We have had gentle winds for Tuesday and Wednesday and there is good progress on the curtailment. So long as we don’t get more winds in the next 24 hours (writing this yesterday morning) then the firefighters will be able to keep up the good work.
The smoke has been bad and the whole area of Merlin and Grants Pass is affected.
But hopefully conditions will improve later on Thursday and more so on Friday.
The fire update, released around 10am yesterday, says:
MERLIN, Ore. – Overnight, the Rum Creek Fire pushed across the line on the east side of the fire near McKnabe Creek, burning several hundred acres. Resources are being shifted to this area to corral the slop-over and establish new control lines. An increase in fire activity is expected through Friday as the weather shifts to a hotter, drier pattern. Inversions are expected to lift earlier in the day, increasing temperatures and winds while reducing relative humidity.
As of early this morning, the fire was already burning actively on the ridges. Firefighters are expecting potential spot fires, and have shifted resources to continue alternate contingency fire lines to the east.
Last night firefighters successfully conducted burnouts on the south edge of the fire near Taylor Creek, eliminating remaining fuels between the control lines and the fire’s edge. Today, they will work to secure the southeast corner of the fire working toward the north. Hose lays and pumps have been set up along many control lines, including those constructed near Stratton Creek.
On the west edge of the fire, burnout operations near Mount Peavine and the 34 road have secured more of the western edge, and crews built line from Taylor Gulch toward Chrome Ridge. Today, fire personnel will tie the line from Chrome Ridge north to Bear Gulch, and are working near Ridge Gulch. North of the Rogue River, the line tying to the Dad Creek Fire scar is expected to be completed today.
Firefighters working with the OSFM are assisting with active fire suppression as needed. They are also extinguishing all remanent heat spots found within 100 feet of buildings, and continuing to assess structures. Also they are making preparations to include clearing brush and installing sprinklers, to further develop structure protection.
It is starting to look as though an evacuation for us at Hugo Road is more and more unlikely.
Although I admit that having this come out at the usual time for a Tuesday rather flies in the face of that sub-heading!
But on Sunday evening Merlin was placed in the first zone of the evacuation instructions. This follows the rapidly expanding Rum Creek Fire that is just West of us. Depending on what defines as the actual location of the fire we are anything from 5 to 9 miles away. Our home is on Hugo Road, Merlin.
3-D map of the Rum Creek Fire, looking south-southwest at 9:45 p.m. Aug. 28, 2022.
The Rum Creek Fire 14 miles northwest of Grants Pass, Oregon has grown to 10,709 acres since it started from lightning on August 17. The fire is burning in very steep, remote, rugged terrain on both sides of the Rogue River. It has spread upriver to Galice and east to Stratton Creek. Spot fires have occurred two miles down range.
Jess, a longtime follower of this blog sent me recently the following email: Paul, I thought you’d really enjoy this one. I hope you are having a great day. JESS
It is called Military Dog and is offered for your pleasure.
(We watched it yesterday evening and it is incredible!)
Aren’t our dogs more than wonderful! They are better than precious!
There are not many who achieve so much, but Sir David most definately has!
This is our planet. It is the only one we have (stating the obvious!).
This beautiful photograph taken from the Apollo 11 mission says it all. That Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969 changed everything.
But one thing that was not on anyone’s mind then; the state of the planet!
This view of Earth rising over the Moon’s horizon was taken from the Apollo 11 spacecraft. The lunar terrain pictured is in the area of Smyth’s Sea on the nearside. Coordinates of the center of the terrain are 85 degrees east longitude and 3 degrees north latitude. While astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, commander; and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., lunar module pilot, descended in the Lunar Module (LM) “Eagle” to explore the Sea of Tranquility region of the moon, astronaut Michael Collins remained with the Command and Service Modules (CSM) “Columbia” in lunar orbit. Image Credit: NASA
How that has changed since 1969.
David Attenborough is a giant of a man, and I say this out of humility and respect for what he has done in his long life, he was born in May, 1926, and he is still fighting hard to get us humans to wake up to the crisis that is upon us.
Wikipedia has an entry that lists all the television shows, and more, that David Attenborough has made. As is quoted: “Attenborough’s name has become synonymous with the natural history programmes produced by the BBC Natural History Unit.”
Please take 45 minutes and watch this film. It is so important.
But before you do please read this extract taken from this site about the film:
For decades David Attenborough delighted millions of people with tales of life on Earth, exploring wild places and documenting the living world in all its variety and wonder. Now, for the first time he reflects upon both the defining moments of his lifetime as a naturalist and the devastating changes he has seen.
Honest, revealing and urgent, the film serves as a witness statement for the natural world – a first-hand account of humanity’s impact on nature, from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to the jungles of central Africa, the North Pole and Antarctica. It also aims to provide a message of hope for future generations.
“I’ve had a most extraordinary life. It’s only now I appreciate how extraordinary,” Sir David says in the film’s trailer, in which he also promises to tell audiences how we can “work with nature rather than against it”.
The film retraces Sir David’s career, his life stages and natural history films, within the context of human population growth and the loss of wilderness areas. “I don’t think that the theoretical basis for the reason why biodiversity is important is a widely understood one,” he told the Guardian in September.
This autumn, a series of publications warned that “humanity is at a crossroads” in its relationship with nature, culminating in a UN report that the world has failed to meet a single target to stop the destruction of nature in the past decade.
Sir David has been vocal about the threat of climate change in recent years, calling on politicians to take their “last chance” to act rather than continue to “neglect long-term problems”.
“We need to learn how to work with nature, rather than against it”, according to Sir David. In the film, he is going to tell us how.
Now watch the film. Please!
As you can see, in the film Sir David states that the only way out of this mess is a massive focus on rewilding.
Coincidentally, Patrice Ayme last Sunday wrote about rewilding: California Grizzly: Rewilding Is A Moral Duty. In the latter half of that essay, he wrote: “One should strive to reintroduce American megafauna, starting with the more innocuous species (and that includes the grizzly). By the way, I have run and hiked in grizzly country (Alaska), with a huge bear pepper spray cannister at the ready. I nearly used the cannister on a charging moose (with her calf which was as big as a horse). The calf slipped off, and I eluded the mom through a thicket of very closely spaced tough trees. But I had my finger on the trigger, safety off. Moose attack more humans than grizzlies and wolves combined (although a bear attack is more dangerous). In any case, in the US, stinging insects kill around 100, deer around 200 (mostly through car collisions), and lightning around three dozen people, per year.
As it is, I run and hike a lot in California wilderness, out of rescue range. I generally try to stay aware of where and when I could come across bears, lions and rattlers. My last close call with a large rattlesnake, up a mountain slope, was partly due to hubris and not realizing I was moving in dangerous terrain. Fortunately I heard the slithering just in time. Dangerous animals make us aware of nature in its full glory, and the real nature of the human condition. They keep us more honest with what is real, what humanity is all about.
And that should be the primordial sense.“
I will close by offering you this photograph. May it inspire you to rewild, in small ways and also, if you can, in bigger ways. All of us must be involved. Otherwise…
The link above is to the home page of Unsplash for there are so many excellent photographs on there.
We had a lightning storm over the house on Thursday evening with, luckily, a small amount of rain. Indeed, Saturday afternoon the firefighters, including air tankers, were attempting to bring three fires to the North-East of us to a halt.
So the first photograph is of a similar storm just to give you an idea of what we watched on Thursday.
I was just idly browsing dog websites a couple of days ago and came across the Dog Aging Project. As their About page reports:
The goal of the Dog Aging Project is to understand how genes, lifestyle, and environment influence aging. We want to use that information to help pets and people increase healthspan, the period of life spent free from disease.
I have taken the liberty of sharing one of their blog posts with you (I can’t see that isn’t allowed!)
ooOOoo
Longer, healthier lives. Together.
Dog and Human Genetics: Similarity and Difference
July 26th, 2022
Your pup may be your “fur baby,” but how similar are you genetically? You may be surprised!
Did you know that dogs and people share over 17,000 special genes called orthologs? Each pair of orthologs is derived from the same common ancestor via vertical descent (speciation) and they tend to have similar functions. They are one of the main reasons why your pup is such an invaluable comparative animal model for studying human health. In fact, humans and dogs have numerous similarities even in those parts of the genome that aren’t genes (the noncoding part of the genome). When it comes to better understanding human health, your pup is our best friend!
Sometimes, the effects of a gene are identical between dogs and people. For example, the same version of EPAS1, a gene triggered by low-oxygen conditions, is shared by people living in the Tibetan Plateau and the dog lineages that developed there. Genetic changes in this gene have taken place to help kickstart the body’s responses to hypoxia, or low oxygen levels, at high altitudes.
In other cases, the effects of a gene may be similar but not identical. For instance, the gene SCN3A is important to brain function and affects the development of speech. In children, mutations in SCN3A have been reported to cause disorders like epilepsy. But in dogs, genetic changes near the canine ortholog of SCN3A are associated with the frequency of howling in dogs.[1] The functions of this gene seem distinct (speech versus howling) but related!
For other health conditions shared by dogs and people, the same genes may not be responsible, but that doesn’t mean that research on those conditions in dogs isn’t helpful for humans! By learning more about how a dog’s genes are connected with a shared health condition, we can investigate the biological mechanisms involved and potentially make links to human health.
For example, people long suggested that narcolepsy might be a disease of the immune system: an autoimmune attack that causes daytime drowsiness and sudden sleep. In human studies, it was difficult to confirm the immune system link. It wasn’t until 1999[2] that this connection was discovered in a lineage of Doberman pinscher dogs. The researchers discovered a gene that is involved in the interface between the nervous system and immune system.
Finally, you and your pup share more than just genetics. Your environments are also very similar! You sleep in the same house—maybe even the same bed!—go on walks together, and breathe the same air. Interactions between these environmental variables and your genetics (called gene by environment interactions) can have an important impact on health. For example, smoking is well known to increase risk of bladder cancer in humans[3], but it is still unknown how secondhand smoke affects risk of bladder cancer in dogs.[4]
Data from the Dog Aging Project should help us answer important questions like these!
2. Ling Lin et al. 1999. The Sleep Disorder Canine Narcolepsy Is Caused by a Mutation in the Hypocretin (Orexin) Receptor 2 Gene. Cell 98 (3): 365-376. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81965-0
3. JD Figueroa et al. 2014. Genome-wide interaction study of smoking and bladder cancer risk. Carcinogenesis 35 (8):1737-44. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24662972/
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”
This famous quotation by Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919), the 26th President of the USA, seems apt for today’s post.
Exactly one week ago I published a post called Musings from a 77 year old! I wrote that the future was uncertain. Summed up at one point by me writing: “I have no idea of the global changes that are afoot and how they will affect us in Merlin. Indeed, I have no idea how long I have to live.“
Margaret (from Tasmania) was one of the many people who responded. She included a video interview of Meg Wheatley by Michael Shaw. It is an hour long. Last Friday afternoon Jean and I watched it in full and it was incredibly interesting. Thank you very much, dear Margaret.
But before I present Meg’s video again I want to show you another video. It is a talk by Richard Grannon about the collapse of our civilisation. Now Richard Grannon is an author, YouTuber and life coach so one needs to remain impartial to his views, certainly before one does further research. But in the 46-minute talk I think there is much sense in what he says. See for yourself:
Moving on! The interview of Meg Wheatley is very good indeed. It’s a broad look at the issues and problems governing society but done in such a way that the people who watch her will also take away a number of tools for avoiding depression and anxiety. Meg places great store on the Hopi Native American Indians: “The Hopi maintain a complex religious and mythological tradition stretching back over centuries.“
Meg quotes one of the more famous Hopi prophecies, that is reproduced below:
This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.
And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word ’struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
Here is that Meg Wheatley interview. (It is an hour long but very interesting; please watch it!)
I want to pick up the topic that was at the end of her interview; that of societal collapse. How would one define it? I chose Wikipedia for a reference.
Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence.[1]Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline, and mass migration. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.
Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity, but some of them later revived and transformed, such as China, India, and Egypt. However, others never recovered, such as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Maya civilization, and the Easter Island civilization.[1] Societal collapse is generally quick[1] but rarely abrupt.[2] However, some cases involve not a collapse but only a gradual fading away, such as the British Empire since 1918.[3]
Anthropologists, (quantitative) historians, and sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, invasion, disease, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality, secular decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune.[1][4] However, complete extinction of a culture is not inevitable, and in some cases, the new societies that arise from the ashes of the old one are evidently its offspring, despite a dramatic reduction in sophistication.[4] Moreover, the influence of a collapsed society, such as the Western Roman Empire, may linger on long after its death.[5]
The article is much more extensive than I have quoted above and for anyone deeply interested then I do recommend you going to the article and reading it extensively.
Now Meg is of the opinion that it is too late to turn back but next Tuesday I want to talk to you about Sir David Attenborough’s film A Life on our Planet. That he believes there is a chance to undo the harm we are causing to the planet; through rewilding.
Once again I am delighted to publish another post from Penny. This is a relatively short post but nevertheless of supreme importance.
With no more ado from me, here it is:
ooOOoo
Protecting Our Pets: Resources for Volunteering at Animal Shelters
By Penny Martin
August 10th, 2022
If animal welfare is close to your heart, you might want to consider helping out at a pet shelter for abandoned or unwanted animals. There are always a number of charities in the USA and beyond looking for eager volunteers.
Before You Apply
Animal welfare work can be challenging for an individual, even if you’re just volunteering. It’s important to take precautions before you commit to your decision.
Read about the experience of working at a shelter to better understand the challenges and obstacles you might encounter.
Often, volunteers need to undergo training, orientation, and background checks before they’re allowed to contribute.
Connect with your local shelters on social media to see the kind of work they do and whether there are opportunities to volunteer.
Organizations
Shelters for abandoned and neglected pets are frequently found throughout the country. If you want to do your part, the logical first step is to locate one close to you.
Institutions like Guide Star have been established to hold animal rescue services accountable and ensure they are being maintained properly.
Take some time to learn about the listed charities in your area.
If you find an abandoned pet and you’re not aware of shelters in your area, try reaching out to American Humane.
Ways to Help
If you’re unable to volunteer in person, there are still plenty of ways to get involved and do your part.
There’s good work to be done online via social media and you can help out by engaging in discussion and sharing posts about missing or unwanted pets.
If you have any spare supplies that you’re willing to donate, these can make a profound impact on the lives of animals.
If you’re purchasing supplies to donate, read expert reviews to choose the highest-quality products.
Unfortunately, across the USA and beyond, there are a great many pets in need of our help but even small acts of kindness can take us a significant way towards eradicating the problem altogether. Reach out to your local shelter and see how you can help.
Read the Learning from Dogs book for a reminder of the unconditional love dogs give us every day.
Learning from Dogs 