It was all Jean’s fault! In that the other day I was talking to her about ideas for posts for Learning from Dogs and Jean suggested a series featuring each of the nine dogs that we have here in Oregon. Considering that this blog is called what it is, for that idea to surface some 2,000 posts and over 4 years after the blog first started says something about yours truly that I’d rather not pursue!
Paloma
Here are a couple of photographs taken of Paloma just two days ago.
Paloma, Oregon, January 26th, 2014.
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Now, as it happens, some time ago there was a post about Paloma published here. Here it is republished some two years later.
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Preface.
Before I met Jean in December 2007, she had been rescuing feral dogs in the Mexican beach town of San Carlos for many, many years. Over those years, Jean must have rescued and found homes for 60 dogs or more. In the month that I met Jean, she had 12 dogs and 6 cats at her home. Ten months later, September 2008, I flew out to be permanently with Jean with my German Shepherd, Pharaoh – that’s him on the home page of Learning from Dogs – taking the total up to 13 dogs.
When we moved up to Payson, Arizona in February, 2010 we brought all 13 dogs and 6 cats with us, much to the amazement of the US Immigration officers at the US-Mexican border town of Nogales! Indeed, our particular officer left his booth excitedly to explain to his colleagues that our dogs and cats represented a border crossing record!
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Paloma, December 29th 2011
Paloma
The old white dog padded down the dusty pavement. Sway-backed and dull-eyed, her teats, heavy with milk, grazed the ground. An anonymous creature in a cruel world. The pavement sizzled in the afternoon Mexican summer sun blistering her tired feet, but she could not hurry. She had to conserve her energy. Her pups were soon coming and finding a safe place to give birth to them was her priority. The beach that had been her home was not a good place. .. needed cool shelter. She would find it.
She was alone among a sea of human legs in this scruffy Mexican beach town. No-one noticed her plight. No-one cared. She was used to it. She had long been adept at finding dried fish, discarded tortillas, sometimes a tasty morsel thrown by a tourist sunning in front of the big hotel.
This would be her eighth litter and she was very tired. As a puppy she belonged to a family with small children. There were plenty of leftovers. But when she became pregnant they drove her to the beach, threw her out and left her to fend for herself.
Her babies were always beautiful. She had Labrador in her genes donating a coat that was pure white. Humans always took her pups; she could only ever hope their fate was always a better one than hers.
Anonymity. She had perfected the art; never make eye contact, move low to the ground, escape the stray kick with a quick sideways leap.
She remembered at the very end of the long beach there was a house with a pool. Plenty of water. Onward she padded.
The lawn surrounding the pool was moist with sprinklers and the hibiscus hedge close to the house made a safe nest. Soon she had dug into the damp earth a big enough hole to curl into; it was cool under the canopy of red flowers.
A human voiced shouted, “Carlos, get that dog out of the hedge.” Then the long hose filling that tempting pool was turned on her and a burst of water hit her in the face. She uttered a low growl. Carlos, the gardener, backed away, “Señor, the dog, she is having babies.”
The owner of the house turned abruptly and went inside. He picked up his phone, made a call to the local English lady who over the years had acquired the nickname ‘Dog Lady’. He practically shouted down the phone, “I have a dog in my hedge having pups. You had better do something about it or I shall dispose of them, and I won’t be pretty about it!”
‘Dog Lady’ was used to this. Had been many years since she took on the practically impossible task of rescuing Mexican feral dogs and she was well-known for never turning a dog away. In less than 15 minutes, she had walked to the fine house overlooking the beach and quietly looked under the hedge. As anticipated, the dog was incapable of being moved, her focus entirely now on the safe birth of her pups. With appropriate feminine wiles, the white dog’s human saviour persuaded the disgruntled owner to allow the mother dog a stay of a few days. ‘Dog Lady’ promised that she would take them away as soon as possible.
“She’s a mean and wild dog, you’ll never tame her,” came the angry response from the house owner.
‘Dog Lady’ just smiled and said nothing.
But every day she took food to the white dog then sat quietly close by on the grass reading her book. The white dog had just the one pup, which ‘Dog Lady’ called Solovino, the Spanish for ‘comes alone’. The mother dog she called Paloma, Spanish for ‘Dove’. Many white dogs in Mexico were called Paloma and maybe years earlier that was what the children named her as the name did seem to resonate with this gentle dog.
Patiently, ‘Dog Lady’ moved closer and closer until Paloma would take meat from her hand, rapidly followed by allowing her ears to be caressed. Ten days later, while Paloma was eating, ‘Dog Lady’ picked up the little Solovino and put him into her car. Paloma’s response was immediate; she frantically ran to her child, her mothering instinct so great that she leapt without hesitation into this strange vehicle. Paloma and Solovino were safe.
The house owner graciously admitted that he had been taught a lesson in empathy and how sorry he was for being so rude and cruel.
Back at ‘Dog Lady’s’ home, a quiet sanctuary for so many dogs over the past years, Paloma and Solovino were quickly settled into a cool room. Paloma soon utterly trusted her ‘Dog Lady’ human companion and became the tame and loving dog she always wanted to be. Her shining eyes embraced her new world and she even regained her figure! Solovino grew quickly and found a wonderful family home in Tucson, Arizona.
Now some 6 years after ‘Dog Lady’ rescued Paloma from under that hedge, she is a beloved part of the Handover family. Indeed, she travelled in peace in February 2009 with her twelve dog friends from her sanctuary in San Carlos, Mexico to this dog paradise in the Arizonan forest just outside Payson.
Paloma will never want again.
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Now here we are in Southern Oregon some two years after that story was first published. Paloma happy and contented.
So many of the dogs that have passed through Jean’s loving arms have stories to tell. Next up will be the story of Lilly.
According to the online version of the Merriam Webster dictionary, one of the two definitions of synchronicity is:
: the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung
That seems sufficiently apt to warrant the choice of title for today’s post.
Here’s why!
Yesterday, Chris Snuggs left a comment to my post Unconditional love. Essentially, Chris made the argument that much of what we see as wrong with the world is not new; not new at all [my insertion of the image of and link to the Great Fire of London].
Great Fire of London. September 2nd-5th, 1666.
What I mean is, the danger of thinking that today’s events are somehow special and different in kind than throughout history, a feeling generated by the fact that WE are living NOW. However, is it not true that ALL ages of Mankind have seen disasters, wars, dangers, catastrophes, including natural ones? How must those have felt who lived through the 30 Years War, the plague, the Great Fire of London, Stalin’s purges and of course the holocaust?
Even in these present times, Chris doubted that mankind had not been here before [my emphasis]:
WHAT then is special about OUR era? Well, Patrice is and rightly very concerned about the kleptocracy. The staggering statistic that emerged the other day about 85 individuals having as much wealth as 3,5 BILLION people was yet another wake-up call, especially as history seems to tell us that A) there have ALWAYS been kleptocracies and B) they ALWAYS end in revolution, dictatorship or social collapse. But the point is, this is nothing NEW. On the contrary, it has in many societies been the normal progression of things for millenia.
So what about Global Warming, as in man-caused? Chris wrote:
No, all my uncertainties lie in the area of GW. It’s pretty clear that there Is global warming, but A) Is it our fault? B) What should we DO about it? and C) Is it too late anyway?
The notion that it is too late to prevent widespread, major consequences from the heating of our planet is widely shared; I sing the siren’s song myself.
So when an item came along yesterday from Transition Network’s blog courtesy of Rob Hopkins pointing out that Chris, me and many others may be wrong to sing the ‘doom and gloom’ song, it naturally caught my eye. A quick call to the Transition Network team in Totnes, Devon gave me permission to republish on Learning from Dogs, so here it is. Thanks TN team. (My thoughts follow the TN piece.)
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Lipkis on Holmgren: “Our job is to make viable the alternative and have it ready”
You know how sometimes someone will just put something you were thinking far more eloquently and clearly than you would have been able to? On Thursday we’ll be posting an interview with Andy Lipkis of TreePeople in Los Angeles. When I talked to Andy last week, it was 80°F, and a state of drought emergency had just been declared (in LA, not Totnes, it was raining here, as usual). At the end of the interview, I asked for his thoughts on the recent debate sparked by David Holmgren’s Crash on Demand article. I asked him “Can we achieve the action on climate change that we need within the existing paradigm, or do we need to deliberately bring the economy down, to deliberately crash it?”. Here’s what he told me.
Andy Lipkis
“This system is so armoured to defend itself from a deliberate crash that much of our resources and intelligence networks are focused on exactly stopping that. On the flip side, the crash is already happening. We don’t have to engineer it: it’s already been engineered into the system. Check it out: Infrastructure systems are in breakdown in major cities around the world, with severe climate exceeding the designed capacity for storms, floods, water shortages, heat events resulting in increasing numbers of people being dislocated, injured or killed. In the US, taxpayers are unwilling or unable to pay for the rapidly inflating costs for upgrading and climate-proofing the outmoded infrastructure systems, all the while, climate change denial campaigns prevent communities from preparing for and protecting themselves from the impacts.
I think our job is to make viable the alternative and have it ready. If we’ve really done our homework, we could scale this thing in a flash in California right now because this crash is upon us. And I hope we’re going to be able, perhaps within months…I invented a cistern that could replace the backyard fence or wall, that could hold 5,000 – 20,000 gallons and could be manufactured locally. The City’s going “hey, maybe we should do that now”. Now. Because it’s going to rain again, even if this drought lasts some years, we could deploy them quickly, just as they did in Australia’s 12 year drought.
I think we’ve been trained to spend time on these battles, on the negativity, and we lose people. We’ve lost precious decades. The crash is on its way. We don’t have to do anything. We need the time to convert people and move people. We need to use examples of Australia and what’s happening now in California to tell those stories, because I agree, denial, defending the system is keeping it pumping. But as you saw from Snowden and all the evidence, for those of us who went through the ‘60s and ‘70s in protest, I don’t think that’s going to succeed. If we focus on that our best leaders are going to end up in jail for too long.
When you look at how fast people change when you add inspiration, when you add attraction, people change on a dime! When we were growing up, there were – I don’t know if you had The Munsters? One of the only people who we all knew who was doing yoga and eating yoghurt was Uncle Fester. But when we started seeing beautiful, sexy male and female bodies doing that, it started selling, moving people by the millions and then billions to choose these lifestyles.
I’m not saying the marketplace is the only answer, I’m just saying that if we choose attraction and inclusion we can create those markets, as you’re starting to do. Your stories over and over again on what’s happening with local currency – it’s time to tell the stories better and use those market forces, because people will choose those because they’re less painful and more attractive. And to be smart, to say wow, yeah.
The Bush administration was ready for all Americans to be protesting to try to stop the Iraq war. They expected that, they built that into their design. I was so amazed that they could say they didn’t care what the people said, that I had to think through why they did not care about that. How did they make it resilient? Because all they cared about was as long as people kept consuming, especially petroleum, their objective was being met. They were counting on no-one changing lifestyles.
The most radical thing sometimes that you can do is actually vote with your feet and vote with your dollars. I was going – “wow, yeah, they’re counting on people complaining”. Protesting and not changing. I started thinking that even the Obama administration is still using the same metrics as the Bush administration was, saying people won’t change on energy. “It’s going to take 35 years to reduce our energy use by 30%”. Well that’s bullshit, because we can choose to do that in a week.
So, I decided that I was going to show that that’s possible even in my own lifestyle. I drive a Prius which is especially fuel efficient, but I’m going to stop driving that car two or three days a week. I told my secretary to book meetings downtown where I could get the bus to. I got out of the car, took the bus, and it actually became a really cool thing. I started investing my dollars in the local bus system. I did it for over two years. I blogged about it. A lot of other people stopped full time car use, and right at the right time as gasoline prices were spiking, a proposal came out to build a new transit system. It’s always been rejected in LA, but the voters at that moment chose to fund 40 billion dollars to build a new subway system in Los Angeles so we could get out of our cars. It’s a radical move, but it’s starting to happen.
So maybe that’s a long complicated answer, but we’ve built the right foundation. Our happiness, our health is the answer. It’s infectious. Our job is to be that much more infectious and inclusive. And don’t put up barriers of titles. Don’t put up barriers of shame and blame. Be open to learning fast and welcoming people in. We’re hacking the system and making it so much better. If we invite that kind of creativity, the generation that’s inheriting this right now is really ready to take this home.
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Don’t know about you but I find that compelling. It’s far too easy to wait for others to fix the problems. Too easy to see the issues as insurmountable. Each of us has the ability and the common-sense to make a change in our lives. Whether it is a small, medium or large change in your behaviour, you will make a difference.
So if you have been inspired by this, as Jeannie and I have been, commit to making a difference.
A genuine cry for help for a pig that needs its toenails cut!
Regulars will be tempted to conclude that this old Brit has really lost the plot! After all, in this fifth year of writing Learning from Dogs, representing a total approaching 2,000 posts, there has been not one mention of the pig; the animal that is! Until now!
Let me explain.
One of the consequences of the NaNoWriMo experience is that I have become aware of a number of other writers, all of them far more competent than yours truly, I’m bound to say. I was also encouraged to join the writers social media website, WattPad. (for those interested, my WattPad user name is LearningFromDogs – yes, I know, it wasn’t very original!)
One of those authors is Melinda Roth and I have been reading her Blog: Anyone Seen My Horse. A recent blog post concerned one of Melinda’s pigs that, as a result of being unable to use its rear legs, can’t naturally wear down its ‘toe nails’.
While the post contains a strong humorous thread, nonetheless the issue is far from funny for the pig.
So, please, if you know what to do for this poor pig, or you know someone who does know, please make the connection, or leave a comment to this post. So with Melinda’s kind permission here is the republication of her recent post.
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My Pig’s Toenails
POSTED ON JANUARY 26, 2014
The publicists says I should be plugging the book, but I have a more immediate concern: the fact that I received no good advice from my last post about how to cut my pig’s toenails.
One person did suggest that I use my pigs for “sustenance.” Which crossed my mind. But I can’t eat anything that I’ve had to clean up after. Which means I am now a vegetarian and still have a partially paralyzed pig who needs her toenails cut.
Besides, this is what they looked like when they first arrived:
And who could eat that?
Unlike the other animals on the farm (back story >), the pigs were a gift . My kids gave them to me for my birthday, and how do you tell your children – who think they’ve just given you the best present ever – that you have too many (bleep)ing animals already? They bought them from a breeder who called them “teacup” pigs and promised they’d never weigh more than 30 pounds.
Right. And I’m Lady Godiva riding gloriously naked across the horizon on my well-behaved steed.
Are there any attorneys out there who can, in the name of civil justice, do anything about this…
(See that fake smile on my son-in-law’s face? He was part of the best-birthday-present-ever conspiracy, and whenever he comes to the farm, he pets the pigs and smiles and tries to pretend like they’re still cute in an effort to cover up his culpability. He thinks I’m stupid).
At first, when the pigs were still under 30 pounds, I let them live in the house. I dressed them in pink sweaters and painted their toenails. I gave them cute names, which I’ve long forgotten, because once they started expanding (75 pounds in six months) and ramming the kitchen table whenever they got hungry and pooping things that looked like meatloaves out of their butts, I started calling them “those things” which is the only name they go by now. More specifically: Thing 1 and Thing 2.
As soon as the weather warmed up, I decided they should be free-roaming things and relocated them outside. I put them in a small barn with the chickens where they had their own separate apartment with a dog house big enough for both of them and all of their blankets and toys. They roamed the property at will and thrived: 125 pound by age one; 150 pounds by age two; 200 pounds currently and still counting.
They got so fat that after a while, you couldn’t see their legs anymore. Then they got fatter and their eyes disappeared under rolls of eyebrow blubber. They got so fat that when one of them meandered out to the road, she blocked traffic (two pick-ups and the mail delivery car) for 20 minutes until I finally coaxed her back into the yard with crescent roll dough.
The last straw was when one of them got stuck in the dog house door. She panicked and squeal/screamed so loudly, the neighbors half a mile down the road called 911, because they thought someone was being murdered (they later told me they didn’t know what the horrible sound was but seemed like something to call 911 about). By the time the sheriff arrived, the pig had dragged herself out of the barn and into the yard, still screaming, dog house still attached to her body.
The sheriff’s first reaction was to reach for his gun (and I must admit, I didn’t do much to stop him). But then his SWAT training must have kicked in: He whipped off his jacket; ran down the dog house; and, then leaped onto its roof, which weighed it down just enough for the screaming pig to pull her body the rest of the way out.
After that, the pigs went on a diet. Nothing but water and lettuce for a week. That, however, didn’t go over well, and they decided to run away from home, which meant the sheriff’s next visit happened after another neighbor called 911 to report “big, black things” attacking her garbage cans.
By the time the pigs were two-and-a-half years old, they were no longer pigs: They were humongous, hairy, black cows with no legs or eyes. Because they couldn’t see so well, they ran into things a lot, and when one of them ran into a small hole in the ground, she threw out her back, which paralyzed her hind legs.
The veterinarian’s suggested that she be “put down.”
Had the sheriff shot her or the mail delivery truck run her over, I wouldn’t have lost too much sleep. But to actually cause the death of something… well, I figure almost anything is better than being dead. Even if you have to drag yourself around by your front legs like a beached walrus it’s probably better than not being. So I let her live.
And now… her toenails have grown to be about seven inches long, because she can’t move around enough to wear them down. I tried to cut them back when they started a life of their own, but she weighs 250 pounds now and does not want anyone messing with her toes.
Thus, this post. Is there ANYONE out there who knows about this stuff?
The most important thing, without a doubt, to learn from dogs.
Last Tuesday, Learning from Dogs published the first of the three parts of Martin Lack’s essay From Environmentalism to Ecologism. It generated a fascinating discussion. One of the commentators was Chris Snuggs who writes his own blog under the name of Nemo Insula Est. Here is the essence of a discussion with Martin Lack and Patrice Ayme. (Without reading the following comments, my closing opinion will make little sense; assuming they do at the best of times!)
Chris: The problem with politics at the moment is that the choices come down to A) being socialist, moral and bankrupt or B) capitalist and immoral but at least with a chance of avoiding poverty and chaos.
Martin: I think I am very much in agreement with you, Chris. It says a l lot when a practicing Catholic can admit that his Church needs to ditch its anthropocentric bias and stop treating the Earth as if we are the only species that matters…
Chris: One of the big questions for me is this. Is the world of our perceptions ONLY what we see, hear, smell and touch or is there another dimension which we cannot sense? Personally, I believe the former, which is why I cannot believe in: God, aliens, ghosts, an afterlife, fairies or indeed a sensible socialist economic policy.
I sometimes feel this makes me boring (or if you like, it just another feature of my boringness), but on the other hand I feel more or less in tune with what I understand “The Enlightenment” to have meant. It would be much more reassuring to know that there is a God (caring if possible, though it is hard to see how he would be) and indeed aliens, as long as they were friendly. But until there is some sound evidence, I cannot. And there IS no evidence that would stand up in court, is there?
So, we are alone; the universe is as it is; how it came into being we do not know and it is perhaps unknowable; the planet Earth cares not a jot about us or our feelings; we have no particular right to exist: we just do, by natural accident (until proven otherwise). I am not a fan of the “There are billions of stars in the universe, so there must be other forms of life elsewhere.” argument. “must be” is not “is”.
So if WE do not ensure our survival by looking after the planet then nobody or nothing will. As for “ecology”, good people are trying to do a lot of things, but as far as I can see:
A) It is too late and too little. Even if we were doing all the right things NOW (which we obviously are not), the time lag before our actions start to correct othe damage done will be too great; we may well have died out by then.
B) Despite all that is being done, CO2 emissions are going up, countries have STILL found no economic model that does not insist on growth and you cannot have growth without increased energy use, which for the moment and foreseeable future means fossil fuel extraction. And THIS of course continues apace with many countries now desperately trying to frack their way to growth, in the case of the USA rather successfully.
Martin: All very interesting, Chris, although I am not sure why your atheism necessitates rejection of socialism. For many people the two are inextricably linked. However, this is all off-topic… All I wanted to point out was that anthropocentrism is a mistake that can be made by both theists and atheists alike; and that it is good to see the former admitting they have made this mistake.
Paul: Chris/Martin, To my way of thinking, there is a more fundamental issue at work. That is the corrupting effect of power. I’m certain you know the famous saying. Thus whatever fine motives propel a person to enter politics, that person seems unable to avoid the call of power and its corrupting effect. The only hope is that key countries, and none so key as the USA, evolve a better, more representative, political process. Otherwise, I fear for the coming years.
Patrice: I agree with Paul 100%. I saw the call of power. Unimaginable. People just get insane. There are also filtering systems to insure they get that way (it starts right away with one week retreats in extremely posh resorts; does not matter if you are capitalist, socialist, blueist, reddist, ecologist, independentist, etc.).
Chris: Agreed. It has been clear time and time again throughout history. Well, so much is obvious, but WHAT TO DO about it?
A) We must end the practice of having career politicians: you serve a maximum of TEN years, at the end of which you go.
B) Inherited wealth allowing the building up of immensely powerful family dynasties over generations must be ended. It is simply untenable. The rich-poor gap is getting obscene everywhere, and money is of course power. My “Abolish inheritance” idea will be wildly unpopular because we are naturally acquisitive and “greedy” and of course would hit those with most to lose who also therefore have the most power.
Patrice: With all due respect, Chris and Martin sound rather naïve… Huge wealth and power is where it’s at. And it attracts to politics first, foremost, and soon uniquely, those it attracts most, namely the basest sort.
Chris:
A) All a question of balance: SOME ambition is essential; it is when there is too much that it is dangerous.
B) I would have maximum terms for political service. plus:
C) Nobody should be allowed to be a public representative until they have fulfilled certain conditions, for example (but to be debated): worked in the private sector; some experience of life in a factory; nobody under 30; high achievement in some industrial, commercial, academic or social field, and so on
Ed Milliband grew up in a Marxist family, went to a posh school and then straight to university from where he went straight into politics as an “advisor”, thence to become a Minister and now leader of the opposition and possible OM.
THAT is not the proper background for a national leader, but the House of Commons is full of such people. The % of MPs from “working-class” backgrounds is going down and down and down. In the USA, Congress is over-represented by the rich, famous and/or connected. Where are the mailmen, bus drivers and burger-servers? “You need more intelligent Congresspeople than that.”
Sorry, I can’t take that argument from a country that elected Dan Quayle, George Bush and Sara Palin!!!!!
Patrice: Right. Glad to see every body agrees. It’s even worse than that. “Representative” politics is intrinsically demonic, as it vests great power in some individuals. That, per se is not just a crime, but absolutely corrupting.
Representative politics has got to be eliminated. Switzerland has eliminated it at the legislative level. Why can’t all other countries of the West do the same? Because the present plutocracy rules through the representatives, esp. in the USA? After we have done the legislative, the executive could be handled along Roman Republican lines and Athenian lines. Roman Consuls, for example, had full power only for one month at a time. In Athens enormous quora (say, 8% of the potential electorate) had to be found, before any decision.
Martin:Excellent synopsis, Patrice. All of the things you mention would be made possible by a return to localism and/or bioregionalism, which may well come to pass by default (i.e. as a result of those in power now being in denial about what is happening to our planet).
Now the reason that I offered up this lengthy transcript of the conversation was that it clearly showed to me that bright, well-educated people agree that there is much wrong with many, if not most, countries that offer a representative democratic form of Government. Bright, well-educated people are also not afraid to offer answers. Patrice went on to write a most engaging post over at his place under the title of Representative Politics Is Dictatorship. It opens:
Representative Dictatorship Is Not Democracy
I know a young lady who was elected for the first time in California. She is sent to a posh resort for a week to learn the basics of her new job, being a “Democratic” politician. Everything is wrong with this picture (not just the mansion she lives in and her million dollar family income, while claiming to be a leftie). Everything is wrong, but it’s typical: all elected representatives in the USA are treated very well, and get to meet who, it dawns on them after a while, can insure for them, and their families, much nicer lives. (The New York Times, to its discredit, just discovered this PACS trick in 2014.)
A gigantic manipulation industry has developed, with its own strategists. Barack Obama seemed to have come out of nowhere, but, even before he started to score big, he was viewed as the anointed one, by the highest powers in “Democratic” circles: Axelrod, a professional manipulator who had just led Kerry’s campaign, was sent to Obama, just a modest Senator. Obama then gave a keynote speech at the Kerry convention, etc. When he campaigned, Wall Street money started to flow, more than towards any other candidate, by orders of magnitude, etc. No wonder Obama has found so hard to bite the hand that fed him.
Let me draw this all together. Possibly in a manner that will cause readers to sigh and say the old fella is losing the plot!
Because what I am about to say strikes me as so obvious, so massively demonstrated day-in, day-out by the planet’s sentient, warm-blooded creatures (even man can do it!).
It is this.
We have lost sight of the fact that animals offer an endless set of examples of living in the present and offering unconditional love to those creatures, humans included, that do not threaten them. These are very difficult times for us and all the creatures on this planet. Unconditional love for the planet we live on and for all those that do not threaten us is the only way forward!
Let me close with three photographs that provide all the evidence that we need to embrace love and tenderness for everything in our lives.
Sweeny on back of settee, Cleo loving Jean.
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Dhalia’s unconditional love for Jean.
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Neighbours Bill and Dordie under the influence of Cleo’s unconditional love.
Can ecologism be regarded as an ideology in its own right? (Part 3)
Therefore, having now surveyed all the relevant “territory”, we shall now consider the third and final part of the answer to the question as proposed in the Introduction.
Ecologism – Neither left nor right, but out in front?
According to Philip Shabecoff, it was members of the European Green parties that were the first to assert that they are “neither left nor right but out in front” (2000: 109).
For this to be true, ecologism would have to represent a new paradigm that rejects (or at least challenges) beliefs central to conventional politics (of any orientation). This, it is here argued, is indeed the case: In a discussion of the libertarian ideas of John Locke and Adam Smith, William Ophuls observed that they “…have not gone unchallenged, but with very few exceptions, liberals, conservatives, socialists, communists, and other modern ideologies have taken abundance for granted and assumed the necessity of further growth” (Ophuls 1977: 145).
What is the problem with modernity?
As suggested by Anthony Giddens, modernity encompasses “…modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence” (Giddens 1991: 1).
The problem is that the accumulation of personal wealth has become the sole objective of many people in modern society; and perpetual growth is posited as a means whereby even the poorest might achieve it.
Karl Marx (as cited by Jon Elster) coined the term “money fetishism” to describe the belief that money (and/or precious metals) have intrinsic (use) value rather than just instrumental (exchange) value, which Marx felt was as misguided as the religious practice of endowing inanimate objects with supernatural powers (Elster 1986: 56-7).
However, whereas Karl Marx saw capitalism as the problem, the ideology that he gave his name to is just as guilty of Daly’s “growthmania”. For example, whereas Jack Goody accepts that capitalism has been “…connected with the growth of rationality and of secularisation; more recently with urbanisation and industrialisation”, he also notes that for Marxist regimes “…modern meant industrialisation without capitalism” (Goody 2004: 6).
The terms “use value” and “exchange value” were first put forward by Aristotle (384-322 BC) who, according to Daly, also recognised the danger of focusing on the latter (i.e. whereby the accumulation of wealth becomes an end in itself) and, alluding to Marx’s criticism, Daly suggested that the paperless economy (where no useable commodities actually change hands) is the logical end-point for money fetishism (Daly 1992: 186).
Finally, on the subject of the consequences of “the problem”, although the centrally-planned economies of the former USSR and China would appear to have had their day, the flaws of the capitalist system they seem so keen to embrace have also revealed themselves in recent time. For example, when John Gray came to write the introduction to the second edition of his book “False Dawn: The Delusions of Modern Capitalism”, he included the following comment:
In the first edition of this book, published in March 1998, I wrote: ‘Today’s regime of global laissez-faire will be briefer than even the belle époque of 1870 to 1914, which ended in the trenches of the first world war’… Not much more than a decade ago this seemed outlandish, but there have since been many signs that global capitalism was heading for a fall (Gray 2009: xii).
Does ecologism provide the answers?
The starting point for ecologism is the concept of carrying capacity (the maximum population of a species) that an ecosystem can support in perpetuity (Dryzek 2005: 27). In this instance, the species is Homo sapiens and the ecosystem is the planet Earth. Therefore, in 1968, Hardin suggested that these limits exist and must be faced. In 1993, frustrated by the absence of discussion on population growth in international politics, he pointed out that:
Two centuries of intermittent wrestling with population problems have produced useful insights about the reality and nature of limits… Four centuries of sedation by the delusion of limitlessness have left humanity floundering in a wilderness of rhetoric… From this it must be inferred that someday political conservatism will once again be defined as contented living within limits. The limitless world view will have to be abandoned (Hardin 1993: 5-6).
In 1968, his solution had been “...mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected” (Hardin 1968: 1247). However, in an apparent reference to the work of an array of scholars including Malthus, Hardin, Meadows, Ehrlich and others, Daly lamented that:
Anyone who asserts the existence of limits is soon presented with a whole litany of things that someone once said could never be done but subsequently were done… Continuing to study economies only in terms of the [exchange value of money] is like studying organisms only in terms of the circulatory system, without ever mentioning the digestive tract. (Daly 1992: 185-186).
Much more recently, Daly has reminded us that, “Ecological limits are rapidly converting ‘economic growth’ into ‘uneconomic growth’-that is throughput growth that increases costs by more than it increases benefits, thus making us poorer not richer” (Daly 2007: 39).
So, it would seem that the challenge of living “within our planet’s means” remains significant; one that few politicians are willing to discuss (because there are no votes to be gained in doing so). It is this fact that the environment cannot speak for itself (i.e. it is disenfranchised) that led Goodin to the conclusion that “nature has interests… as deserving of protection as anyone else’s, which must be ‘encapsulated’ as part of a discursive participatory democracy” (Goodin 1996: 835).
Similarly, whereas Goodin used the term “encapsulated interests” (to describe how one party’s interests are incorporated in those of another), Dobson suggested that non-human animals and future generations of humans (and maybe even other species) are “new environmental constituencies” requiring human representatives to look after their interests (Dobson 1996: 125).
All that needs to be decided is who we shall admit into the “community of justice” (i.e. how radical you want to be).
Citing Low and Gleeson (1998) and Baxter (1999), Derek Bell therefore distinguishes environmental and ecological justice as follows: Environmental justice concerns the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens among human beings. Whereas ecological justice is concerned with justice between human beings and the rest of the natural world (Bell 2006: 208). Furthermore, Bell also spells out the importance of this distinction (just in case any reader has not appreciated it yet) as follows:
Advocates of environmental justice merely insist that the instrumental value of the environment to humans should be recognised in a theory of social justice or justice among humans. Ecological justice makes the much more radical claim that justice extends beyond relations among humans so that we can talk about ‘justice to nature’ (Bell 2006: 208).
Conclusions
The question that has been addressed herein is whether or not ecologism can or should be regarded as a political ideology in its own right given that both socialists and conservatives can lay claim to some aspects of ecological politics.
In order to provide a defensible answer to this question, it was necessary to define what is meant by ecological politics (i.e. the pursuit of policies that are concerned with the environment; but which are not merely or predominantly anthropocentric) and ecologism (i.e. the pursuit of environmental policies that are biocentric or ecocentric). This therefore highlighted the fact that the two are not the same thing; and that ecological politics also includes anthropocentric environmentalism.
However, it has been demonstrated that, rather than being a simple dividing line within the field of ecological politics, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism represent opposite ends of a spectrum along which it is possible to adopt a variety of philosophical positions. Furthermore, although it has also been demonstrated that it is very difficult to be entirely one thing or the other, when faced with difficult policy decisions, almost everyone (both socialists and conservatives included), tends to favour self-preservation. Therefore, the default position of all humans tends to be towards the anthropocentric end of the spectrum.
Nevertheless, to avoid the tautological response to the question (“ecologism must be regarded as a distinctive political ideology in its own right because it is!”), it was deemed necessary to demonstrate how and why both socialists and conservatives can lay claim to ecological politics (although the majority of both socialists and conservatives do not do so) and, therefore, how and why the ecologism that both find so challenging must be regarded as a political ideology in its own right.
In so doing, it has been shown that some socialists find common cause with those that seek equal rights for the environment; whereas some conservatives may do so in pursuit of maintaining the status quo. However, both generally assume the necessity of further growth (Ophuls); what Daly called ‘growthmania’. Furthermore, capitalism is fixated upon the inherent value of things we may consume; whereas Marxism (an extreme form of socialism) is fixated upon the inherent value of things we may produce. However, ecologism insists that nature has inherent – if not intrinsic – value in and of itself; independent of our finding a use for it.
Ecologically-minded scientists and economists have pointed out that the Earth is finite and its capacity to accommodate humans is finite; whereas the evidence of at least the last 40 years is that many prefer to refuse to accept this reality and, as Schumacher pointed out, are spending environmental capital as if it were income. Therefore, because ecologism demands justice that is ecological (ecocentric) – not just environmental (anthropocentric), it represents a fundamental challenge to conventional politics and, as such, must be regarded as a distinctive political ideology in its own right.
References
Baxter, B. (1999), Ecologism: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bell, D. (2006), ‘Political Liberalism and Ecological Justice’ [online], Analyse & Kritik 28, pp.206-22. [Paper originally presented at ECPR General Conference, Marburg, 18–21 September 2003]. Available at <http://analyse-und-kritik.net/2006-2/AK_Bell_2006.pdf> [accessed 18 April 2011].
Daly, H. (1992), Steady State Economics (2nd edition). London: Earthscan.
Daly, H. (2007), Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development, Selected Essays of Herman Daly. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Dobson, A. (1996), ‘Representative democracy and the environment’, in Lafferty, W. and Meadowcroft, J (eds), Democracy and the Environment: Problems and Prospects. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp.124-39.
Dryzek, J. (2005), The Politics of the Environment (2nd edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ehrlich, P & Ehrlich, A. (1996), Betrayal of Science and Reason. New York: Island Press.
Elster, J. (1986), An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Giddens, A. (1991), The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Goodin, R. (1996), ‘Enfranchising the earth, and its alternatives’, Political Studies, 44, pp.835-49.
Goody, J. (2004), Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gray, J. (2009), False Dawn: The Delusions of Modern Capitalism, 2nd edition. London: Granta.
Hardin, G. (1993), Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Low, N. and Gleeson, B. (1998), Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration of Political Ecology. London: Routledge.
Malthus, T. (1798), An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J Johnson.
Ophuls, W. (1977), Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. San Francisco: Freeman & Co..
Shabecoff, P., (2000), Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century, Washington DC: Island Press.
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I know a good number of readers have followed Martin’s essay since Tuesday and I would like to thank Martin, on my own account and on behalf of all LfD readers, for giving me the opportunity to republish the essay.
Part Two of the three-part guest essay by Martin Lack.
The background to this major essay was covered yesterday, in the introduction to Part One.
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Can ecologism be regarded as an ideology in its own right? (Part 2)
A question of values
According to Carter (2007: 14-15), there is no consistent use of terminology regarding the value ascribed to different entities, so it would seem sensible to use that which he outlines:
Instrumental value: The value which something has for someone as a means to an end (also known as utility value).
Inherent value: The value which something has because it is considered desirable (e.g. precious metals such as silver, gold and platinum).
Intrinsic value: The value which something has because of what it is – typically essential for the existence of life (e.g. sunlight, clean air, and clean water).
As Carter points out (2007: 15), as well as being inconsistently applied to individual entities by those doing the valuing, these terms are not mutually exclusive (i.e. “being valuable in one way does not preclude being valuable in another way”). However, what is clear is that the value judgements that any individual makes will determine their attitude towards consumption and/or pollution of the Earth’s natural resources.
In setting out his “Green Theory of Value”, Robert Goodin boldly acknowledged that, ideally, it should “tell us both what is to be valued and why” (Goodin 1992:19). However, before explaining his own theory of value, Goodin identifies the two main alternatives as capitalist (consumer-based) value; and Marxist (producer-based) value (Goodin 1992: 23-4). Goodin’s green theory of value is thus distinct from both of these because the value-imparting properties are neither those of the consumer nor producer; they are (or at least should be) “natural resource based”; although he specifically does not claim that his theory “is correct utterly to the exclusion of all others” (Goodin 1992: 25-6).
Applying Carter’s typology of value (above) to Goodin’s argument, capitalists would appear to be focussed upon the inherent value of things they consume; and Marxists upon the instrumental value of the things they produce. In contrast to both of these, Goodin seeks to justify the assertion that nature itself should always be considered, independent of the presence or activity of humans, to have inherent – if not intrinsic – value. However, he seems to shy away from the logical conclusion of his argument; that all nature has intrinsic value that does not require the presence of valuers (Goodin 1992: 42-45). This is presumably part of an appeal to reason, which such an extreme view would probably not have.
A question of perspective
If anthropocentrism is a way of thinking “…that regards humans as the source of all value and is predominantly concerned with human interests”, then, in simplistic terms, ecocentrism is one “…that regards humans as subject to… ethical, political and social prescriptions… equally concerned with both humans and non-humans” (Carter 2007: 14). However, as with most things in life, it is not as simple as these definitions imply. For example, from an anthropocentric perspective, it is possible to be concerned about the welfare of individual domesticated animals; and yet not be concerned about the survival of entire endangered species.
Equally, one of the biggest debates in ecological politics may revolve around how one defines “moral persons” (Rawls, 1972: 504-5); or legitimate “recipients of justice” (Garner 2003: 11), although many would probably agree with what Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) said: “The question is not, can they reason? Not, can they talk? But, can they suffer?” (cited in Dobson 2006: 220-1). However, the contentious and unresolved nature of this debate has led to the appearance of terms such as “shallow” and “deep”; which may be applied to anthropocentrism and ecocentrism alike (with “deep” denoting a more extreme position in either case). Therefore:
Rather than define different perspectives according to which side of the ecocentric/anthropocentric divide they lie, they can be located along a continuum, which moves from ecocentrism through various gradations of anthropocentrism to ‘strong anthropocentrism’ (Carter 2007: 36).
Once it is recognised that there is a range of possible positions that may be adopted (rather than a choice that has to be made), it is possible – as Eckersley has done – to characterise at least five different positions, which are as follows:
Resource conservation – the wise use of natural resources for human benefit: Eckersley suggests that the conservation movement was founded upon the Judeao-Christian notion of humans having “dominion” over the Earth; rather than any duty of “stewardship”, as exemplified by Gifford Pinchot (the first chief of the US Forest Service) (Eckersley 1992: 35).
Human welfare ecology – an appeal to enlightened self-interest: Eckersley cites Barry Commoner’s “four laws of ecology”as (1) everything is connected to everything else; (2) everything must go somewhere; (3) nature knows best; and (4) there’s no such thing as a free lunch (Eckersley 1992: 37-8).
Preservationism – seeking the aesthetic preservation of wilderness areas: Whereas Gifford Pinchot wanted to preserve nature for development (i.e. maximise the utility of natural resources for human benefit), John Muir (of the Sierra Club) wanted to preserve nature from development (i.e. minimise the human impact on the natural environment) (Eckersley 1992: 39).
Animal liberationism – the prevention of cruelty to certain animals: A comparatively modern, radical, development; which can trace its heritage back to “humane” societies formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the RSPCA (Eckersley 1992: 42).
Ecocentrism – seeking the preservation of nature for its own sake (Eckersley, 1992: 46).
With regard to the latter, given that Eckersley recognised the fact that these positions lie upon a “wide spectrum of differing orientations towards nature”, whose end-points are anthropocentrism and ecocentrism (1992: 33), this could be better defined as deep ecocentrism. However, even using these five labels, it is not hard to see why it is difficult to categorise people: For example, the human welfare ecologists could be regarded as quite ecocentric (if they recognise the validity and/or importance of each and every one of Barry Commoner’s “four laws of ecology”); whereas animal liberationists could be regarded as quite anthropocentric (if they are only concerned about domesticated pets and/or individual animals).
The ecocentric end of the spectrum has also been described as that of “deep ecology” (Devall and Sessions 1985: 70), and “biospherical egalitarianism” (Naess 1989: 170). However, whilst preferring the term “biocentric egalitarianism” for the latter, Carter points out that – as indeed was conceded by Naess (1989: 28) – food is an essential requirement for life and, therefore, an entirely egalitarian position is untenable:
Certainly, any principle along the lines of biocentric egalitarianism would be impossible to implement. Taking it to the extreme, how could a human justify killing any animal or fish, or consuming a vegetable, bean or berry? All involve some restraint on another entity’s capacity to live and flourish (Carter 2007: 36).
So, it would seem that an entirely ecocentric position is hard to maintain, but can the same be said for an entirely anthropocentric position? This, as we shall now see, has been the subject of much debate.
A question of justice
When someone says, “I want justice!” it is normally because they feel they have been wronged in some way; and want what they feel they deserve (i.e. fairness). Hence, Paul Sterba opens his chapter in “Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge” on this subject by saying, “Justice requires giving what is deserved” (Sterba 2006: 148). However, within the sphere of environmental politics, when faced with difficult choices, human beings tend to ‘circle the wagons’ and protect their own kind.
In the introduction to his book “Theory of Ecological Justice”, Brian Baxter uses the example of Sir David Attenborough’s response to the prospect of humans causing species extinctions (i.e. “Surely, it is sad indeed that our descendants should inherit a natural world that is more impoverished than the one we inherited?”) to suggest that all humans are almost incapable of being anything other than anthropocentric (Baxter 2005: 1). However, Attenborough was probably deliberately making the question rhetorical; just as Baxter was probably being provocative in order to retain the interest of readers. Nevertheless, in a wide-ranging consideration of the subject, Baxter discusses the work of numerous authors, to advocate the case for “moral consideration” to be given to sentient non-humans (Baxter 2005: 45).
This would appear to be in accordance with Bentham’s conclusion that it is the ability to suffer that should confer the right to fair treatment. Indeed, one such author Baxter considered, David DeGrazia, proposed the principle of “equal consideration” for all sentient non-humans but pointed out that this could not guarantee justice; merely a fair hearing. He also pointed out that granting equal consideration would not automatically confer upon them the right to moral consideration, but it would be revolutionary; because much animal experimentation (he uses the term “exploitation”) would then seem to be unjustifiable (DeGrazia 1996: 37-38).
Dobson has written a great deal on the subject of justice. In a characteristically thought-provoking contribution to a recent collection of essays on the subject (regarding the difficulties of combining social justice and environmental sustainability; in effect asking “What is to be sustained and for whose benefit?”), he discusses who should be the legitimate “recipients of justice”; and what should be the consequential scope of the “community of justice” thus determined (Dobson 2003: 87-94).
Baxter sees the three main principled objections to the notion of ecological justice as being that justice need only be distributed to (1) those able to voluntarily co-operate to produce and/or preserve environmental benefits; (2) those with property rights; and (3) those capable of reciprocity (Baxter 2005: 77). Baxter deals with the first and last of these reasonably easily, as follows: (1) bacteria are beneficial and slaves were not volunteers (2005: 78-9); and (3) mentally-incapacitated people do not cease to be human because they cannot interact with their surroundings or respond to stimuli (2005: 77-8). However, objection (2) seems a little more intractable (2005: 86). Finally, Baxter concludes that if these objections can indeed be rejected, ecological justice represents a fundamental challenge to the laissez-faire attitude of liberalism (2005: 94).
However, for now, the final word on the question of justice will be given to Dobson, who almost seemed to be responding to Baxter, by saying: “Just who is throwing down the gauntlet here? Is political ecology a challenge for citizenship, or is citizenship a challenge for political ecology?” (Dobson 2006: 216). Whilst acknowledging the historical existence of at least two types of citizenship; namely liberal and civic republican (stressing right-claiming and responsibility-taking respectively), Dobson highlights at least two fundamental challenges to any notion of citizenship (i.e. feminism and cosmopolitanism) (2006: 217-8). However, much more space is given to the ways in which the notion of citizenship is a challenge to ecological politics. Again, this is indicative of the fact that ecologism should be regarded as a distinctive political ideology in its own right.
References
Baxter, B. (2005), A Theory of Ecological Justice. London: Routledge.
DeGrazia, D. (1996), Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Devall, B. and Sessions, G. (1985), Living as if Nature Mattered. Layton UT: Peregrine and Smith.
Dobson, A. (2003), ‘Social justice and environmental sustainability: ne’er the twain shall meet?’, in Agyeman, J., Bullard, R., and Evans, B. (eds.), Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. London: Earthscan, pp.83-95.
Dobson, A. (2006), ‘Citizenship’, in Dobson, A. and Eckersley, R., Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.216-231.
Garner, R. (2003) ‘Animals, politics and justice: Rawlsian liberalism and the plight of non-humans’, Environmental Politics, 12 (2), pp.3-22.
Goodin, R. (1992), Green Political Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Naess, A. (1989), Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Rawls, J. (1972), A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sterba, P. (2006), ‘Justice’, in Dobson, A. and Eckersley, R., Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.148-64.
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The final part, Part Three, will be published tomorrow.
A few days ago, I remarked that for the time being posts on Learning from Dogs were frequently going to be based on the material of others. It was the only way that I could keep this blog going yet at the same time edit (code for re-write!) a 60,000-word novel that was completed, as a first pass, last November.
Martin Lack is one major step ahead of yours truly. Not because he, too, writes a blog but because, unlike yours truly, he is a published author! His book is called The Denial of Science; he blogs under the name of Lack of Environment.
Thus I was extremely grateful when a short while ago, Martin offered a major essay of his as a guest post for Learning from Dogs. Better than that, Martin happily accepted my recommendation to send me his essay in three parts.
It may not be the easiest read out in the ‘blogosphere’ but, trust me, Martin’s essay is profoundly important.
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Can ecologism be regarded as an ideology in its own right? (Part 1)
Introduction
Although it might well be assumed that one does not have to define what is meant by ‘socialists’ or – in UK terms at least – ‘conservatives’, it is certainly necessary to define ‘ecologism’: For the purposes of answering the above question, therefore, the latter should be understood as including thinking, behaviour, and the pursuit of policies that are concerned with the environment; but which are not merely or predominantly anthropocentric (i.e. those concerned with human needs and interests).
In a way, the question is nonsensical because use of the term ‘ecologism’, as coined by Andrew Dobson, appears to pre-suppose that ecological politics is indeed a “new political ideology” (2000: 163). If so, to respond to the above question by saying, in effect, ‘just because both socialists and conservatives (can) lay claim to ecological politics does not change the fact that ecologism is a distinctive political ideology in its own right’, would clearly be tautological. Therefore, to provide a defensible answer “Yes” to the above question – as is the intent herein – it is necessary to explain how and why:
both socialists and conservatives can lay claim to ecological politics;
the majority of both socialists and conservatives do not do so; and
the ‘ecologism’ that both find so challenging must therefore be considered as a distinctive political ideology in its own right.
The Socialist claim
One does not have to be an eco-socialist in order to believe or appreciate that there is a great deal of common ground shared by socialist and environmental politics. Socialism is a broad left-of-centre church that, it could be argued, includes everything from social democrats to communists. However, if socialism can be summed-up in the tripartite “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” motto of France (with its origins in the French Revolution of 1789-99), whose English translation would be “Freedom, equality, and brotherhood”, then it is not hard to see why socialists would find common cause with those whose goal is, in effect, to seek equal rights for the environment.
The “four pillars” of ecological politics are – as cited by Neil Carter – those devised by the German Green Party in 1983: ecological responsibility, grassroots democracy, social justice, and non-violence (Carter 2007: 48). Clearly, grassroots democracy and social justice are part of the socialist agenda. Therefore, despite the global dominance of free-market economics, Mary Mellor has asserted that far from being a challenge to socialism, “ecology greatly enhances the case for a redefined and refocused socialism” (Mellor 2006: 35).
The Conservative claim
Although by no means a monolithic entity, environmental politics is usually seen as being a predominantly left-of-centre entity (e.g. Carter 2007: 78); and it is often seen as being easier to define what it opposes than to define what it seeks. If so, ecological politics is essentially a reaction against anthropocentric thinking and the selfish pursuit of individual gain without regard for others or the environment. However, some philosophers such as Roger Scruton have therefore tried to distinguish between such selfish, libertarian, goals and those of traditional conservatives who, as their name suggests, seek the preservation of the status quo for the benefit of both the current generation and those that will follow (Scruton 2006: 7-8). Indeed, as early as 1993, in the wake of the Rio Earth Summit, Scruton was advocating the need for a radical re-think of right-wing politics:
Conservatives need to explore, with greens and others, as yet unthought-of dilemmas of life in societies which are no longer buoyed up by the prospect of incessant economic growth or by modernist pseudo-religions of endless world improvement” (Scruton 1993: 173).
However, in 1993, the idea that there might be limits to growth was hardly new; being based on Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons article (1968); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Limits to Growth report for the Club of Rome (Meadows et al., 1972); E. F. Schumacher’s highly influential book Small is Beautiful (1973). For example:
The illusion of [mankind’s] unlimited powers, nourished by astonishing scientific and technological achievements, has produced the concurrent illusion of having solved the problem of production… based on the failure to distinguish between income and capital where this distinction matters most… A businessman would not consider a firm to have solved its problems of production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital… (Schumacher 1974: 11).
Therefore, although the dilemmas were not “as yet unthought-of”, Scruton had, nevertheless, identified the source of the challenge that does indeed, it is here argued, begin to transform ecological politics into the distinctive political ideology that is ecologism.
Limits to Growth – a political and economic challenge
Although much disputed (by those that point to the fact that commodity prices have generally fallen over time, or that dire predictions have not yet come true), the Limits to Growth argument is based on the reality of the physical constraints of the planet on which we live.
For example: “Infinite growth is impossible in a closed system. With continued growth in production, the economic subsystem must eventually overwhelm the capacity of the global ecosystem to sustain it” (Daly & Farley 2004: 64). However, this is merely a comparatively recent re-statement of (former World Bank economist) Herman E Daly’s longstanding belief in the need for steady-state growth.
Furthermore, Daly and Farley cite Rudolf Clausius has having “coined the term ‘entropy’ for the Second Law [of Thermodynamics], derived from the Greek word for transformation, in recognition of the fact that entropy was a one-way street of irreversible change; a continual increase in the disorder of the universe” (Daly & Farley 2004: 65).
This is a fundamental tenet of modern physics; one that Daly has been repeating (like a “voice in the wilderness” proclaiming a message that nobody wants to hear) for a long time: It was over 35 years ago that he began an article entitled ‘The Economics of the Steady State’ with a quote from the famous scientist Sir Arthur Eddington, who once said, “But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation” (as cited in Daly 1974: 15).
With this in mind, perhaps, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) issued the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” on 18 November 1992, from which the following excerpt is taken:
The earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth’s limits. Current economic practices which damage the environment, in both developed and underdeveloped nations, cannot be continued without the risk that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair (UCS 1992).
Today, we are now well beyond these limits. According to the Global Footprint Network (GFN), humanity is now using the resources of at least 1.5 Earth’s (GFN, 2010). The most recent update to the Limits to Growth report was produced in 2005 and, in a section entitled “why technology and markets alone can’t avoid overshoot”, the authors suggested that:
…the more successfully society puts off its limits through economic and technical adaptations, the more likely it is in the future to run into several of them at the same time… the [model] does not run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capacity, it runs out of the “ability to cope” [i.e. too much industrial output has to be diverted to solving problems]… Given enough time, we believe humanity possesses nearly limitless problem solving abilities. [However] exponential growth… shortens the time for effective action. It loads stress on a system faster and faster, until coping mechanisms that have been adequate with slower rates of change finally begin to fail (Meadows et al 2005: 223).
Arguably, it could be said that the evidence for this is already becoming clear in the form of widespread social unrest around the globe, as a result of the increasing cost of – or difficulty in gaining access to – food, water, and energy.
For Robyn Eckersley, the reality of limits to growth and the magnitude of the ecological challenge is something from which we need to be emancipated; and it is also the raison d’être for environmentalism:
The environmental crisis and popular environmental concern have prompted a transformation of Western politics… Whatever the outcome of this realignment… the intractable nature of the environmental problems will ensure that environmental politics… is here to stay (Eckersley 1992: 7).
The latest UN projections for global population (published on 3 May 2011) suggests that stabilisation at about 10 billion by 2100AD is still most likely; but use probabilistic methods to account for the uncertainty in future fertility trends. Therefore, depending on changes in fertility rates in differing countries, the press release also indicates that global population could also peak at 8 billion in 2050 and then fall to 6 billion in 2100, or reach 10 billion by 2050 and continue to rise to 15 billion by 2100 (UN 2011: 1).
The key question the UN press release does not address is, “How many humans is too many?” Furthermore, although it depends on average rates of resource consumption, it is quite probable that there are already too many. However, this raises philosophical and/or ethical issues that form the other main aspect of ecological politics, which ensures that ecologism is a distinct political ideology in its own right.
From Environmentalism to Ecologism – the philosophical and ethical challenge
What’s in a name?
In the introduction above, ‘ecological politics’ was, in effect, defined as being environmentally-friendly and ecocentric (i.e. ecologism). For the avoidance of any doubt, therefore, it should be noted that this implies that it is possible to be concerned for the environment but be anthropocentric (i.e. environmentalism). It is precisely because the two things are not the same that Dobson has asserted that “…environmentalism and liberalism are compatible, but ecologism and liberalism are not” (2000: 165). The reason for this is examined below. (Ed. As in tomorrow!)
References
Carter, N. (2007), The Politics of the Environment (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daly, H. & Farley, J. (2004), Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications. Washington DC: Island Press.
Daly, H. (1974), ‘The Economics of the Steady State’, The American Economic Review, 64(2), pp.15-21.
Dobson, A. (2000), Green Political Thought, (3rd edition). London, Routledge.
Eckersley, R. (1992), Environmentalism and Political Theory. London: UCL Press.
Hardin, G. (1968), ‘The tragedy of the commons’, Science, 168, pp.1243-8.
Meadows D, et al (1972), The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books.
Meadows D, et al (2005), Limits to Growth: the 30-Year Update, London: Earthscan.
Mellor, M. (2006), ‘Socialism’, in Dobson, A. and Eckersley, R., Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.35-50.
Schumacher, E.F. (1974), Small is Beautiful: A study of Economics as if Small People Mattered, London: Abacus.
Scruton, R. (1993), Beyond the New Right. London: Routledge.
Scruton, R. (2006), ‘Conservatism’, in Dobson, A. and Eckersley, R., Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.7-19.
UN (2011), World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision – Press Release. [Online] UN. Available at <http://esa.un.org/wpp/index.htm> [accessed 11/05/2011].
Cars travel through flood water in Helston, south-west Cornwall – Daily Mail August, 2013
You can tell, undoubtedly, from the title and sub-title to today’s post that I am feeling somewhat forlorn about the way that we humans work things out! As the old saying goes, “Question:Why has Planet Earth never been visited by an alien species?Answer:Because they have seen no signs of intelligent life!“
This feeling is a result of reading a recent essay from George Monbiot, Drowning in Money. It is republished here within his terms of sharing.
Now before you read it, if you are not living in the UK it would be easy to reject the messages as being only relevant to the United Kingdom. But when you do read it, you will agree that this level of government policy stupidity is not the sole reserve of the UK. The ‘virus’ is alive and well elsewhere!
ooOOoo
George Monbiot
Drowning in Money
January 13, 2014
The hidden and remarkable story of why devastating floods keep happening. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 14th January 2014.
We all know what’s gone wrong, or we think we do: not enough spending on flood defences. It’s true that the government’s cuts have exposed thousands of homes to greater risk, and that the cuts will become more dangerous as climate change kicks in (1). But too little public spending is a small part of problem. It is dwarfed by another factor, which has been overlooked in discussions in the media and statements by the government: too much public spending.
Vast amounts of public money – running into the billions – are spent every year on policies that make devastating floods inevitable. This is the story that has not been told by the papers or the broadcasters, a story of such destructive perversity that the Guardian has given me twice the usual space today in which to explain it.
Flood defence, or so we are told almost everywhere, is about how much concrete you can pour. It’s about not building houses in stupid places on the floodplain, and about using clever new engineering techniques to defend those already there (2). None of that is untrue, but it’s a small part of the story. To listen to the dismal debates of the past fortnight you could be forgiven for believing that rivers arise in the plains; that there is no such thing as upstream; that mountains, hills, catchments and watersheds are irrelevant to the question of whether or not homes and infrastructure get drowned.
The story begins with a group of visionary farmers at Pontbren, in the headwaters of Britain’s longest river, the Severn. In the 1990s they realised that the usual hill farming strategy – loading the land with more and bigger sheep, grubbing up the trees and hedges, digging more drains – wasn’t working. It made no economic sense, the animals had nowhere to shelter, the farmers were breaking their backs to wreck their own land.
So they devised something beautiful. They began planting shelter belts of trees along the contours. They stopped draining the wettest ground and built ponds to catch the water instead. They cut and chipped some of the wood they grew to make bedding for their animals, which meant that they no longer spent a fortune buying straw. Then they used the composted bedding, in a perfect closed loop, to cultivate more trees (3).
One day a government consultant was walking over their fields during a rainstorm. He noticed something that fascinated him: the water flashing off the land suddenly disappeared when it reached the belts of trees the farmers had planted. This prompted a major research programme, which produced the following astonishing results: water sinks into the soil under the trees at 67 times the rate at which it sinks into the soil under the grass (4). The roots of the trees provide channels down which the water flows, deep into the ground. The soil there becomes a sponge, a reservoir which sucks up water then releases it slowly. In the pastures, by contrast, the small sharp hooves of the sheep puddle the ground, making it almost impermeable: a hard pan off which the rain gushes.
One of the research papers estimates that, even though only 5% of the Pontbren land has been reforested, if all the farmers in the catchment did the same thing, flooding peaks downstream would be reduced by some 29% (5). Full reforestation would reduce the peaks by around 50% (6). For the residents of Shrewsbury, Gloucester and the other towns ravaged by endless Severn floods, that means, more or less, problem solved.
Did I say the results were astonishing? Well, not to anyone who has studied hydrology elsewhere. For decades the British government has been funding scientists working in the tropics, and using their findings to advise other countries to protect the forests or to replant trees in the hills, to prevent communities downstream from being swept away. But we forgot to bring the lesson home.
So will the rest of the Severn catchment, and those of the other unruly waterways of Britain, follow the Pontbren model? The authorities say they would love to do it (7). In theory. Natural Resources Wales told me that these techniques “are hard wired in to the actions we want land managers to undertake.” (8) What it forgot to say is that all tree planting grants in Wales have now been stopped. The offices responsible for administering them are in the process of closing down (9). If other farmers want to copy the Pontbren model, not only must they pay for the trees themselves; but they must sacrifice the money they would otherwise have been paid for farming that land.
For – and here we start to approach the nub of the problem – there is an unbreakable rule laid down by the Common Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment – by the far biggest component of farm subsidies – that land has to be free from what it calls “unwanted vegetation” (10). Land covered by trees is not eligible. The subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills.
Just as the tree planting grants have stopped, the land clearing grants have risen. In his speech to the Oxford Farming Conference, made during the height of the floods, the environment secretary Owen Paterson boasted that hill farmers “on the least-productive land” will now receive “the same direct payment rate on their upland farmland as their lowland counterparts.” (11) In other words, even in places where farming makes no sense because the land is so poor, farmers will now be paid more money to keep animals there. But to receive this money, they must first remove the trees and scrub that absorb the water falling on the hills.
And that’s just the start of it. One result of the latest round of subsidy negotiations – concluded in June last year – is that governments can now raise the special mountain payments, whose purpose is to encourage farming at the top of the watersheds, from €250 per hectare to €450 (12). This money should be renamed the flooding subsidy: it pays for the wreckage of homes, the evacuation of entire settlements, the drowning of people who don’t get away in time, all over Europe. Pig-headed idiocy doesn’t begin to describe it.
The problem is not confined to livestock in the mountains. In the foothills and lowlands, the misuse of heavy machinery, overstocking with animals and other forms of bad management can – by compacting the soil – increase the rates of instant run-off from 2% of all the rain that falls on the land to 60%(13).
Sometimes, ploughing a hillside in the wrong way at the wrong time of the year can cause a flood – of both mud and water – even without exceptional rainfall. This practice has blighted homes around the South Downs (that arguably should never have been ploughed at all). One house was flooded 31 times in the winter of 2000-2001 by muddy floods caused by ploughing (14). Another, in Suffolk, above which the fields had been churned up by pigs, was hit 50 times (15). But a paper on floods of this kind found that “there are no (or only very few) control measures taken yet in the UK.” (16)
Under the worst environment secretary this country has ever suffered, there seems little chance that much of this will change. In November, in response to calls to reforest the hills, Owen Paterson told parliament “I am absolutely clear that we have a real role to play in helping hill farmers to keep the hills looking as they do.” (17) (Bare, in other words). When asked by a parliamentary committee to discuss how the resilience of river catchments could be improved, the only thing he could think of was building more reservoirs (18).
But while he is cavalier and ignorant when it comes to managing land to reduce the likelihood of flooding, he goes out of his way to sow chaos when it comes to managing rivers.
Many years ago, river managers believed that the best way to prevent floods was to straighten, canalise and dredge rivers along much of their length, to enhance their capacity for carrying water. They soon discovered that this was not just wrong but counterproductive. A river can, at any moment, carry very little of the water that falls on its catchment: the great majority must be stored in the soils and on the floodplains.
By building ever higher banks around the rivers, by reducing their length through taking out the bends and by scooping out the snags and obstructions along the way, engineers unintentionally did two things. They increased the rate of flow, meaning that flood waters poured down the rivers and into the nearest towns much faster. And, by separating the rivers from the rural land through which they passed, they greatly decreased the area of functional floodplains (19, 20, 21).
The result, as authorities all over the world now recognise, was catastrophic. In many countries, chastened engineers are now putting snags back into the rivers, reconnecting them to uninhabited land that they can safely flood and allowing them to braid and twist and form oxbow lakes. These features catch the sediment and the tree trunks and rocks which otherwise pile up on urban bridges, and take much of the energy and speed out of the river. Rivers, as I was told by the people who had just rewilded one in the Lake District – greatly reducing the likelihood that it would cause floods downstream – “need something to chew on” (22, 23).
There are one or two other such projects in the UK: Paterson’s department is funding four rewilding schemes, to which it has allocated a grand total of, er, £1 million (24). Otherwise, the secretary of state is doing everything he can to prevent these lessons from being applied. Last year he was reported to have told a conference that “the purpose of waterways is to get rid of water” (25). In another speech he lambasted the previous government for a “blind adherence to Rousseauism” in refusing to dredge (26). Not only will there be more public dredging, he insists: but there will also be private dredging: landowners can now do it themselves (27).
After he announced this policy, the Environment Agency, which is his department’s statutory adviser, warned that dredging could “speed up flow and potentially increase the risk of flooding downstream.” (28) Elsewhere, his officials have pointed out that “protecting large areas of agricultural land in the floodplain tends to increase flood risk for downstream communities.” (29) The Pitt Review, commissioned by the previous government after the horrible 2007 floods, concluded that “dredging can make the river banks prone to erosion, and hence stimulate a further build-up of silt, exacerbating rather than improving problems with water capacity.” (30) Paterson has been told repeatedly that it makes more sense to pay farmers to store water in their fields, rather than shoving it off their land and into the towns.
But he has ignored all this advice and started seven pilot projects in which farmers will be permitted to drag all that messy wildlife habitat out of their rivers, to hurry the water down to the nearest urban pinch point (31). Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that Paterson has demanded massive cuts at the Environment Agency, including many of the staff responsible for preventing floods (32).
Since 2007, there has been a review, a parliamentary enquiry, two bills, new flood management programmes (33), but next to nothing has changed. Floods, because of the way we manage our land and rivers, remain inevitable. We pay a fortune in farm subsidies and river-mangling projects to have our towns flooded and homes and lives wrecked. We pay again in the form of the flood defences necessitated by these crazy policies, and through the extra insurance payments – perhaps we should call them the Paterson tax – levied on all homes. But we also pay through the loss of everything else that watersheds give us: beauty, tranquility, wildlife and, oh yes, the small matter of water in the taps.
In the Compleat Angler, published in 1653, Izaac Walton wrote this. “I think the best Trout-anglers be in Derbyshire; for the waters there are clear to an extremity.” (34) No longer. Last summer I spent a weekend walking along the River Dove and its tributaries, where Walton used to fish. All along the river, including the stretch on which the fishing hut built for him by Charles Cotton still stands, the water was a murky blueish brown. The beds of clean gravel he celebrated were smothered in silt: on some bends the accretions of mud were several feet deep.
You had only to raise your eyes to see the problem: the badly-ploughed hills of the mid-catchment and above them the drained and burnt moors of the Peak District National Park, comprehensively trashed by grouse shooting estates. A recent report by Animal Aid found that grouse estates in England, though they serve only the super-rich, receive some £37m of public money every year in the form of subsidies (35). Much of this money is used to cut and burn them, which is likely to be a major cause of flooding (36). Though there had been plenty of rain throughout the winter and early spring, the river was already low and sluggish.
A combination of several disastrous forms of upland management has been helping Walton’s beloved river to flood, with the result that both government and local people have had to invest heavily in the Lower Dove flood defence scheme (37). But this wreckage has also caused it to dry up when the rain doesn’t fall.
That’s the flipside of a philosophy which believes that land exists only to support landowners, and waterways exist only “to get rid of water”. Instead of a steady flow sustained around the year by trees in the hills, by sensitive farming methods, by rivers which are allowed to find their own course and their own level, to filter and hold back their waters through bends and braiding and obstructions, we get a cycle of flood and drought. We get filthy water and empty aquifers and huge insurance premiums and ruined carpets. And all of it at public expense.
4. M. R. Marshall et al, 2013. The impact of rural land management changes on soil hydraulic properties and runoff processes: results from experimental plots in upland UK. Hydrological Processes, DOI: 10.1002/hyp.9826. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hyp.9826/abstract
9. I talked to one of the employees over the weekend: everyone is being made redundant as all funding has ceased.
10. Official Journal of the European Union, 31st January 2009. Council Regulation (EC) No 73/2009 of 19 January 2009, establishing common rules for direct support schemes for farmers under the common agricultural policy and establishing certain support schemes for farmers, amending Regulations (EC) No 1290/2005, (EC) No 247/2006, (EC) No 378/2007 and repealing Regulation (EC) No 1782/2003. Annex III. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:030:0016:0016:EN:PDF
15. R. Evans, 2010. Runoff and soil erosion in arable Britain: changes in perception and policy since 1945. Environmental Science and Policy 13, pp 1 4 1 – 1 4 9. doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2010.01.001
23. I hope before long to write up the extraordinary story I was told by a representative of United Utilities about the sharply differing responses of the rewilded River Liza in Ennerdale and the still-canalised St John’s Beck in Thirlmere to the famous 2009 downpour.
Just to underline that message of it not being only the UK with crazy policies, the photograph below is of a forest ridge within sight of the house here in Oregon.
A local ridge demonstrating ‘clear-cutting’ mania poking above the valley mist.
I have a policy of not allowing Learning from Dogs to promote commercial interests. I need those who visit this place to trust the integrity of what they find here.
Then back on the 19th December last, in came the following email.
Dear LearningfromDogs (I think Paul!),
Greetings from Florence, Tuscany!
We are sending you a piece that we hope will be considered for publication on your blog: we begin by talking about making pet food at home (and then go on to list some of the risks – essentially the message here is don’t do it!), we then talk about buying products off the shelf, and explain about food labeling and what different types of labeling will mean in terms of the meat content. I’ve also included some pictures that we purchased from DepositPhotos to help support with its publication. You can verify the usage terms on Deposit photos, but I can tell you that for your website they will be considered appropriate use.
Our shop first opened it doors in 1962 and we’ve just started an English website where we (wait for it!) are making dog beds, and collars to order. We’ve got the most amazing fabrics from a town in Tuscany that has been producing fabrics from the 13th Century. The quality is (as I hope you will take a look) of the highest standard.
Please take a read through the article and if you would like to publish it we would be thrilled.
Best regards from Tuscany,
Glyn
The email offered me a potential conflict. Glyn was clearly promoting his company and yet the information struck me as valuable to pet owners. On balance, it seemed worthwhile to publish the article.
ooOOoo
We only want what’s best for our dogs.
There have been substantial changes in the market of pet foods over the last decade, and so this article sets out to demystify pet food labelling in layman’s terms. We also consider whether or not preparing the food your pet eats in your own home is really a viable option, if you want to have a healthy pet.
Preparing food at home
If you have decided to undertake the mission of preparing your pet’s food at home, it’s important that you take some time to look up what exactly is needed in your pet’s diet. You have to ensure that your pet gets all the nutrients it needs, and that you don’t provide it with too much of one food group or another as this could cause it serious health problems (Hypervitaminosis A, Hypervitaminosis D).
A short thought for the cat!
Cats require a varied diet, consisting mainly of meat. One of the most important amino acids for cats is Taurine which is only found in meat – a lack of this in a cat’s diet could cause cardiac dysfunction, blindness, etc. Other essential nutrients for our feline friend include: arginine (also important for dogs too), arachidonic acid, niacin, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E. You should not forget to provide the right amount of calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium. Reading this you probably get the sense that taking on the task of being your pet’s personal cook is not as simple as it sounds. Our pets have very specific dietary needs, just like us, and you wouldn’t want to risk endangering them with the wrong food. The plate of scraps after a large meal is clearly not enough.
Purchasing food off the shelf
As the vast majority of consumers opt for buying their food from either the supermarket or their local pet store, it’s important to highlight that the range of dietary foods being produced today means that, if you don’t read the label carefully, you can really do harm to your pet feeding them food that is not matched to their actual dietary needs. We’ve seen dogs that look emaciated and thin simply because they have not been given the correct advice when feeding their dog (we then saw the same dog a few weeks later looking great!).
For example, ‘ash’ is often included in the ingredient list of pet foods. This refers to the inorganic component of the food, and it shouldn’t make up more than 6.5%-7% of dry foods and 1%-2% of wet foods. The lower the concentration of ash, the higher the quality of the food.
Labelling in pet food and what it means
Specifically regarding meat in packaged pet foods, there are a few things to keep an eye open for while studying the labels. The amount of meat included in pet food changes from brand to brand, but as a general rule the following serves as a guide:
– products that have the word ‘flavour’ or ‘aroma’ in their name contain under 4% of meat;
– when the product name declares ‘with meat’ it should contain over 4% of meat;
– when the name contains ‘rich in meat’ or ‘extra meat’ the percentage of meat is between 14% and 25%. Anything above 14% and 25% and the product takes on the name of the meat it’s made up of.
In dry foods, sometimes meat flour or fish flour are included. These sometimes contain offal and discarded meat so a better option is dehydrated meat.
Author Bi line
We hope that this article has provided you the reader with greater detail on some of the nuances involved in planning your pet’s diets. At ZEIPET in Florence, Tuscany, we have been serving customers in our little pet shop since 1962. We are most known for our luxury dog beds which are made to order and from some of the finest fabrics in Italy. So, after you pet has eaten and it’s time to stretch out, they are guaranteed to do so on a bed of doggie paradise.
Now what!
ooOOoo
Hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions, leave them as comments and I’ll ask Glyn to reply.
On Monday and Tuesday of the week I posted Legitimate Anger and Legitimate Hope. (And please see the footnote to today’s post)
Patrice Ayme left the following comment to the Legitimate Hope post:
It’s hard to live with elephants, especially in poor, crowded conditions. I remember bathing in Africa as a child with a bull elephant 200 meters away, on the other side of a stream, and being extremely worried, with all in attendance.
Europe used to have elephants, and North America, two species. Time to reintroduce them, and live according to our discourse.
Rewilding Euramerica can be done, and should be done, for the deepest philosophical and emotional reasons, and will create new, very productive jobs.
PA
Then on Friday came an email from reader and blogger Martin Lack:
It was but a moment to go across to The Conversation website (rather liked what I saw, by the way) and find the article that Martin linked to. It is republished here within the terms of The Conversation site.
ooOOoo
Restore large carnivores to save struggling ecosystems
By William Ripple, Oregon State University
We are losing our large carnivores. In ecosystems around the world, the decline of large predators such as lions, bears, dingoes, wolves, and otters is changing landscapes, from the tropics to the Arctic. Habitat loss, persecution by humans and loss of prey have combined to inflict great losses on these populations.
In fact more than 75% of the 31 largest carnivore species are declining, and 17 species now occupy less than half their former ranges. Southeast Asia, southern and East Africa, and the Amazon are among areas in which multiple large carnivore species are declining. And with only a few exceptions, large carnivores have already been exterminated from much of the developed world, including areas of Western Europe, and the eastern United States.
Top dogs keep ecosystems in order
Many of these large carnivore species are endangered and some are at risk of extinction, either in specific regions or entirely. Ironically, they are vanishing just as we are learning about their important ecological effects, which is what led us to write a new paper in the journal Science to document their role.
From a review of published reports, we singled out seven species that have been studied for their important ecological role and widespread effects, known as trophic cascades. These are the African lion, leopard, Eurasian lynx, cougar, gray wolf, sea otter and dingo.
Based on field research, my Oregon State University co-author Robert Beschta and I documented the impact of cougars and wolves on the regeneration of forest tree stands and riverside vegetation in Yellowstone and other national parks in western North America. Fewer predators, we found, lead to an increase in browsing animals such as deer and elk. More browsing disrupts vegetation, reduces birds and some mammals and changes other parts of the ecosystem. From the actions of the top predator, widespread impacts cascade down the food chain.
Similar effects were found in studies of Eurasian lynx, dingoes, lions and sea otters. For example in Europe, absence of lynx has been closely tied to the abundance of roe deer, red fox and hare. In Australia, the construction of a 3,400-mile dingo-proof fence has enabled scientists to study ecosystems with and without dingoes which are closely related to gray wolves. They found that dingoes control populations of herbivores and exotic red foxes. The suppression of these species by dingoes reduces predation pressure, benefiting plants and smaller native prey.
In some parts of Africa, the decrease of lions and leopards has coincided with a dramatic increase in olive baboons, which threaten crops and livestock. In the waters off southeast Alaska, a decline in sea otters through killer whale predation has led to a rise in sea urchins and loss of kelp beds.
Predators are integral, not expendable
We are now obtaining a deeper appreciation of the impact of large carnivores on ecosystems, a view that can be traced back to the work of landmark ecologist Aldo Leopold. The perception that predators are harmful and deplete fish and wildlife is outdated. Many scientists and wildlife managers now recognise the growing evidence of carnivores’ complex role in ecosystems, and their social and economic benefits. Leopold recognised these relationships, but his observations were ignored for decades after his death in 1948.
Top carnivores, at work keeping things in check. Doug Smith
Human tolerance of these species is the major issue. Most would agree these animals have an intrinsic right to exist, but additionally they provide economic and ecological services that people value. Among the services documented in other studies are carbon sequestration, restoration of riverside ecosystems, biodiversity and disease control. For example, wolves may limit large herbivore populations, thus decreasing browsing on young trees that sequester carbon when they escape browsing and grow taller. Where large carnivore populations have been restored – such as wolves in Yellowstone or Eurasian lynx in Finland – ecosystems appear to be bouncing back.
I am impressed with how resilient the Yellowstone ecosystem is, and while ecosystem restoration isn’t happening quickly everywhere in this park, it has started. In some cases where vegetation loss has led to soil erosion, for example, full restoration may not be possible in the near term. What is certain is that ecosystems and the elements of them are highly interconnected. The work at Yellowstone and other places shows how species affect each another through different pathways. It’s humbling as a scientist to witness this interconnectedness of nature.
My co-authors and I have called for an international initiative to conserve large carnivores in co-existence with people. This effort could be modelled after a couple of other successful efforts including the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe, a non-profit scientific group affiliated with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the Global Tiger Initiative which involves all 13 of the tiger-range countries. With more tolerance by humans, we might be able to avoid extinctions. The world would be a scary place without these predators.
William Ripple does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
In 2011, more African elephants were killed than any other year in history. The figures for 2012 and 2013 are not yet known, but are likely to be even higher. At current rates, in twelve years, there will be none left.
It is a familiar cause, but it has never been more urgent. Poaching has turned industrial. Armed militia fly in helicopters over jungle clearings, machine gunning down entire herds. Their tusks are then sold to fund war and terrorism throughout the continent and the wider world. Ivory is still illegal, but as China booms, it is more popular than ever.
This campaign will raise money to support rangers on the ground to protect Kenya’s elephants from armed poachers, together with Space for Giants’ longer term work to create new wildlife sanctuaries where elephants will be safe, forever. More can be found about the charity at Space for Giants
The article above includes two videos. A shorter one that can be viewed on the paper’s campaign website. Then there is a longer, five-minute, video also on YouTube and included below.
Jean and I wanted to make a donation but found that without a UK bank account/UK Visa card it wasn’t possible. We contacted Space for Giants and received the following email from Amy.
Hi Paul
Sorry for the difficulties and thank you for your perseverance!
You can donate in USD through our CrowdRise page at www.crowdrise.com/spaceforgiants1. These funds are sent to TUSK USA who will then allocate them to us.
Alternatively, you can make out a cheque to ‘TUSK USA’ and send to TUSK USA, 40 East 94th Street, Apt 3A, New York, NY 10128 – please attach a covering note confirming that you would like your donation to be used to support the work of Space for Giants.
Many thanks,
Amy.
So if there’s anyone else out there not in the UK who would like to donate, here’s another option.
Please, for all our sakes, help these beautiful creatures.
Learning from Dogs 