Category: consciousness

Behaving like animals

A fascinating point of view of the relationship between humans and animals.

Jean and I were at our regular gardening college class yesterday.  It was all about the growing of vegetables.  OK, I can hear you thinking, what on earth does that have to do with today’s topic?  Simply because the tutor, Cayci V., mused at the start of her lesson how gardeners were great animal lovers and then proceeded to list all the animals she and her husband kept at their home in Globe, about an hour from Payson, Arizona.  Cayci admitted to having 5 dogs, 15 cats, 2 emus, 2 llamas, numerous chickens.  She also had 2 bison that recently died having been poisoned by Oleander cuttings.  Anyway, to the article.

A recent article on the BBC News Magazine was about the need for humans to have contact with animals.  It was presented by John Gray who is a political philosopher and author of the book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism which  argues that free market globalization is unstable and is in the process of collapsing!  H’mmm.  John is also the author of the book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, a book that was described by the British Observer newspaper thus,

There is unlikely to be a more provocative or more compelling book published this year than Straw Dogs. A long-time scourge of the delusions of global capitalism, John Gray is one of the most consistently interesting and unpredictable thinkers in Britain. He is unpredictable because, unlike most political commentators, he never ceases to question the underlying assumptions of his own beliefs and prejudices.

Anyway, I’m at risk of digressing, as many of you will regularly notice!  The article by John Gray on the BBC News website was published over a couple of weeks ago and, therefore, I feel it not too great a copyright sin to reproduce it in full on Learning from Dogs.  It’s a fascinating article.

Why does the human animal need contact with something other than itself, asks John Gray.

Many years ago an eminent philosopher told me he’d persuaded his cat to become a vegan. To begin with I thought he was joking. Knowing a bit about cats, I couldn’t take seriously the idea that they’d give up their predatory ways.

“You must have provided the cat with some pretty powerful arguments,” I said jokingly. “It wasn’t as difficult as you may think,” he replied rather sternly.

He never explained exactly how the transformation was achieved. Was his cat presented with other cats that had converted to veganism – feline role models, so to speak? Had he prepared special delicacies for his cat – snacks that looked like mice but were made of soya, perhaps?

Beginning to suspect that the philosopher might after all be serious, I asked if the cat went out. He told me it did. That answered a part of my puzzlement. Evidently the cat was supplementing its vegan diet by hunting, natural behaviour for cats after all.

I was still a little perplexed though. Cats tend to bring their hunting trophies back home and I wondered how the philosopher had missed seeing them. Had the cat hidden them out of sight? Or were the cat’s trophies prominently displayed but disregarded by the philosopher, marks of atavistic feline behaviour that would eventually disappear as the cat progressed towards a new kind of meat-free life?

The conversation tapered off and I never did get to the bottom of the mystery. The dialogue did set me thinking. Evidently the philosopher thought of the cat as a less evolved version of himself that, with a lot of help, could eventually share his values. But the idea that animals are inferior versions of humans is fundamentally misguided.

Each of the millions of species that evolution has thrown up is different and particular, and the animals with which we share the planet aren’t stages on the way to something else – ourselves. There’s no evolutionary hierarchy with humans perched at the top. The value of animals – or as I’d prefer to say other animals – comes from being what they are. And it’s the fact that they are so different from humans that makes contact with them so valuable to us.

Human qualities

Some philosophers – not many it must be admitted – have in the past understood this. The 16th Century French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, loved cats because he knew he would never be able to enter their minds. “When I play with my cat,” he asked, “how do I know she is not amusing herself with me rather than I with her?”

Montaigne didn’t want his animal companions to be mirrors of himself, he wanted them to be a window from which he could look out from himself and from the human world.

Never more than partly domesticated, cats are never fundamentally humanised. Montaigne found them lovable for precisely this reason, it wasn’t that he was suggesting we should emulate cats. Wiser than the philosopher who believed he’d converted his cat to veganism, he understood that the good life means different things for animals with different natures. What he questioned was the idea that one kind of life, the kind humans alone can live, is always best.

It’s true that cats don’t have some of the capacities we associate with morality. They seem to lack empathy, the capacity of identifying with the emotions of others. This may explain what has often been described as cruelty in their behaviour, toying with captured mice for example. Attributing cruelty to cats seems a clear case of anthropomorphism – the error of projecting distinctively human qualities onto other species.

Cats are not known to display compassion, but neither do they inflict pain and death on each other in order to gratify some impulse or ideal of their own. There are no feline inquisitors or suicide bombers. Pedants will say that this is because cats lack the intellectual equipment that is required to formulate an idea of truth or justice. I prefer to think that they simply decline to be enrolled in fanaticism, another peculiarly human trait.

Dogs seem to be capable of showing human-like emotions of shame, but though they are more domesticated they still remain different from us. And I think it’s their differences from us, as much as their similarities, that makes them such good companions.

Whatever you feel about cats and dogs, it seems clear that the human animal needs contact with something other than itself. For religious people this need may be satisfied by God, even if the God with whom they commune seems too often all-too-human. For many landscape gives a sense of release from the human world, even if the land has been groomed and combed by humans for generations, as it has in England.

The contemplation of field, wood and water intermingling with wind and sky still has the power to liberate the spirit from an unhealthy obsession with human affairs. Poets such as Edward Thomas and Ted Hughes have turned to the natural world in an attempt to escape a purely human view of things. Since they remained human and used human language in the attempt, it’s obvious that they couldn’t altogether succeed. It’s also obvious that searching for a way of looking at the world that’s not simply human expresses a powerful human impulse.

The most intense example of this search I know is that recorded by John Baker in his book The Peregrine. First published in 1967 and recently reissued, the book is seemingly a piece of nature writing which slowly reveals itself as the testament of someone struggling to shed the point of view of a human observer.

Renewed humanity

Baker records his pursuit of two pairs of peregrines, which had arrived to hunt in the part of East Anglia where he lived. Alone he followed the birds for over 10 years. Concentrating the decade-long quest into a single year in order to recount it in the book, he writes of the peregrine: “Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom of the hunting life.”

He tells us that he came late to the love of birds. “For years I saw them only as a tremor on the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion.”

In time the human observer seemed to be transmuted into the inhuman hawk. “In a lair of shadow,” Baker writes, “the peregrine was crouching, watching me… We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men.”

Note how Baker switches suddenly from describing the hawk watching him to describing how “we” flee from humans. Baker found a sensation of freedom in the feeling that he and the hawk were fused into one. Sharing in the “exaltation and serenity” of the birds’ life he could imagine that he’d shed his human identity, at least for a time, and could view the world through hawks’ eyes.

Of course he didn’t take this to be literal truth. He knew he couldn’t in the end be anything other than human. Yet he still found the pursuit of the peregrine deeply rewarding, for it opened up a temporary exit from the introspective human world.

John Baker’s devotion to the peregrine hadn’t enabled him to see things as birds see them. What it had done was to enable him to see the world through his own eyes, but in a different way. His descriptions of the landscape of East Anglia are exact and faithful to fact. But they reveal that long-familiar countryside in a light in which it looks as strange and exotically beautiful as anything in Africa or the Himalayas. The pursuit of a bird had revitalised his human perceptions.

What birds and animals offer us is not confirmation of our sense of having an exalted place in some sort of cosmic hierarchy, it’s admission into a larger scheme of things, where our minds are no longer turned in on themselves. Unless it has contact with something other than itself, the human animal soon becomes stale and mad. By giving us the freedom to see the world afresh, birds and animals renew our humanity.

A fascinating, beautiful and incredibly thought-provoking essay.

Voices from a Professor of Peace.

Our Planet is a living entity, which means…. well, allow Professor Klare to spell it out.

A few months back, specifically on the 3rd May, I reflected on views that the Planet Earth was a living entity responding to how it was treated.  One of those views was the now-famous Gaia hypothesis from Prof. James Lovelock; the other idea, of an avenging planet, was from Michael T. Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College.

Then in June, Tom Engelhardt, of TomDispatch fame, published a further article from Professor Michael Klare.  Tom’s generosity allows me the permission to re-publish the article, which is riveting reading.

The Global Energy Crisis Deepens

Three Energy Developments That Are Changing Your Life 
By Michael T. Klare

Here’s the good news about energy: thanks to rising oil prices and deteriorating economic conditions worldwide, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that global oil demand will not grow this year as much as once assumed, which may provide some temporary price relief at the gas pump.  In its May Oil Market Report, the IEA reduced its 2011 estimate for global oil consumption by 190,000 barrels per day, pegging it at 89.2 million barrels daily.  As a result, retail prices may not reach the stratospheric levels predicted earlier this year, though they will undoubtedly remain higher than at any time since the peak months of 2008, just before the global economic meltdown.  Keep in mind that this is the good news.

As for the bad news: the world faces an array of intractable energy problems that, if anything, have only worsened in recent weeks.  These problems are multiplying on either side of energy’s key geological divide: below ground, once-abundant reserves of easy-to-get “conventional” oil, natural gas, and coal are drying up;above ground, human miscalculation and geopolitics are limiting the production and availability of specific energy supplies.  With troubles mounting in both arenas, our energy prospects are only growing dimmer.

Here’s one simple fact without which our deepening energy crisis makes no sense: the world economy is structured in such a way that standing still in energy production is not an option.  In order to satisfy the staggering needs of older industrial powers like the United States along with the voracious thirst of rising powers like China, global energy must grow substantially every year.  According to the projections of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), world energy output, based on 2007 levels, must rise 29% to 640 quadrillion British thermal units by 2025 to meet anticipated demand.  Even if usage grows somewhat more slowly than projected, any failure to satisfy the world’s requirements produces a perception of scarcity, which also means rising fuel prices.  These are precisely the conditions we see today and should expect for the indefinite future.

It is against this backdrop that three crucial developments of 2011 are changing the way we are likely to live on this planet for the foreseeable future.

Tough-Oil Rebels

The first and still most momentous of the year’s energy shocks was the series of events precipitated by the Tunisian and Egyptian rebellions and the ensuing “Arab Spring” in the greater Middle East.  Neither Tunisia nor Egypt was, in fact, a major oil producer, but the political shockwaves these insurrections unleashed has spread to other countries in the region that are, including Libya, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.  At this point, the Saudi and Omani leaderships appear to be keeping a tight lid on protests, but Libyan production, normally averaging approximately 1.7 million barrels per day, has fallen to near zero.

When it comes to the future availability of oil, it is impossible to overstate the importance of this spring’s events in the Middle East, which continue to thoroughly rattle the energy markets. According to all projections of global petroleum output, Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf states are slated to supply an ever-increasing share of the world’s total oil supply as production in key regions elsewhere declines.  Achieving this production increase is essential, but it will not happen unless the rulers of those countries invest colossal sums in the development of new petroleum reserves — especially the heavy, “tough oil” variety that requires far more costly infrastructure than existing “easy oil” deposits.

In a front-page story entitled “Facing Up to the End of ‘Easy Oil,’” the Wall Street Journal noted that any hope of meeting future world oil requirements rests on a Saudi willingness to sink hundreds of billions of dollars into their remaining heavy-oil deposits.  But right now, faced with a ballooning population and the prospects of an Egyptian-style youth revolt, the Saudi leadership seems intent on using its staggering wealth on employment-generating public-works programs and vast arrays of weaponry, not new tough-oil facilities; the same is largely true of the other monarchical oil states of the Persian Gulf.

Whether such efforts will prove effective is unknown.  If a youthful Saudi population faced with promises of jobs and money, as well as the fierce repression of dissidence, has seemed less confrontational than their Tunisian, Egyptian, and Syrian counterparts, that doesn’t mean that the status quo will remain forever.  “Saudi Arabia is a time bomb,” commented Jaafar Al Taie, managing director of Manaar Energy Consulting (which advises foreign oil firms operating in the region). “I don’t think that what the King is doing now is sufficient to prevent an uprising,” he added, even though the Saudi royals had just announced a $36-billion plan to raise the minimum wage, increase unemployment benefits, and build affordable housing.

At present, the world can accommodate a prolonged loss of Libyan oil.  Saudi Arabia and a few other producers possess sufficient excess capacity to make up the difference.  Should Saudi Arabia ever explode, however, all bets are off.  “If something happens in Saudi Arabia, [oil] will go to $200 to $300 [per barrel],”said Sheikh Zaki Yamani, the kingdom’s former oil minister, on April 5th.  “I don’t expect this for the time being, but who would have expected Tunisia?”

Nuclear Power on the Downward Slope

In terms of the energy markets, the second major development of 2011 occurred on March 11th when an unexpectedly powerful earthquake and tsunami struck Japan.  As a start, nature’s two-fisted attack damaged or destroyed a significant proportion of northern Japan’s energy infrastructure, including refineries, port facilities, pipelines, power plants, and transmission lines.  In addition, of course, it devastated four nuclear plants at Fukushima, resulting, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, in the permanent loss of 6,800 megawatts of electric generating capacity.

This, in turn, has forced Japan to increase its imports of oil, coal, and natural gas, adding to the pressure on global supplies.  With Fukushima and other nuclear plants off line, industry analysts calculate that Japanese oil imports could rise by as much as 238,000 barrels per day, and imports of natural gas by 1.2 billion cubic feet per day (mostly in the form of liquefied natural gas, or LNG).

This is one major short-term effect of the tsunami.  What about the longer-term effects?  The Japanese government now claims it is scrapping plans to build as many as 14 new nuclear reactors over the next two decades.  On May 10th, Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced that the government would have to “start from scratch” in devising a new energy policy for the country.  Though he speaks of replacing the cancelled reactors with renewable energy systems like wind and solar, the sad reality is that a significant part of any future energy expansion will inevitably come from more imported oil, coal, and LNG.

Read this book.

The disaster at Fukushima — and ensuing revelations of design flaws and maintenance failures at the plant — has had a domino effect, causing energy officials in other countries to cancel plans to build new nuclear plants or extend the life of existing ones.  The first to do so was Germany: on March 14th, Chancellor Angela Merkelclosed two older plants and suspended plans to extend the life of 15 others.  On May 30th, her government made the suspension permanent.  In the wake of mass antinuclear rallies and an election setback, she promised to shut all existing nuclear plants by 2022, which, experts believe, will result in an increase in fossil-fuel use.

China also acted swiftly, announcing on March 16th that it would stop awarding permits for the construction of new reactors pending a review of safety procedures, though it did not rule out such investments altogether.  Other countries, including India and the United States, similarly undertook reviews of reactor safety procedures, putting ambitious nuclear plans at risk.  Then, on May 25th, the Swiss government announced that it would abandon plans to build three new nuclear power plants, phase out nuclear power, and close the last of its plants by 2034, joining the list of countries that appear to have abandoned nuclear power for good.

How Drought Strangles Energy

The third major energy development of 2011, less obviously energy-connected than the other two, has been a series of persistent, often record, droughts gripping many areas of the planet.  Typically, the most immediate and dramatic effect of prolonged drought is a reduction in grain production, leading to ever-higher food prices and ever more social turmoil.

Intense drought over the past year in Australia, China, Russia, and parts of theMiddle East, South America, the United States, and most recently northern Europehas contributed to the current record-breaking price of food — and this, in turn, has been a key factor in the political unrest now sweeping North Africa, East Africa, and the Middle East.  But drought has an energy effect as well.  It can reduce the flow of major river systems, leading to a decline in the output of hydroelectric power plants, as is now happening in several drought-stricken regions.

By far the greatest threat to electricity generation exists in China, which is suffering from one of its worst droughts ever.  Rainfall levels from January to April in the drainage basin of the Yangtze, China’s longest and most economically important river, have been 40% lower than the average of the past 50 years, according toChina Daily.  This has resulted in a significant decline in hydropower and severe electricity shortages throughout much of central China.

The Chinese are burning more coal to generate electricity, but domestic mines no longer satisfy the country’s needs and so China has become a major coal importer.  Rising demand combined with inadequate supply has led to a spike in coal prices, and with no comparable spurt in electricity rates (set by the government), many Chinese utilities are rationing power rather than buy more expensive coal and operate at a loss.  In response, industries are upping their reliance on diesel-powered backup generators, which in turn increases China’s demand for imported oil, putting yet more pressure on global fuel prices.

Wrecking the Planet

So now we enter June with continuing unrest in the Middle East, a grim outlook for nuclear power, and a severe electricity shortage in China (and possibly elsewhere).  What else do we see on the global energy horizon?

Despite the IEA’s forecast of diminished future oil consumption, global energy demand continues to outpace increases in supply.  From all indications, this imbalance will persist.

Take oil.  A growing number of energy analysts now agree that the era of “easy oil” has ended and that the world must increasingly rely on hard-to-get “tough oil.”  It is widely assumed, moreover, that the planet harbors a lot of this stuff — deep underground, far offshore, in problematic geological formations like Canada’s tar sands, and in the melting Arctic.  However, extracting and processing tough oil will prove ever more costly and involve great human, and even greater environmental, risk.  Think: BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster of April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico.

Such is the world’s thirst for oil that a growing amount of this stuff will nonetheless be extracted, even if not, in all likelihood, at a pace and on a scale necessary to replace the disappearance of yesterday’s and today’s easy oil.  Along with continued instability in the Middle East, this tough-oil landscape seems to underlie expectations that the price of oil will only rise in the coming years.  In a poll of global energy company executives conducted this April by the KPMG Global Energy Institute, 64% of those surveyed predicted that crude oil prices will cross the $120 per barrel barrier before the end of 2011.  Approximately one-third of them predicted that the price would go even higher, with 17% believing it would reach $131-$140 per barrel; 9%, $141-$150 per barrel; and 6%, above the $150 mark.

The price of coal, too, has soared in recent months, thanks to mounting worldwide demand as supplies of energy from nuclear power and hydroelectricity have contracted.  Many countries have launched significant efforts to spur the development of renewable energy, but these are not advancing fast enough or on a large enough scale to replace older technologies quickly.  The only bright spot, experts say, is the growing extraction of natural gas from shale rock in the United States through the use of hydraulic fracturing (“hydro-fracking”).

Proponents of shale gas claim it can provide a large share of America’s energy needs in the years ahead, while actually reducing harm to the environment when compared to coal and oil (as gas emits less carbon dioxide per unit of energy released); however, an expanding chorus of opponents are warning of the threat to municipal water supplies posed by the use of toxic chemicals in the fracking process.  These warnings have proven convincing enough to lead lawmakers in a growing number of states to begin placing restrictions on the practice, throwing into doubt the future contribution of shale gas to the nation’s energy supply.  Also, on May 12th, the French National Assembly (the powerful lower house of parliament)voted 287 to 146 to ban hydro-fracking in France, becoming the first nation to do so.

The environmental problems of shale gas are hardly unique.  The fact is that all of the strategies now being considered to extend the life-spans of oil, coal, and natural gas involve severe economic and environmental risks and costs — as, of course, does the very use of fossil fuels of any sort at a moment when the first IEA numbers for 2010 indicate that it was an unexpectedly record-breaking year for humanity when it came to dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

With the easily accessible mammoth oil fields of Texas, Venezuela, and the Middle East either used up or soon to be significantly depleted, the future of oil rests on third-rate stuff like tar sands, shale oil, and extra-heavy crude that require a lot of energy to extract, processes that emit added greenhouse gases, and as with those tar sands, tend to play havoc with the environment.

Shale gas is typical.  Though plentiful, it can only be pried loose from underground shale formations through the use of explosives and highly pressurized water mixed with toxic chemicals.  In addition, to obtain the necessary quantities of shale oil, many tens of thousands of wells will have to be sunk across the American landscape, any of one of which could prove to be an environmental disaster.

Likewise, the future of coal will rest on increasingly invasive and hazardous techniques, such as the explosive removal of mountaintops and the dispersal of excess rock and toxic wastes in the valleys below.  Any increase in the use of coal will also enhance climate change, since coal emits more carbon dioxide than do oil and natural gas.

Here’s the bottom line: Any expectations that ever-increasing supplies of energy will meet demand in the coming years are destined to be disappointed.  Instead, recurring shortages, rising prices, and mounting discontent are likely to be the thematic drumbeat of the globe’s energy future.

If we don’t abandon a belief that unrestricted growth is our inalienable birthright and embrace the genuine promise of renewable energy (with the necessary effort and investment that would make such a commitment meaningful), the future is likely to prove grim indeed.  Then, the history of energy, as taught in some late twenty-first-century university, will be labeled: How to Wreck the Planet 101.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, ofRising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Klare discusses the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and resource conflicts, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 Michael T. Klare

Clarity of thought

The power of clear visions.

Martin Luther King, (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968)

One of the aspects of modern life that is deeply unsatisfactory is the way that politicians and leaders of democratic societies fudge the truth in the hope that trying to be all things to all men means wider acceptance of their messages.

Think of the quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. ”

These words serve as an introduction to some beautiful thoughts from a loyal American living here in Payson.  This is a man who is deeply spiritual, who has fought for his country, and who is soft and gentle to the core.  This is a man who is not afraid to offer a personal vision to the world.  I regard it as a real bonus that Jean and I have his friendship.

Here is the first of two contributions from John H.

The Passion of Enlightenment

Enlightenment includes deep grief and a passion to leave life a bit better than we found it. Enlightenment has little practical value in a growing and constantly consuming cultural demographic. Consumers tend to spiritually disconnect when faced by a need for change or when morality becomes inconvenient.

Is God truth?  What is the opposite of truth?  We’ve lost our way as a species.  Does God tell us to worship money? Does God tell us to ignore our finite earth?  Does God tell us to kill each other?  Does God tell us to ignore human history and the emerging network of scientific understandings?

Human wisdom has been far greater in the past than it is today.  God is not known through empirical knowledge.  Man is as limited as the finite planet which gave life to our species and sustains our existence. Matter and energy are interchangeable as fundamental forces.  God is experienced through our inner being and understood through the wisdom tradition of our species.

Sustainability includes the well-being of our planet and the life it supports.  Sustainability includes serving as caretakers rather than acting as owners.  Sustainability includes surrendering our addictions, our illusions and our delusions. Surrendering includes the courage to speak the truth and walk as we talk.  Surrendering assures our common well-being as a conscious component of God.  We have nothing to fear.

Consider world leadership.  Who are the aggressors?  Who are the oppressed?  Who serves God?  Who serves Mammon?  We each must search our heart, mind and soul to answer these questions honestly.  We need to face our shame and guilt in order to redeem ourselves and make a sustained effort to change.

The roots of wisdom in a constantly changing world are God, nature, history, and science.  We’ve come a long way since we first learned to use tools.  What have we forgotten in the process?  We can’t wait for the truth to become popular.  We each need to help make the truth popular.

an old lamplighter

Powerful words.  Thank you John.

The Grand Re-opening

A guest post from Joelle Jordan

A couple of days ago, out of the blue, in came an email with this article attached.  Was sure that Joelle and I didn’t know each other but so what!  One of the lovely aspects of this wired-up world is the ease with which like-minded people can communicate.  It’s a pleasure to publish Joelle’s story.

Charlie's first day!

I had been resistant to getting a new dog. We couldn’t afford one; we couldn’t afford the time to train a pup, the sleep deprivation, the continual puppy proofing the areas he would reside in, the contingent poop and pee cleanup. We couldn’t financially afford the shots, the toys, the food, the new crate. It was just too much stuff all at once, and we were just getting established as a couple and as a family.

That wasn’t the true reason I didn’t want a dog. I had been resistant because of a dog I’d had before, the dog I left behind. I loved this dog with all my heart, he was my “first.” I did not want to disrespect that dog by replacing him. I always questioned if my decision to leave him behind with my ex was right. My head always said yes, but my heart always said no. This left a war inside of me of enormous proportions that I could only allow to play out as it would, a sort of inner-Vietnam that ended only with withdrawal, but not with surrender.

So I put my foot down for a long time. “No, no dogs.” I would add the caveat the sake of mollification: “Not yet.” Maybe someday. Maybe someday I would be ready. Maybe someday our home situation would be perfect for a puppy. That would be when we could get a puppy: when we were independently wealthy and didn’t have to work and had all the time in the world to train a pup the proper way. Yeah, then.

I added another caveat to my “no dogs” edict: “I’ll know my dog when I see him.” I knew I would know the right dog for us when I saw him. It would be a chemical thing, like falling in love. I would not be swayed by cute fluff balls and wide expressive eyes. I would not be swayed by the tug of puppy teeth and the scent of puppy breath through a cage as we wandered through the aisles of a rescue. I would not be swayed; I would not be swayed until the perfect time when we were independently wealthy. In this way, I could save our money, our time, and my heart. I would just use my intuition (which I heretofore had never had) to know the when and the which one.

My partner continued to try to bend me, showing me pictures on the internet of homeless pups and rescue pups. She tried every breed; I saw terriers and shih tzus, Pomeranians and Pekinese, Maltese and min-pins. I saw every mutt with a happy, drooly, grinning face, and heard every sad story about why the owners could not keep said dog. And my response was always the same: “Oh, yes, he’s so cute, but no, not yet.”

What it came down to was that I was not ready to forgive myself. It’s not as though the dog I left behind wasn’t loved; I knew my ex loved him as much as I did. I didn’t leave him in some rat hole; it’s a two bedroom, one bath with a fenced back yard. But circumstances dictated that I leave, and leave my boy behind. Did that kind of behavior even warrant the luxury of having another dog again? I wondered in silence but responded with “No, not yet.”

Until one day, while trolling the internet for that love match for me yet again, my partner turned the screen towards me and said, “Baby, look.” Two males, pug crossed with dachshund, both auburn with black muzzles. Their mother had died shortly after birth and their father had gone missing.

I looked.

“Wow, they’re really cute,” I said.

I’m sure my partner was shocked that she didn’t receive my standard, “Oh, yes, they’re so cute, but no, not yet.” She could only pause and let me look at the picture.

“They’re only two hours away, and they don’t want a lot of money, just to cover the shots,” she offered.

“Yeah, they’re really cute,” I responded again.

Something in me said that’s your dog. I knew in theory that it would happen like that, but I was surprised that it actually did happen.

Two days later my partner and I were in the very nice home of some very nice people trying to rehome the last two of the surprise litter of their two lost but beloved house dogs. I sat cross-legged on the floor, and the daughter put the pups down about three feet from me. They were barely bigger than hamsters, just eight weeks old to the day. One of them walked right to me, as though he knew me, crawled in my lap, as though my lap were his home. The other had nothing to do with me, had nothing to do with either my partner or me. The first pup explored me, my fingers, tasting, smelling, intent. I looked up at my partner as I cuddled the warm ball of fur to my neck, and our eyes met. She smiled at me and fished through her purse for the nominal rehoming fee.

That little guy rode home most of the way with me, on my chest, staring into my eyes as I stared back into his. He studied me hard, calmly, gazing, as though memorizing. I thought perhaps that he was imprinting me (as I was him) but I think it was more than that, now that I think back on it. I think he was singing The Byrds, as sometimes he still sings, even now, softly, as he lays against my leg as I write this about him, “To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

I’m sure all you lovely readers will agree that is a very moving story.  Thank you Joelle.

Transitions, pt Two

Reflections on these present times, concluding part.

I closed yesterday with, So maybe there’s a blindness with humans, and then set out the characteristics of that blindness.  One of those characteristics being,

Our obsession with how things are now prevents us from reflecting on those signs that indicate changes are under way, even when the likely conclusions are unmistakeable.  The ecological and climatic changes being the most obvious example of this strange blindness that mankind possesses.

Let’s move this on a little.  The arguments from a wide range of scientists are overwhelmingly in favour of the proposition that mankind is using vastly more resources from the planet than the planet can provide.  Take oil.  This graph show past and projected oil production for the whole Earth out to 2050, less than 40 years away.

Here’s an extract from that website which I encourage you to read in full,

The part before 2007 is historical fact. The part that comes afterward is an ASPO extrapolation.

This graph is worth careful attention as a lot of world history is written into it. Note the steep rise in oil production after World War II. Note that 1971 was the peak in oil production in the United States lower 48. There is a sliver of white labled Arctic oil. That is mostly Alaskan Prudhoe Bay oil, which peaked in 1990. Prudhoe Bay was almost big enough to counteract the lower 48 peak of 1971. The sliver is very narrow now. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 is very visible. The oil produced by non-OPEC countries stayed nearly constant while OPEC production nearly halved. The embargo caused the world economy to slow. But the high cost of energy spurred the development of energy efficient automobiles and refrigerators and a lot of other things. Note the effect of the collapse of the Russian economy in 1990 on Russian oil production. Note the rapid increase in oil production when the world economy boomed near the end of the twentieth century. Oil was $12 a barrel at that time. Note that European (North Sea) oil peaked in 2000. Note especially what would have happened if the 1973 embargo had not occurred. It is possible that the world would now be on the steep part of the right side of the Hubbert curve.

Take population growth. Here’s a graph that shows that going through seven billion, which is due shortly, is likely to be way short of the eventual peak.  Likely peak might be in the range of  eight to ten billion!  Just take a look at that graph,

Take global warming.  Here’s a graph from NASA, from which I quote,

The five warmest years since the late 1880s, according to NASA scientists, are in descending order 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2006. (reported in the year 2007!)

No apologies for bashing you around the head with these graphs and figures – most people have a good sense about these aspects of our life on this planet.  But, in a very real sense, that’s the point.

The point that despite powerful and obvious evidence, mankind has great difficulty accepting obvious trends and understanding that whatever ‘today’ feels like, ‘tomorrow’ is almost certainly not going to be more of the same.

At the risk of hammering this point to death, here are two pictures and some text to show how quickly ‘today’ changes and becomes ‘tomorrow’.

Scientist left speechless as vast glacier turns to water

by Helen Turner, Western Mail

THESE images show the astonishing rate of break-up of an enormous glacier in north Greenland – from ice to water in just two years.

The before and after photographs, which left a Welsh scientist who led the 24-month project “speechless”, reveal the worrying effects of climate change in an area previously thought too cold to be much affected.

The Petermann glacier pictured August, 5th, 2009
Petermann glacier, pictured from same position, July 24th, 2011

Dr Alun Hubbard, a reader at Aberystwyth University’s Centre for Glaciology, returned from the Petermann Glacier in north-west Greenland a month ago, but did not see the stark images documenting the changes until this week.

He said: “Although I knew what to expect in terms of ice loss from satellite imagery, I was still completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the break-up, which rendered me speechless.  It was just incredible to see. This glacier is huge, 20km across, 1,000m high.”

“It’s like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it’s full of water.”

“It’s quite hard to get your head around the scale of the change.  To be able to see that, everything changed in such a short period of time, I was speechless.”

Do read the full article on the Wales Online website here.

Stay with me a little longer, if you will.

Yves Smith in her wonderfully broad and addictive Blog, Naked Capitalism, had the first part of a powerful interview with Satyajit Das published on the 7th.  Here are a couple of extracts,

 It’s amazing how much money you can make just shuffling paper backwards and forwards. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece praising John Paulson who made a killing from the subprime disaster as an entrepreneur. But what did he make? What did he leave behind? Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued: “I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence. US financial services increased its share of value added from 2% to 6.5% but is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”

Just let that quote from Paul Volcker stay with you for a while.  Satyajit goes on to say,

Management and directors of financial institutions cannot really understand what is going on – it’s simply not practical. They cannot be across all the products. For example, Robert Rubin, the former head of Goldman Sachs and Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, encouraged increased risk taking at CitiGroup. He was guided by a consultant’s report and famously stated that risk was the only underpriced asset. He encouraged investment in AAA securities assuming that they were ‘money good’. He seemed not to be aware of the liquidity puts that Citi had written which meant that toxic off-balance sheet assets would come back to the mother ship in the case of a crisis. Now, if he didn’t understand, others would find it near impossible. And I’m talking about executive management.

Non executives are even further removed. Upon joining the Salomon Brothers Board, Henry Kaufman, the original Dr. Doom found that most non-executive directors had little experience or understanding of banking. They relied on board reports that were, “neither comprehensive … nor detailed enough … about the diversity and complexity of our operations.” Non-executive directors were reliant “on the veracity and competency of senior managers, who in turn … are beholden to the veracity of middle managers, who are themselves motivated to take risks through a variety of profit compensation formulas.”

Kaufman later joined the board of Lehman Brothers. Nine out of ten members of the Lehman board were retired, four were 75 years or more in age, only two had banking experience, but in a different era. The octogenarian Kaufman sat on the Lehman Risk Committee with a Broadway producer, a former Navy admiral, a former CEO of a Spanish-language TV station and the former chairman of IBM. The Committee only had two meetings in 2006 and 2007. AIG’s board included several heavyweight diplomats and admirals; even though Richard Breeden, former head of the SEC told a reporter, “AIG, as far as I know, didn’t own any aircraft carriers and didn’t have a seat in the United Nations.”

In other words, there is no shortage of information from all corners of the world to show, with very little doubt, that the last few decades have seen unprecedented mistakes by national governments, mistakes in corporate governance, a lack of understanding of economic fundamentals, poor financial and social management, and on and on and on.

But practically all of us, and I mean all of us, didn’t see it at the time, didn’t see where it was heading and only now, when it is full in our faces, do we get it and see it for what it has really been, a long period of over two decades where the ‘me‘ has been more important than the ‘us‘.

That me versus us even being promoted, if that’s the right word, by a British Prime Minister twenty-five years ago.  That quote from Margaret Thatcher back in 1987,  “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” (Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987)

Let me draw this all together, yesterday’s part and this concluding part.

There is significant evidence, real hard evidence, that the patterns of mankind’s behaviours of the last few decades cannot continue.  Simply because mankind will go over the edge of self-extinction.  Darwin’s evidence and all that!  We have to accept that humans will see the bleedin’ obvious before it is too late.  We have to keep the faith that our species homo sapiens is capable of huge and rapid change when that tipping point is reached, so eloquently written by Paul Gilding in his book, The Great Disruption, reviewed by me here.  We have to embrace the fact that just because the world and his wife appears to be living in total denial, the seedlings of change, powerful change, are already sprouting, everywhere, all over the world.

So let’s welcome those changes. Let’s nurture those seedlings, encourage them to grow and engulf our society with a new richness, a new fertile landscape.

Let’s embrace the power of now, the beauty of making today much better and letting go of tomorrow.

For today, I am in charge of my life,

Today, I choose my thoughts,

Today, I choose my attitudes,

Today, I choose my actions and behaviours.

With these, I create my life and my destiny.

It’s very difficult to make predictions, especially when they involve the future!

The power of a wagging tail!

We must never lose sight of the greater power of positive thoughts.

Indeed, who cannot look at a dog’s wagging tail and not feel better about life.  There is so much doom and gloom around that we need constantly to remind ourselves that there is a brighter future ahead, there always is.

And to understand how little it takes for a positive difference to sweep through, take a look at this article from Science Daily,

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

The implications of this are profound. Be sure that we are living through a transition period, a period necessary to find a better future.  Find another nine people who agree with you, and there’s a hundred on their way!  Back to the article,

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

Science supporting common-sense!

That day, a decade ago.

Just one thought, one prayer for today.

A prayer for love

And think not you can guide the course of love. For love, if it finds you worthy, shall guide your course.  Khalil Gibran

 

Not good if detached.

The power of real words

Yesterday, I published a soft little item showing some reflective pictures and rather appropriate words of attachment.  Little did I know that some very powerful word forces were planning same day to really thump me around the head.  Here’s what happened.

The church that Jean and I go to on a regular basis is very inspiring.  Two reasons come to mind.  The first is the love and friendship that the congregation offer, both to regulars and visitors alike.  The second is the spiritual inspiration gifted to the priest and, boy oh boy, does that come out through his sermons.  Indeed, the rest of this article was motivated by yesterday’s sermon.

Take a look at the American railway ticket above.  Turn your head and look at the right-hand part.  What do you read?  ‘This check is not good if detached‘.  Now let me quote a little from the sermon,

It is difficult to care for people in the world when we are not a caring community.  It is totally absurd to speak of peace in a world when we do not have peace in our community.  It is impossible to be an instrument of love in the world if we are not a community of love.

What is true in the Church is of course true in the world as a whole.  We do need to learn to live together.  Railway tickets used to carry the words, “Not good if detached.”  That is true of life in general.  Our survival and progress as people on this planet are dependent on our interrelatedness.

See the beautiful spiritual inspiration that comes from those gifted to draw such powerful word pictures.  Take that last word ‘interrelatedness’.  Jean and I are studying at the local college for a Master Gardener’s Certificate.  For the simple reason that we have to find a way to tame our wild garden, comprised mainly of decomposed granite granules, so that we can grown our own vegetables, have some chickens, that sort of thing.

The last session was about botany.  To a complete non-gardener like me it was, nonetheless, fascinating.  What moved me beyond measure was the detail and complexity of all things botanical; grasses, trees, shrubs, flowering plants, you name it.  It was the interconnectedness of it all.  Here’s an example.

Not a female wasp, just an orchid.

Certain orchids dupe male wasps into trying to mate with them.  Here are a few extracts from a piece in the New Scientist website,

Few can resist the allure of a beautiful rose, but some wasps outdo even the most ardent flower lover. Presented with the right specimen, a male orchid dupe wasp ejaculates right on the petals.

Many insects mistake flowers for femmes, but few go as far as these wasps, says Anne Gaskett, a biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who led a study of the insects’ amorous intentions toward two species of Australian tongue orchids. “It’s just so hard [for the wasps] to resist,” she says.

——

Orchids are known for toying with males. Many species produce female-mimicking perfumes that lure males into spreading pollen. But most insects merely touch down on the flowers.

——

But why might an orchid provoke such misdirected affection? Gaskett thinks that her experiments show an extreme form of sexual deception that helps the flowers spread their own seed.

Think about that the next time you order flowers!

Now have a quick watch of this video extract from the BBC,

OK, let me get back to that botany class.  As our teacher pointed out, lose that particular species of wasp and the planet probably loses that species of orchid.  Think about the interconnectedness of that, and much more in the beautiful planet all around us.  It is such a marvellous, beautiful, complex and interconnected world.  We need constant reminding of that fact.  Which is where yesterday’s sermon hit the mark again.

Inspired by the pictures from a flight to the moon in 1968, American poet Archibald MacLeish spoke these beautiful words:

“To see the earth as it truly is, small, blue, beautiful in the eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together …“

That is a wonderful image, riders on the earth together.  It speaks of our togetherness as a human race, brothers and sisters on this fragile island within the vastness of the universe.  Brothers and sisters … that really need to know … that we are brothers and sisters.

We need to do all that we can to build bridges, to mend bridges, to stay together as a true community… because we are:

Not good if detached.  Amen.

What a powerful sermon.  What inspired power in those words.  Real words.

Earthrise, from Apollo 8, 1968

Forgive me for holding your attention just a tad longer.  This is the full Archibald MacLeish’s quotation, referred to in the sermon above.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.

— Archibald MacLeish, American poet, ‘Riders on earth together, Brothers in eternal cold,’ front page of the New York Times, Christmas Day, 25 December 1968

This is what Frank Borman, who was on Apollo 8, had published in Newsweek, 23 December 1968,

When you’re finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.

This is what Frank Borman was reported as saying in the press in early 1969,

I think the one overwhelming emotion that we had was when we saw the earth rising in the distance over the lunar landscape . . . . It makes us realize that we all do exist on one small globe. For from 230,000 miles away it really is a small planet.

and this,

The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me—a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don’t show from that distance.

The power in those words. The power of the truth about our interconnectedness and the power of Not good if detached.

Let me leave you with a fragment from another Blogsite that I came across quite by chance while researching for this piece.

A blog is a voice, the inner voice, telling, in this case, what is going on, inside and out. And in me, that means it should also be about my spiritual path. My spiritual life is as important to me as breathing. Without connection with the One, what is life? What is it for?

Not good if detached.  Amen.

Amen indeed.

The meaning of words

With grateful thanks to MaryAnne for forwarding these.

LOVE

Love

RESPECT

Respect

FAITHFULNESS

Faithfulness

COMPASSION

Compassion

COMPANIONSHIP

Companionship

The sustainable dog.

Looking for sustainability?  Try this!

Sustainable is an overused word these days.  All for the right reasons, of course!  But how often is the word used in the context of relationships?  Of the relationships between the domesticated dog and man?  I suspect rarely.

Take the example of the Japanese Akita dog called Hachi, (Hachikō in Japanese) that I wrote about almost a year ago.

In 1924, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at theUniversity of Tokyo took in Hachikō as a pet. During his owner’s life Hachikō saw him out from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. The pair continued their daily routine until May 1925, when Professor Ueno did not return on the usual train one evening. The professor had suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage at the university that day. He died and never returned to the train station where his friend was waiting. Hachikō was loyal and every day for the next nine years he waited sitting there amongst the town’s folk.

Hachikō 1925

“…. every day for the next nine years he waited sitting there amongst the town’s folk” Truly a sustainable relationship.

Now to something closer to home; literally.

The Payson Roundup is our local newspaper. Last Tuesday’s edition had the following story which Tom Brossart, Editor, has kindly given me written permission to reproduce here on Learning from Dogs.  Thank you, Tom.

Best friends help save man’s life

Both Logger and Harold Green are a little gray around the muzzle, but they have lots of good days ahead after Logger helped save Green’s life back on July 1.Photo by Andy Towle

By Teresa McQuerrey

August 30, 2011

Logger is Harold Green’s best friend. Logger isn’t a flannel-wearing, tattooed burly woodsman; he is a sweet-tempered chocolate Labrador retriever. And this best friend saved Green’s life.

Green makes his home up in Happy Jack. Recently he and Logger drove into the woods and went for a walk, and then Green had a heart attack. He didn’t have a history of heart disease, but all of a sudden his chest became tight. He collapsed and on his way to the ground, he hit a fallen log and wound up hitting his forehead and nose, tearing his bottom lip away from his gums, cutting his chin and breaking a rib.

“Right before I had the heart attack I had a page there was a fire, and that’s the last thing I remember,” he said. Green is an emergency medical technician with the Blue Ridge Fire Department.

He said the next thing he remembers was waking up and trying to call 911. “There was so much blood in my eyes I couldn’t see at first, but Logger licked the blood away.”

Green was conscious long enough to dial 911 and try to explain where he was. He heard the sirens go past him and with that information; the emergency responders had a place to start looking for him.

At that point, Logger left Green’s side to go to the rescue personnel.

“From what they told me, he was like Lassie. He came running to them, barking, and started running back to me, stopped and made sure they were following,” Green said.

The first person on the scene with him was a law enforcement officer with the Forest Service. Green said he told him his nose was bleeding so much he thought it was broken.

Next to arrive was a deputy sheriff. Green said he later learned the guy was off duty, but came to help anyway.

The Blue Ridge ambulance crew arrived next.

“Logger did the same with all of them as he had with the first one on the scene. They told me, without Logger’s help they would have had to search for me a lot longer.”

Green said when they first reached him his heart rate was in the mid-40s and he had no blood pressure. The rescue team stabilized him and carried him out to the ambulance to take him to the fire station where a helicopter could land.

“They said Logger tried to get into the ambulance with me,” Green said.

He said he has little or no memory of everything that took place, when he woke up he was in the hospital in Flagstaff.

Logger couldn’t ride in the ambulance with Green and couldn’t come see him in the hospital, but since he has been out, the dog has not been more than three feet from him for three weeks.

“It is really humbling to have so many friends there to help you out,” Green said.

The people who came to his rescue were all friends and, just like Logger, they did what best friends do, except it was something they do every day, for friends and strangers alike.

Logger has been part of Green’s family for seven years, joining it when he was just a puppy.

Green is the son of longtime Rim Country Realtor Bea Baxter, who has been in the community for around 40 years.

So dear, lovely Logger also demonstrated the same, deep sustainability of relationship that Hachikō did back in 1925.  There is so much that we can learn from dogs.  Think about sustainability, as it relates to the relationship between dogs and man.  It goes back at least 30,000 years.  It’s an unimaginable length of time.

In this context, sustainability is an underused word!