan Marks wonderful and evocative blog. Here it is, republished with Jeremy’s kind permission.
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I used to believe
As some of you may have heard, late last week the Obama Administration officially delisted gray wolves from endangered species protection. This means that 40 years of wolf recovery efforts have come to an end. Wolves only occupy a tiny fraction of their former habitat and with anti-wolf governments occupying the state houses in the few places that still have wolf populations, states like Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Wisconsin, it is hard to imagine that wolves have a bright future in the lower 48 states.
I am deeply, profoundly saddened by this decision. I have learned over time how wolves -like so many other species- just don’t register on the list of national concerns and priorities. A great many people oppose the delisting, in fact one gets the impression that the effort to remove these protections has consistently been guided by political pressures and a political agenda and not by a true commitment to a sustainable and enduring wolf recovery. I know that I am hardly alone in registering my disappointment and voice of protest.
I cannot let this sad milestone pass without acknowledging it here on this blog. If you do not like wolves -if you feel hatred or resentment towards them or are pleased at what has recently transpired, I respectfully request that you refrain from sharing your feelings here. I seldom offer any “directives” like this, but if you are a reader of this blog then you know how strongly I feel about this issue. I am sharing these thoughts because I want to not only draw attention to what has happened, but also because I feel the need to mourn it. I tremble at the thought of a United States -or a North America- without wolves. Defenders of the administration and the Department of Interior’s position will say that the United States Government is committed to protecting wolves and ensuring their future but I am afraid I see things quite differently. This is not a partisan political issue: Democratic and Republican administrations alike are behind this stance towards wolves.
I would like to share a poem which I feel is very incomplete and does not begin to adequately draw upon the well of feelings, concerns and thoughts I have on this subject. But I would be remiss I think if I did not mark what has just happened.
I used to believe
I used to believe that one day
I might live carefully, cooperatively
beside the wolves
I would go to them but respect their
space; wait for their return and tend
my garden with local mind, open my windows
When they moved off I would wait
and make a space; I would lock my guns
in bolted cabinets to honor and not to intrude
I used to believe that there was a chance
of this because there were others who saw
in wolves the same uncertainties and histories
And we, a new community, would redraw
the map, eradicate “the frontier” and perhaps
expunge that word altogether from our plans
It is ironic really how a word, a concept,
one invisible line can have more tendrils
and seeds than a weed, more pups than a pack.
–Jeremy Nathan Marks
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The Center for Biological Diversity has been incredibly active in fighting for the continued protection of the wolf. The Press Release about the loss of protection is here. Do read it and do everything you can to help. PLEASE!
Let me share some of my special feelings about wolves.
Luna, the wild wolf, with Tim and Tim’s dog; taken in 2006.
Then in February this year, I wrote about Oregon and the wolf. The following picture was in that Post.
These wolf pups born to the Wenaha Pack in 2012 helped get recovery back on track. But their future remains tenuous (photo courtesy ODFW)
Please now listen to this:
So you can see that I have written frequently about wolves; indeed just a few days ago did so and included this photograph.
Wolf greets man.
Now just look at those eyes of the Grey Wolf above and compare them to the eyes of the German Shepherd dog below and tell me that wolves aren’t as close to man as dogs.
Finally, feel free to share this post as far and wide as you can. Learning from Dogs is published under a Creative Commons License. This link covers how to share my material.
Please do something to help these ancient animals who, more than any other creature, helped put mankind ‘on the map’.
That post celebrated the arrival into the Handover household of three Koi.
However, since that day the three Koi have not been seen; not even a tremor on the surface of the water. We doubt that they have survived.
Jean found a rather fancy bird cage in a secondhand store the other day and a couple of days ago the cage became home to Mr. Blu and Mr. Green, a pair of Parakeets, or Budgerigars in English speak. I know many feel uncomfortable about having birds in cages but as the store assistant pointed out, these birds had been breed in captivity and wouldn’t survive a moment if released.
Mr. Green and Mr. Blu!
I have not a single jot of doubt that Jeannie will love them as she loves all our animals – with total devotion.
This second offering from Dan is very different to yesterday’s deep space theme.
Yesterday, I published an item sent in by Dan that included a video of an area of deep space photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Do take a look if you missed it yesterday – it is truly astounding.
Today, something from Dan that is altogether much more pragmatic, albeit very funny. Enjoy!
Dan sent me an email with a link to a most astounding video. But before we get to that, just take a look at these images. Here are the first three from the set of eight.
Eight breathtaking images of baby stars
1. Beautiful newborns
In a universe of fantastic images, a newborn star is a mystical masterpiece. Cradled within the dusty arms of a nebula, a baby star seems to blink its way to a new life. The lifespan of a star is a series of sequences. A star may spend most of its life in a “main sequence phase” where nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium is happening in its core. But before this happens, it lives as a protostar, or baby star.
Thanks to NASA’s advanced infrared space telescopes such as Hubble and Spitzer, we are able to view these star births as never before. Pictured here are newborn stars peeking out “from beneath their natal blanket of dust” in the Rho Ophiuchi dark cloud as seen by the Spitzer Space Telescope. (Text: Katherine Butler)
2. Young stars in Serpens
Here the Spitzer Space Telescope reveals the Serpens South star cluster, in which 50 or so young stars exist. They are seen as the “green, yellow, and orange-tinted specks sitting atop the black dust lane.” A supernova or galaxy collision can cause a star to form when huge clouds of hydrogen and helium collapse under mutual gravity. As the cloud collapses, it heats up and starts to spin. Since protostars are covered in dust, they can be seen only through infrared telescopes like Hubble and Spitzer. As Universe Today writes, “After about 100,000 years or so, the protostar stops growing and the disk of material surrounding it is destroyed by radiation.” Then this star, now called a T Tauri or pre-main sequence star, is visible from Earth.
3. Bubbly little star
We are used to images of babies blowing bubbles, and it looks like the infants of the cosmos do the same. This image, taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, shows the HH 46/47 baby star blowing bubbles into space via powerful jets of gas. Located about 1,140 light-years from Earth, HH 46/47 is the bright white star at the middle of the image. Two bubbles reach out in opposite directions and are formed when the jets collide with the dust and gas surrounding the star. As Universe Today reports, “Astronomers think that young stars accumulate material by gravitationally pulling in gas and dust. This process ends when the star gets large enough to create these jets. Any further material is just blown away into space.”
Go and view the remaining five stunning images here.
Now to what was sent by Dan.
Check out this mind-bending video that talks about the “Hubble Ultra Deep Field” image captured by NASA astronomers nearly a decade ago — a photograph that some call “the most important image ever taken.”
It all started back in 1996 when a group of astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at an empty patch in the sky close to the Big Dipper in hopes of seeing something, anything. At the time, it was considered to be a risky move, given that demand for use of the telescope was so high. What if the experiment yielded no results? What if nothing but an empty image was the final result?
After ten full days of exposing the telescope’s CCD camera sensor to this seemingly vacuous patch of sky, a breathtaking image was produced. Over three thousand galaxies appeared in one image — some as dots, others as spirals. It was a visual reminder of just how big our universe really is. The photo is called the “Hubble Deep Field“:
In 2004, astronomers pointed Hubble near constellation Orion and opened the shutter for a whopping 11 days. Using sensitive detectors and specialized filters, the telescope was able to capture an image with over 10,000 galaxies. This image became known as the “Hubble Ultra Deep Field.”
Scientists later used redshift calculations of the galaxies to turn the photograph into a “fly-thru” view of the photo:
It didn’t end there. Last year, NASA scientists created the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which has an equivalent exposure time to 23 days and features. It’s the “deepest image of the sky ever obtained” that reveals “the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen”:
And just think: scientists created these photos by pointing their mega-camera at a tiny speck of the night sky that appears to be completely devoid of visible stars!
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“… a tiny speck of the night sky that appears to be completely devoid of visible stars!”
Dan said in his email, “Are we really here? What are the chances?”
You really have to wonder! Incredibly long odds. Both to us being here and to us being the only conscious, intelligent species in the universe.
Reflections on the launch of George Monbiot’s new book Feral.
In my recent post, Dealing with Madness, where I referred to the launch of this new book there were comments from Jules that included him saying:
George is appearing at the Hay Festival to sell his book and do a talk this Saturday and it is only a few miles away so may be I will pop in and buy the book.
all the best
Jules
Jules, who has his own blog Bollocks2012, did go across to the Hay Festival and most generously agreed to write up his visit as a guest post.
So I am delighted to offer you Jules’ report today.
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George at Hay
by Jules Bywater-Lees, 1st June, 2013
The small Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye in Powys is just a few miles from where I live. It went from a little backwater with a failing rural economy to become, in the words of Bill Clinton, ‘the Woodstock of the mind’. All through the vision of eccentrics!
Hay-on-Wye
The town of Hay-on-Wye is pretty. It is set in the most beautiful Welsh countryside and even has its own tumble-down castle. However, back in the 70’s, like so many other small market centres, the town was in decline. That was until an eccentric bibliophile moved into the castle. The name of that eccentric was Richard Booth.
Richard Booth established a second-hand bookshop in town and, as a publicity stunt, on 1st April 1977 proclaimed himself King of Hay and Head of this new Independent Kingdom! Hay-on-Wye subsequently became a magnet for the second-hand book lover and trader, and now every other shop is a bookshop giving the town a healthy economy serving the many visitors.
Books, books and more books!
The Hay Literary Festival was devised by Norman and Peter Florence in 1988 and had become sufficiently established internationally for the highlight of Bill Clinton being a speaking guest in 2001. It is rather a corporate festival now attracting big names but the town has developed fringe events, that are both cheaper and more fun.
The reason this back story is relevant is that Hay-on-Wye has always been a gateway town between the urban English and rural Welsh. It is only a few hours drive from London and the nearest ‘wilderness’ for day trippers and holiday makers. A few miles further west and the uplands, or mountains as we call them (few are higher than 1000 feet), are considered by most people to be wild.
George Monbiot lives another 60 miles away to the West on the coast in what is considered deepest Wales where the hills have a barren beauty and the locals speak Britain’s ancient first language. But it is not all that it seems; the moors and hilltops are not natural they are a product of over-grazing. They are the degraded shells of a natural ecosystem. A shadowland; a ghostly memory of a former landscape.
View from Hay Bluff, just a few miles from Hay-on-Wye, and a powerful example of a bald hill.
Back to this year’s Festival. I coughed up the £8 ticket price and went with friends to have a day of culture. Those friends who came to hear George Monbiot speak were sceptical; for them the hills are beautiful and it is the denuded ‘wildness’ and prancing Spring lambs that gives the landscape so much value.
George makes frequent appearances on television and is very much a leading commentator on the environment and climate change, and his Guardian articles, see postscript, cover his views well so I wasn’t expecting any surprises. If anything I felt sceptical! You see while in principle I agreed with Monbiot’s message of rewilding and supportive of his views on the wide range of subjects he covers, the concept of rewilding appeared to be woolly and vague and lacking the practicalities of how this vision would be achieved. I even prepared a question for the session after his presentation.
Britain is a little country and our national parks are not the same as those elsewhere in the world, a better description would be regulated areas of private ownership. There are a few parks in Wales notable Snowdonia, which amounts to 2,200 square Kilometres (850 square miles), Brecon Beacons, 1,300 Km2 (502 SqM) and larger ones in Scotland such as the Cairngorms of 4,500 Km2 (1,737 SqM). But all of these are tiny compared to Yellowstone National Park with its 9,000 km2 (3,475 SqM and about 100 wolves!). Is it possible to have viable populations of wild animals in such a small area?
My concern is that Britain actually does have a wild landscape of both international importance and scale, with mega fauna, diversity and rare ecosystems that put it on par with the rainforest. It is truly huge with a conservative estimate of 50 to 100 thousand Km2 in area (19,305 to 38,610 square miles) but it is hidden: It is the 31,000 Km (19,260 miles) of coastline and the waters that extend from it. Surely we should be concentrating on its protection rather than allowing the hill tops to grow pretty common native woodland that could support a few hundred wolves, Lynx and beavers at best?
George live, as it were, was a lot more engaging than his appearance on telly and his spoken words a lot more passionate than his written words. I was surprised, and interested. Like all good story tellers he started off with a mystery. Why do British native trees appear to thrive when they are hacked about into hedges, why do blackthorn trees have thorns so tough and sharp they spike industrial leather gloves and why does the yew and holly have roots so extensive they could hold up a tree twice as big? The answer: Elephants!
Much of what he spoke about is found in his last three Guardian articles so I will spare you the detail but what struck me was his passion. Initially the cynic within wondered if George was just another celebrity seeking a cause. But such thoughts were dispelled as soon as George started to speak. What was communicated resonated strongly with this idealistic former self who was sufficiently passionate about nature enough to have studied zoology and yearned a human desire for wilderness and, indeed, danger but whose life has otherwise been engaged in more civilised necessities.
Such was the passion expressed by Mr. Monbiot that even I could overlook the practicalities and details; they can be sorted out when they need to be. My friends were impressed and even they were able to see that letting the hills go wild or a least a few of them would enhance their appreciation of our countryside.
But I didn’t buy a signed copy of the book! At £20 for the hardback version I thought it best to order one from my local library or at least wait for the paperback edition on Amazon.
Until modern humans arrived, every continent except Antarctica possessed a megafauna. In the Americas, alongside mastodons, mammoths, four-tusked and spiral-tusked elephants, there was a beaver the size of a black bear: eight feet from nose to tail. There were giant bison weighing two tonnes, which carried horns seven feet across.
Even before you start reading the devastating State of Nature report, published today, you get an inkling of where the problem lies. It’s illustrated in the opening pages with two dramatic photographs of upland Britain (p6). They are supposed to represent the natural glories we’re losing. In neither of them (with the exception of some distant specks of scrub and leylandii in the second) is there a tree to be seen. The many square miles they cover contain nothing but grass and dead bracken. They could scarcely provide a better illustration of our uncanny ability to miss the big picture.
The dam is beginning to crack, faster than I would have believed possible. Britain, one of the world’s most zoophobic nations, is at last considering the return of some of its extinct and charismatic mammal species.
While wolves, lynx, bears, bison, moose, boar and beavers have been spreading across the continent for decades, into countries as developed and populous as ours, and while they have been widely welcomed in those places, here we have responded to this prospect with unjustified horror.
As Edinburgh Zoo’s panda freakshow continues to captivate the witless and the infantile, a real Scottish animal has been allowed to die. Under the noses of Scottish Natural Heritage, which likes to be known as the nation’s leading conservation body, the Scottish wildcat has all but been extinguished from the Highlands. The importance of this news may be deemed worthy of a mere footnote on the schedule of important issues with which Scotland is grappling but it ought to rank much higher. For the wildcat’s demise seems to be part of the neutering and emasculating of our wildest places. That which was previously held to be a quintessential part of what Scotland was originally meant to look like and smell like and sound like is now, it seems, unimportant.
I never imagined being 52. As I grew up catching lizards and newts, rummaging through hedges to find birds’ nests, or prodding flattened hedgehogs with my scuffed Clarks lace-ups, the world was ripe with natural riches. Every scrap of wasteland revealed yet more gems: tadpoles, fox cubs and a confetti of butterflies. And when at the weekends the family Ford Anglia trundled off to the countryside, I strode in shorts into a wildlife nirvana, a utopia, and I explored what I imagined would be a never-ending world of beautiful and exotic creatures.
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Finally, back to me and all I want to add is that the blogsite for more information on the book Feralis here.
So how to close? Well having given this post the title of a well-known saying, let me close with one perhaps less familiar but, boy oh boy, so relevant.
“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns
What an expanse of learning is out there in this modern interconnected world!
I try to limit my following to those organisations and writers who offer me the opportunity of learning. Whether something I was previously unaware of or a sight of the world from an unfamiliar perspective, it’s a rare day when something doesn’t ‘pass my screen’ that offers an ‘Ah, ha’ moment.
Such as the following essay by Dave Nussbaum that recently appeared on the Big Think website. Cheekily, I asked permission to republish and promptly and generously both Dave and Daniel Honan, managing editor of Big Think, said yes. Thank you, gentlemen.
A quick web search finds that Dave Nussbaum is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science, University of Chicago Booth School of Business. (I couldn’t avoid wondering if the learned Professor requires extra-large business cards! Sorry for that!) To fill in a little more about the Professor, one can easily read that:
I am currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. I received my PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford in 2008, working primarily with Claude Steele and Carol Dweck. I recently completed a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Waterloo with Steve Spencer. My research is primarily focused on how people manage and defend their self-image in the face of threats, and how this affects their beliefs and behavior. I also explore how social contexts and psychological processes can either exacerbate threats to self-image or attenuate them. I have found that defensively managing self-image threats can often lead to negative consequences, including academic disidentification, missed learning opportunities, the avoidance of important medical tests, and persistence in failing investments. I believe that by identifying contexts and processes that attenuate threat, individuals and organizations can employ strategies to prevent these maladaptive outcomes.
So moving on past my quip about the length of Professor Nussbaum’s title, the summary above shows that this is one smart cookie! Just go back and reread “My research is primarily focused on how people manage and defend their self-image in the face of threats, and how this affects their beliefs and behavior.” Then reflect on the range and scale of ‘threats’ facing millions of us across the world. So research into “how social contexts and psychological processes can either exacerbate threats to self-image or attenuate them“, seems particularly appropriate for these times.
OK, without further ramblings from yours truly, here is that essay.
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Odysseus Nudged: How Limiting Our Choices Can Give Us More Freedom
According to legend, the Sirens were beautiful women whose voices were so alluring that when sailors heard their song they could not resist approaching and were drowned on the rocky shores of the island where the Sirens sang. No sailor had heard their song and lived until Odysseus, who, on the counsel of the goddess Circe, had his crew tie him to the mast of his ship. When he heard the Sirens’ song he begged to be released, but his crew, their ears plugged with beeswax, would not unbind him and saved him from his own desires. Odysseus was lucky – he knew that he would be unable to resist the Sirens and had himself bound – but people often have difficulty foreseeing their weakness from a distance. Sometimes they need help.
I love watching my not-quite-two-year-old son learn about the world from his mistakes. I look on with sympathy at his falls and bumps and spills and I try to restrain myself from interceding. But when he’s about to tumble down a flight of stairs I step in. It is difficult to balance preserving his freedom to explore and make his own mistakes with the desire to keep him safe. There’s a lot to be said for giving kids autonomy and letting them learn from experience, but sometimes you have to behave paternalistically and tie them to the mast (or at least install safety gates).
When you start treating grown men and women like you’re their father, though, the charge of paternalism becomes a more serious one. There may be cases in which a heavy-handed approach is necessary (particularly when people’s actions harm others), but we should be careful about using it. A more circumspect approach is libertarian paternalism, described by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in Nudge (and re-articulated more recently by Sunstein in his Simpler) as a way of influencing people to make decisions that they themselves would consider beneficial, without restricting their freedom.
Here, we are not tying Odysseus to the mast – the more appropriate analogy would be to the beeswax that Odysseus had his sailors put in their ears. The wax prevented the sailors from hearing the Sirens’ song and saved them from being lured to their deaths, but it also left them free to remove the wax if that is what they wanted to do. This sort of intervention is an acknowledgment that the sailors’ freedom is important, but also that people are not always perfectly rational. As Carnegie Mellon economist (and psychologist) George Loewenstein recently explained to me, “When people have problems exercising self-control, restricting their choices can, in some cases, leave them more freedom to choose.”
On its face, Loewenstein’s claim may seem paradoxical – isn’t a person most free when presented with all her options and allowed to choose among them? But as the mythical Sirens make clear, there are some options that we are not truly free to resist. Without beeswax in their ears Odysseus’ crew would have been doomed; the wax gave them the freedom to choose.
Take the recent attempt by New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to forbid stores from displaying cigarettes to their customers. Just like the beeswax did not prevent the sailors’ from choosing to hear the Sirens’ song, hiding cigarettes from view doesn’t prevent people from buying them. But, as Loewenstein explains, it makes it easier for those who may be trying to quit to avoid being lured back in.
When we pass laws that forbid the sale of cigarettes to minors we are being paternalistic. We are tying Odysseus to the mast, whether he likes it or not. But when we ban cigarette advertising that targets children – as the FTC did when it banned Joe Camel ads – we’re not tying anyone down. We are merely acknowledging that children are vulnerable to influences that may lead them to act contrary to their own interests and that they may not be in a position to resist these influences. Banning the display of cigarettes in stores is merely acknowledging that children aren’t the only ones who are vulnerable. The cigarettes, like the sirens, draw us in against our will. Putting them out of sight is like putting wax in our ears – we can easily still give in to temptation if we choose to, but we’re less at its mercy.
Learning from Dogs 