Category: Core thought

The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding

A book review

Unlike my recent review of Capt. Luis Montalvan’s book Until Tuesday which came about as a result of an invitation from the UK publishers, Headline Publishing, this review of Mr. Gilding’s book is totally off my own bat.  I should also declare that I have recently been in email contact with Paul Gilding with some pleasant outcomes.  To the review.

The way ahead.

Regular readers of Learning from Dogs will know that I have been making recent references to this book, which I have now finished reading.  On the 25th I quoted from the book in a post that I called The blame game.  I used a quote from Chapter 5, Addicted to Growth, namely “Growth goes to the core of the society we have built because it is the result of who we are and what we have decided to value.”

Then the next day again when writing about Tim Bennett’s movie, What a Way To Go, when I reflected on Paul Gilding’s opinion that, ” the quicker that mankind recognises the massive levels of denial presently in place, the quicker that mankind will commit to the scale of change that is required“.

Now if mankind’s efforts to change to a sustainable way of life were proportional to the number of books, films and essays written about the subject then, frankly, the task would be complete.  There’s an awful lot out there!  Here’s a list of the books that I have read in the last few years:

The Human Side of Enterprise – Douglas McGregor

Motivation and Personality – Abraham Maslow

The Power of Pause – Terry Hershey

Earth in the Balance – Al Gore

The Spectrum of Consciousness – Ken Wilber

Politics Lost – Joe Klein

Why America Doesn’t Work – Chuck Colson & Jack Eckerd

The Art of Happiness – HH Dalai Lama & Howard C Cutler

Eaarth – Bill McKibben

Stabilizing an Unstable Economy – Hyman P. Minsky

The Next 100 Years – George Friedman

World of the Edge – Lester Brown

and finally

The Great Disruption – Paul Gilding

And, of course, this doesn’t even scratch the number of online journals, essays and articles that have been read in conjunction with writing hundreds of posts on this Blog.

So what’s the point?

On p.260, Chapter 20 Guess Who’s in Charge?, Paul Gilding writes,

We need to fully acknowledge the challenging times and inevitable suffering ahead but stay focused and determined to move forward and past this.  Easy to say, harder to do.

So yes, it is challenging to know how to respond to all this and what to do personally.  It is easy to see what the world should do, but what should you do?

but what should you do? Talk about a thump on the back of the head!

This is about me!

Of all the books that have influenced how I see the world and my opinions, the one book that has rammed home to me that this is about me, about my attitudes and behaviours, is The Great Disruption.  For a long time I haven’t needed convincing that man is screwing up the planet.  For ages, I’ve been sure that our greed and materialism were fundamentally incompatible with the planet. I have been so good at ‘talking the talk’ ….. but ….

But the way that Mr. Gilding has so comprehensively approached every aspect of how my past behaviours have been incompatible with the future needs of my little grandson, Morten, (and all the grandchildren in the world) is powerfully inspiring.  I now totally and utterly believe that only I am in charge of making a difference.

Why The Great Disruption touched me in this way when so many other books and articles haven’t done so isn’t clear.  Perhaps it was in the opening paragraphs?

The earth is full.

[skip one paragraph]

This means things are going to change.  Not because we will choose change out of philosophical or political preference, but because if we don’t transform our society and economy, we risk social and economic collapse and the descent into chaos.  The science on this is now clear and accepted by any rational observer.  While an initial look at the public debate may suggest controversy, any serious examination of the peer-reviewed conclusions of leading science bodies shows the core direction we are heading in is now clear.  Things do not look good.

These challenges and the facts  behind them are well-known by experts and leaders around the world, and have been for decades.  But despite this understanding, that we would at some point pass the limits to growth, it has been continually filed away to the back of our mind and the back of our drawers, with the label “Interesting – For Consideration Later” prominently attached.  Well, later has arrived.

I nodded silently in agreement when reading that.

Was it the opening paragraph to Chapter 4, Beyond the Limits – The Great Disruption?

The plans we have been making for our economies, our companies, and our lives have all been based on a key assumption that is clearly wrong.  This assumption is that our current economic model will carry on unless we choose to change it – in other words, no action means more of the same.

This resonated strongly with me because I happen to believe, without any specialist economic skills to my name – just a gut sense, that the economic situation now afflicting so many economies across the world is not cyclical but the start of a breakdown of the policies and behaviours of the last 20 years or more.  In other words, the Great Disruption was in my face already!  As is written on p. 87 in Chapter 6, Global Foreshock – The Year That Growth Stopped,

My view, firmly held at the time and since, is that 2008 was the year that growth stopped.  It was the year, as Thomas Friedman said, “when Mother Nature and Father Greed hit the wall at once”.

The Power of a New Future

But, in the end, the real power that I found in this book was the strength of Gilding’s argument that we will change, that seeing the future as hopeless is wrong, that man has the ability to commit to huge change when there is no alternative.  Ergo, p121 Chapter 9 When the Dam of Denial Breaks,

To argue we are naturally greedy and competitive and can’t change is like arguing that we engage naturally in murder and infanticide as our forebears the chimps do and therefore as we did.  We have certain tendencies in our genes, but unlike other creatures we have the proven capacity to make conscious decisions to overcome them and also the proven ability to build a society with laws and values to enshrine and, critically, to enforce such changes when these tendencies come to the surface.

So don’t underestimate how profoundly we can change.  We are still capable of evolution, including conscious evolution.  This coming crisis is perhaps the greatest opportunity in millennia for a step change in human society.

This quote is towards the end of the last chapter that spells out, as so many other books have done, that our global society Has a Very Big Problem.  Thus from page 123 onwards, slightly less than half-way through the book, Paul Gilding devotes huge detail to describing how we will change.  Frequently, the comparison used is World War II,

British poster from 1940

When Great Britain went to war in World War II, do you think they had clarity on all the details of transitioning into a war economy before they made the decision to act?  Of course they considered it, as we must, but it wasn’t a determining issue because there was no choice.  Do you think President Roosevelt calculated the United States could win the war by increasing military spending to 37 percent of U.S. GDP and producing a nuclear bomb before he decided to enter the war?  Of course not: he just knew they had to succeed and so they would.  He had confidence in human ingenuity delivering under pressure, when it’s given defined parameters and political support, and so must we.

From p. 164, Chapter 12 Creative Destruction on Steroids.

That’s what ended up being the real inspiration for me.  That it’s not about the complex problems looming large; as so many that Jean and I chat to here in Payson, AZ, readily admit to being worried.  It’s not news! The majority of the world’s citizens know the trends are not good.

No, what really socked me between the eyes was reading all the many and varied ways that we are changing (note present tense), that the Great Disruption is, in fact, mankind moving to a new era.  One where we will have less inequality, less poverty, be happier, have extended life-spans and a future that goes on for thousand of years.

The Future is Here.

The phrase ‘life-changing’ is often used but this book is truly life-changing.  The book will motivate you in ways that you can’t imagine.  It will inspire you but, above all, it will show you the way ahead.  Read it.

Well done, Mr. Gilding.  Well done, indeed!

Mr. Paul Gilding

The mystery of telepathy

Just a bit more science about that sixth sense.

Yesterday, I wrote about how science was coming up with some pretty strong evidence that humans do have the ability to communicate in a way that might be called ‘telepathic’.

If (and that’s a big ‘if’) I have any understanding of the science, I believe it has much to do with quantum physics.  So I thought it fun to take a small diversion in today’s Post and give you some material on this very strange world of the very, very small.

From A Lazyman’s Guide to Quantum Physics,

What is Quantum Physics?

That’s an easy one: it’s the science of things so small that the quantum nature of reality has an effect. Quantum means ‘discrete amount’ or ‘portion’. Max Planck discovered in 1900 that you couldn’t get smaller than a certain minimum amount of anything. This minimum amount is now called the Planck unit.

Why is it weird?

Niels Bohr, the father of the orthodox ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum physics once said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it“.

To understand the weirdness completely, you just need to know about three experiments: Light Bulb, Two Slits, Schroedinger’s Cat.

Two Slits

The simplest experiment to demonstrate quantum weirdness involves shining a light through two parallel slits and looking at the screen. It can be shown that a single photon (particle of light) can interfere with itself, as if it travelled through both slits at once.

Light Bulb

Imagine a light bulb filament gives out a photon, seemingly in a random direction. Erwin Schroedinger came up with a nine-letter-long equation that correctly predicts the chances of finding that photon at any given point. He envisaged a kind of wave, like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading out from the filament. Once you look at the photon, this ‘wavefunction’ collapses into the single point at which the photon really is.

Schroedinger’s Cat

In this experiment, we take your pet cat and put it in a box with a bottle of cyanide. We rig it up so that a detector looks at an isolated electron and determines whether it is ‘spin up’ or ‘spin down’ (it can have either characteristic, seemingly at random). If it is ‘spin up’, then the bottle is opened and the cat gets it. Ten minutes later we open the box and see if the cat is alive or dead. The question is: what state is the cat in between the detector being activated and you opening the box. Nobody has actually done this experiment (to my knowledge) but it does show up a paradox that arises in certain interpretations.

To conclude I will offer this quotation reputed to be from the great master himself, Albert Einstein,

The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.

Sixth sense? Of course, say dogs!

 

Science is catching up with dogs!

Those of you who have come across Rupert Sheldrake and, in particular his book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home will really not be surprised at what is coming, in terms of the rest of this Post.  Because most dog owners know, from countless observations, that dogs have an uncanny ability to see the world around them in a more deeper and intuitive manner than we can explain.

I wrote of Sheldrake’s book on the 1st June including touching on a report of Mason, a small terrier mix …

On April 27th, Mason was hiding in his garage in North Smithfield when the storm picked him up and blew him away. His owners couldn’t find him and had about given up when they came back Monday to sift through the debris, and found Mason waiting for them on the porch.

A few evenings ago, we watched a documentary from the website Top Documentary Films from the series Through The Wormhole.  This particular documentary was entitled Is There a Sixth Sense? Here’s how that film was introduced,

Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the tools most of us depend on to perceive the world. But some people say they also can perceive things that are outside the range of the conventional senses, through some other channel for which there is no anatomical or neurological explanation. Scientific researchers who study such abilities call them extrasensory perception (ESP), but lay people often refer to them as the sixth sense.

Either term really is a catch-all for a variety of different purported abilities that vary from person to person. Some people claim the power of telepathy – that is, the ability to perceive others’ thoughts, without having them communicated verbally or in writing. Others claim to have the power of clairvoyance, which is the ability to perceive events and objects that are hidden from view because of barriers or distance. Still others claim to be gifted with precognition, which enables them to look into the future and glimpse what hasn’t yet occurred.

The belief in ESP or the sixth sense dates back thousands of years. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Croesus, who ruled a kingdom in what is now Turkey in the sixth century B.C., consulted oracles – that is, groups of priests claimed to be able to predict the future — before he went to war. In ancient India, Hindu holy men were believed to possess the power to see and hear at a distance, and to communicate through telepathy.

In the late 1700s, the Viennese physician Franz Mesmer claimed that he could give people ESP powers by hypnotizing them. Just before his assassination in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln told friends that he’d dreamed of his own body lying in state in the White House. In the 20th century, Edgar Cayce and Jean Dixon attracted wide followings by claiming that they could foresee future events. During the Cold War, U.S. military and intelligence agencies, spurred by reports that the Soviets had psychics at their disposal, even tried to utilize clairvoyants who claimed remote-viewing powers for espionage purposes.

As well as watching it directly from the Top Documentary Films website, it is also available from YouTube.  Here are the four links.  It is a most fascinating review of the scientific findings in this area.  If you have a dog with you when you watch the videos, don’t be surprised if he or she fall asleep!  Nothing new for dogs in all this!

The blame game

A retrospective muse about the present global challenges.

A few days back I posted an article by Tom Engelhardt called The Great American Carbon Bomb.  It attracted a number of comments including a couple from Learning from Dogs supporter, Patrice Ayme.  Here is one of those comments,

Dear Paul: There is a gentleman leading the Tour de France, right now. He was not given a chance, especially in the mountains. However, he has been going day by day, and has now worn the Yellow Jersey for more than a week, supported by his inferior, but dedicated team. His philosophy: humility, and do the job day by day, trying his best, although he strongly doubts that he is up to the task.

We, as humankind, or, rather, our hubristic leaders are doing the exact opposite. We are not doing our best, and it’s precisely because those leaders are not humble and not honest, and so very sure we are going to pull out OK, because that’s what we do best, and have always done, and thus will always do.

Verily all indicators are that of an unfolding catastrophe. All signals are loud and clear that way. So it’s really not the moment to say:”Oh, BTW, we are very resilient and totally great, so it’s just a matter of time before we put it all together OK. So now let’s all pull together, and it’s fine.”

In truth we are on the verge of an irreversible situation, as the CO2 poisoning will turn, within a decade or so, into a political, and then military issue.
PA

Patrice is an angry man (not a criticism by the way – so many of us are angry!) and anger is a great reason to find someone, something, anything, to blame!  I suspect, wearing my cloak of an amateur psychologist, that a core reason why we feel anger is that, so often, the causes of our anger are our own errors.  Anger at one’s self is much more difficult to deal with!

Anyway, back to the plot.

Like Patrice I also feel badly let down by our ‘leaders’.  Especially with regard to the nightmare of economic and ecological issues fast approaching.

Then I read this in Paul Gilding’s book, The Great Disruption, that has been featured on this Blog a couple of times.

Our addiction to growth is a complex phenomenon, one that can’t be blamed on a single economic model or philosophy.  It is not the fault of capitalism or Western democracy, and it is not a conspiracy of the global corporate sector or of the rich.  It is not a bad idea that emerged in economics, and it is not the result of free market fundamentalism that emerged in the 1980s with globalization.  While each of those factors is involved, it is too simple and convenient to blame any of them as the main driver.  Growth goes to the core of the society we have built because it is the result of who we are and what we have decided to value. [Chapter 5, Addicted to Growth, p66]

That last half of that last sentence – ‘it is the result of who we are and what we have decided to value.‘  That strikes me as the core truth.  It is the reason why Patrice, and me, and countless thousands of others across the globe, are so angry.  At heart we all know that the circumstances we find ourselves in are, in great part and before we ‘saw the light’, the result of earlier personal values which we now know were not compatible with a sustainable relationship with the planet we all live on.

It is very good news.  That anger is fuelling change.  As Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book The Tipping Point societies change when something of the order of 18% of individuals emotionally commit to change.

Taking a dip!

Another one of those ‘cute’ moments.

I subscribe to Naked Capitalism, as many of you will be aware, and in their 20th July release were the following photos,

In fact, a quick Google search reveals that the photographs have been widely circulated over recent years and in all probability the source and original story are long lost by now.

Enjoy the rest of the day!

Sanity out of insanity

Dogs are such a great metaphor!

There’s no question that when one stays very still and closely watches a dog’s behaviour you see an amazing level of awareness.  Even when they appear to be deeply asleep anything sensed by their ‘being’ is registered immediately.  A small tale, by way of example.  Many years ago when Pharaoh and I lived in the Devon village of Harberton, we  frequently shopped in the town of Totnes, just 3 miles away.  Many times, I would be walking up the High Street with Pharaoh nicely to heel being passed by many people walking the opposite way on the same pavement.

Totnes High Street

Every once in a while, during the fraction of time that it took for someone to pass us by, Pharaoh would utter a low, throatal growl without even slowing his pace.  I always presumed that something, way beyond my level of consciousness, had disturbed Pharaoh during that instant of time.

Real awareness, or if you prefer, consciousness is not some touchy/feely concept but a true understanding about just what the heck is going on.

So do watch the following video of Peter Russell discussing Rediscovering Ourselves; it’s very relevant.

Then have a read of a couple of items on Peter’s website.  The first is about runaway climate change, and here’s an extract,

Runaway Climate Change

The most dangerous aspect of global warming.

Global Warming is bad enough. Over the last hundred years, average global temperatures have increased by 0.75°C, one third of that rise occurring in the last twenty years. The 2007 report by The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that, by 2090, temperatures will have risen between 2 and 6 degrees.

Even a two degree rise in temperature would be disastrous. Changes in climate will lead to more intense storms, longer periods of drought, crop failures in many developing countries, the destruction of nearly all the coral reefs, the melting of much of the polar ice, the flooding of many low-lying urban areas, the possible collapse of the Amazonian rain forest, and the extinction of 20-30% of the planet’s species. The IPCC projects that this could happen by 2050.

If the temperature were to rise by six degrees, the prognosis is extremely bleak. At this temperature, the entire planet will be ice-free. Sea levels will rise by 70 meters. Many species of tiny plankton will cease to exist, and the problem would echo up the food chain, bringing the extinction of many fish, sea mammals, and the largest whales. Much of the land will now be desert. Hurricanes of unimaginable ferocity will bring widespread ecological devastation. If, as is possible, the ozone layer were destroyed, the burning ultraviolet light could make life on land impossible. Evolution would have been set back a billion years. It would be a planetary catastrophe.

Read the rest of that essay here.  Now on to the next extract, from here,

The Under-rated Approach to Carbon Reduction

As critical as it is to reduce future carbon emissions, it is equally critical, perhaps even more critical, to get much of the CO2 that as already been released—and which is responsible for the current warming—out of the atmosphere and back into the ground where it belongs.

This approach, known as carbon capture and sequestration, has until now been largely ignored, and for several reasons. The atmosphere is so huge, it would seem to be an impossible task. There are possible technologies, but they are not nearly so well-developed as alternative energy sources. Many are still only ideas on paper. Where technologies of carbon capture have been developed they are mostly for capturing CO2 from smokestacks. Valuable as this may be, it is still dealing with the problem of future carbon emissions. What we need are technologies that will remove from the atmosphere the carbon that we already emitted, and then sequestrate it (put it away) in a stable form.

It is to this end that Sir Richard Branson announced his $25 million prize (Virgin Earth Challenge) for technologies that could capture a billion tons of carbon a year from the atmosphere (about one tenth of what we now release each year). Nor is it just Richard Branson who believes we must make this an equally important approach to the problem. His team includes Al Gore, James Lovelock, Sir Crispin Tickell (former UK ambassador to the UN), and James Hansen, the head climate scientist at NASA).

Again, the full article, a ‘must-read, in my opinion, is here.

It is really about awareness!  Dogs have so much to teach us!

What is it you don’t understand?

Stating the obvious.

I am about a third into Paul Gilding’s book The Great Disruption.  It’s proving to be a very-thought provoking read that I will review in more detail over the coming weeks.

However, I just wanted to quote from the start of Chapter 5, Addicted to Growth,

Indeed, as argued by economist Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Very little that can be argued about that statement.  It rather puts into context a couple of items read recently. Both from the blogsite New Economic Perspectives.  The first on June 10th by Stephanie Kelton,

Earlier this week, President Obama talked about the weakening state of the economy, telling us that he’s not worried about a double-dip recession and that the nation should “not panic.” It’s hard to imagine a more alarming assessment at this juncture.

The recovery is faltering. Our economy is growing at annual rate of just 1.8 percent. Manufacturing just grew at its slowest pace in 20 months. More than 44 million Americans – one in seven – rely on food stamps. Employers hired only 54,000 new workers in May, the lowest number in eight months. Jobless claims increased to 427,000 in the week ended June 4. The unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent. Nearly half of all unemployed Americans have been without work for more than 6 months. About 25% of all teenagers who are looking for work are unemployed. Eight-and-a-half million Americans are underemployed – i.e. working part-time because their hours have been cut or because they can’t find full-time work. There are, on average, 4.6 unemployed people for every 1 job opening. And even if all the open positions were filled, there would still be 10.7 million people looking for work.

The second on July 8th by Marshall Auerback,

Today’s unemployment data suggests that we are experiencing something far worse than a mere “bump in the road”, as our President described it last month.  In fact, if last month was the time to panic, as Stephanie Kelton argued here, then today’s data should create real palpitations in the White House.  This isn’t just a “bump,” but a fully-fledged New York City style pot hole.

First the headline number everyone looks at: non-farm payrolls. Up 18,000 in June, the increase was 100,000 less than expectations.  In addition the prior two month payroll increases were revised down by -44,000 overall.  That’s weak – but not terrible.

Dig a bit deeper into the data and it looks absolutely awful:  The household measure of employment fell by -445,000.  Okay, it’s a noisy number. But, as Frank Veneroso has pointed out to me in an email correspondence, this measure of employment which is never revised now shows no employment growth over the last five months and very negative employment growth over the last three.

But it gets worse:  The work week was down one tenth.  Overtime was down one tenth.  The labor participation rate at 64.1% was the lowest since 1984.  The broad U6 unemployment rate rose from 15.8% to 16.2%.  In other words, as Frank suggested to me this morning, “many other employment indicators in this report confirm the deep disappointment in the payroll series and the much more negative message of the household series.”

Now here’s the latest item published by Paul Gilding in his Blog, The Cockatoo Chronicles. (I have republished it in full, hopefully without upsetting Mr. Gilding – couldn’t see advice on reproduction – but copyright remains, of course, fully with Paul Gilding.)

Like a Grenade in a Glasshouse

June 29, 2011

It’s going to hit hard and it’s going to hurt – made worse because most aren’t expecting it. They think the world is slowly returning to our modern “normal” – steadily increasing growth, with occasional annoying but manageable interruptions. After all, the global recession wasn’t so bad was it? Sure there was pain and things got shaky but Governments responded, bailed out companies, stimulated economies, got things back on track.  While it’s still a bit bumpy, Greek wobbles, US debt, extreme weather, high oil and food prices etc, it’ll work out. It always does….

If only it were so. In fact we are blindly walking towards the next in a series of inevitable system shaking and confidence sapping crises, deluded in the belief that the worst is behind us.

Each crisis will be a little worse than the last. Each one will shake our denial a little more. This is what happens when systems hit their limits. They don’t do so smoothly, but bump up against the wall, hitting hard, then bouncing off equally hard. It is the behaviour of a system trying to break through. But if the limits are solid, as is the case with our economic system hitting the limits of the planet – defined by unchangeable physical capacity and the laws of physics, chemistry and biology – then it can’t find its way through. So eventually, when the pain of hitting the wall gets too much, it stops.

Then it will hit. Like a grenade in a glasshouse, shattering denial and delusion and leaving it like a pile of broken glass on the floor of the old economic model. Then we’ll be ready for change.

I’ve been arguing the inevitability of this moment since 2005, mostly inside the business community. Before the 2008 financial crisis hit, the idea was almost universally rejected, with a belief in the indomitable power of globalised markets to overcome all challenges and keep growth on track. Most audiences believed that while markets always wobbled, they also always recovered. My suggestion, that this level of arrogance was the hallmark of empires before they fell, landed on deaf ears. They were the masters of the universe and markets and growth would always reign supreme.

Now the response is different. The financial crisis saw many break off from the pack and start to ask the difficult questions. I now find as I tour the world speaking about The Great Disruption to community gatherings, corporate executives and policy makers that minds are increasingly open. While not the dominant view, the previous confidence in the inevitably of growth has become shaky and the group asking the challenging questions is rapidly expanding.

As I argue in the book, the fundamental cause of what’s coming is resource constraint and environmental breakdown, which when combined with an overstretched financial system and high levels of debt puts unbearable tension into the global economy. While no one can know what event will pull the pin out of the grenade, the underlying pressures make that moment inevitable. Yes, the dominant commentary still blames each individual problem on unique circumstances, but the underlying systemic causes are clear for those who wish to look.

The continued level of denial still surprises me, especially given the pressures driving this are not esoteric and can be measured in clear economic indicators. A good example was recently published by one of the more interesting voices to join the growing chorus that we have a system-wide problem. The legendary contrarian and fund manager Jeremy Grantham is co-founder of the Boston based firm GMO, with over $100 billion of assets under management. So this guy is a solid capitalist and market advocate, pursuing wealth for the wealthy. But he sees the data and is raising the alarm, calling this moment “one of the giant inflection points in economic history” – referring to the end of a 100-year steady decline in commodity prices. His views were echoed by Stephen King, group chief economist at HSBC, who wrote in the FT: “After the biggest meltdown since the Great Depression, economic theory tells us that world commodity prices should not be this high. But they are and the West quickly needs to wake up to this new economic reality. Commodity prices are now permanently higher.”

Grantham provides the detail, pointing out that the 100 year trend of falling prices in the 33 most important commodities, except for oil, were wiped out with a price surge from 2002 to 2010 – a surge even greater than experienced in WW2. We have now reached what Grantham calls the Great Paradigm shift; not a price spike but a new reality. Within this new reality, Grantham says: “if we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.”

This is why hitting the wall is inevitable – because limits are not philosophies, they are limits. We can understand what to expect – and why the grenade will shatter the glasshouse of economic growth – by going back to how systems behave when they hit their limits. Our economic system first hit the wall in 2008 – that was when The Great Disruption began with food and oil prices hitting record highs and a credit crisis driven by reckless monetary policy pursuing growth at all costs. The resulting recession meant we backed away from those limits (bouncing off the wall), and then borrowed massive amounts of money from our children (think Greece) to try to get the economy moving again.

Now that the global economy is slowly entering a so-called “recovery”, the prices of commodities (representing our use of earth’s resources for food and materials) are on the way up, accelerated, in the case of food, by climate change. Of course if significant growth kicks in, the prices of oil, food and other commodities will surge, this timestarting from near record highs.  Then we will bounce back into recession and prices will back off again. Hit the wall, bounce off. Hit the wall, bounce off. Ouch.

By itself this would pose enough of a challenge to growth. But now we also have the debt we used to get the economy moving again. This debt can only be paid off with significant economic growth – but such significant growth is impossible as outlined above. So the debt itself becomes an enormous additional tension in the system, as argued by Richard Heinberg in his important forthcoming book The End of Growth. With the global economy and ecosystem now both burdened by unmanageable debt, effective global default is only a matter of time.

So we’re living in a glass house with the grenade sitting there for all to see. Who knows what will pull the pin. It could be Greece, a Chinese food crisis, peak oil or any number of other triggers. But it’s coming.

The question to ask yourself is simple. Are you ready?

Back to Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Precisely!

TomDispatch – The Great American Carbon Bomb.

A powerful and insightful essay from Bill McKibben about our love affair with carbon-based energy.

Introduction

I subscribe to a number of Blogs and one of them is TomDispatch.  Here’s how Tom describes what the writings are all about.

Tom Engelhardt launched Tomdispatch in November 2001 as an e-mail publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The site now features Tom Engelhardt’s regular commentaries and the original work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, and Mike Davis to Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Robert Lipsyte, and Elizabeth de la Vega. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is associate editor and research director.

Tomdispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.

I read the TomDispatch essay from Bill McKibben on the 14th.  It caught my eye, not only because of the power of Bill’s conclusions, but also because I was deeply impressed with Bill’s book ‘eaarth’, which I reviewed on Learning from Dogs here and here.

Tom Engelhardt has given written permission for that TomDispatch to be re-published in full on Learning from Dogs.  It now follows.

First the introduction by Tom Engelhardt,

The Great American Carbon Bomb

These days, even ostriches suffer from heat waves.  More than 1,000 of them reportedly died from overheating on South African farms during a 2010 drought.  As for American ostriches, the human variety anyway, at the moment it should be increasingly hard for them to avoid extreme-weather news. After all, whether you’re in sweltering heat, staggering drought, a record fire season, or a massive flood zone, most of us are living through weird weather this year.  And if you’re one of the lucky few not in an extreme-weather district of the USA, you still won’t have a problem running across hair-raising weather stories, ranging from the possible loss of one out of every ten species on this planet by century’s end to the increasing inability of the oceans to soak up more atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Then, of course, there are those other headlines.  Here’s a typical one: “As Water Rises, Florida Officials Sit on Their Hands” (a former member of the just abolished Florida Energy and Climate Commission points out that, thanks to Republican governor Rick Scott and the legislature in the part of the country most vulnerable to rising sea levels, “there is no state entity addressing climate change and its impact”).  And here’s another: “Economy Keeps Global Warming on the Back Burner for 2012” (American climate-change “skeptics” are celebrating because “the tide of the debate — at least politically — has turned in their favor” and “political experts say that… concerns over global warming won’t carry much weight in the 2012 election”).   And then there are the polls indicating Americans are confused about the unanimity of the scientific consensus on climate change, surprisingly dismissive of global-warming dangers, worry less about it than they did a decade ago, and of major environmental issues, worry least about it.

It’s true, of course, that no weird-weather incident you experience can definitively be tied to climate change and other factors are involved.  Still, are we a nation of overheating ostriches?  It’s a reasonable enough conclusion, and in a sense, not so surprising.  After all, how does anyone react upon discovering that his or her way of life is the crucial problem, that fossil fuels, which keep our civilization powered up and to which our existence is tethered, are playing havoc with the planet?

TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben, author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is a man deeply committed to transforming us from climate-change ostriches to climate-change eagles.  Perhaps it’s time, he suggests, for the environmental movement to get one heck of a lot blunter. Tom

Here’s the essay from Bill,

Will North America Be the New Middle East?
It’s Yes or No For a Climate-Killing Oil Pipeline — and Obama Gets to Make the Call 
By Bill McKibben

The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last 18 months.  Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire.  First Pakistansuffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, and this spring and summer, it’s the Midwest that’s flooding at historic levels.

The year 2010 saw the lowest volume of Arctic ice since scientists started to measure, more rainfall on land than any year in recorded history, and the lowest barometric pressure ever registered in the continental United States.  Measured on a planetary scale, 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in history.  Jeff Masters, probably the world’s most widely read meteorologist, calculated that the year featured the most extreme weather since at least 1816, when a giant volcano blew its top.

Since we’re the volcano now, and likely to keep blowing, here’s his prognosis: “The ever-increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases humans are emitting into the air put tremendous pressure on the climate system to shift to a new, radically different, warmer state, and the extreme weather of 2010-2011 suggests that the transition is already well underway.”

There’s another shift, too, and that’s in the response from climate-change activists. For the first two decades of the global-warming era, the suggested solutions to the problem had been as abstract as the science that went with it: complicated schemes like the Kyoto Protocol, or the cap-and-trade agreement that died in Congress in 2010.  These were attempts to solve the problem of climate change via complicated backstage maneuvers and manipulations of prices or regulations.  They failed in large part because the fossil-fuel industry managed, at every turn, to dilute or defang them.

Clearly the current Congress is in no mood for real regulation, so — for the moment anyway — the complicated planning is being replaced by a simpler rallying cry. When it comes to coal, oil, and natural gas, the new mantra of activists is simple, straightforward, and hard to defang: Keep it in the ground!

Two weeks ago, for instance, a few veteran environmentalists, myself included, issued a call for protest against Canada’s plans to massively expand oil imports from the tar sands regions of Alberta.  We set up a new website, tarsandsaction.org, and judging from the early response, it could result in the largest civil disobedience actions in the climate-change movement’s history on this continent, as hundreds, possibly thousands, of concerned activists converge on the White House in August. They’ll risk arrest to demand something simple and concrete from President Obama: that he refuse to grant a license for Keystone XL, a new pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico that would vastly increase the flow of tar sands oil through the U.S., ensuring that the exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands will only increase.

Forget the abstract and consider the down-and-dirty instead. You can undoubtedly guess some of the reasons for opposition to such a pipeline.  It’s wrecking native lands in Canada, and potential spills from that pipeline could pollute some of the most important ranchlands and aquifers in America. (Last week’s Yellowstone River spill was seen by many as a sign of what to expect.)

There’s an even bigger reason to oppose the pipeline, one that should be on the minds of even those of us who live thousands of miles away: Alberta’s tar sands are the continent’s biggest carbon bomb.  Indeed, they’re the second largest pool of carbon on planet Earth, following only Saudi Arabia’s slowly dwindling oilfields.

If you could burn all the oil in those tar sands, you’d run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would mean if not hell, then at least a world with a similar temperature. It won’t happen overnight, thank God, but according to the planet’s most important climatologist, James Hansen, burning even a substantial portion of that oil would mean it was “essentially game over” for the climate of this planet.

Halting that pipeline wouldn’t solve all tar sands problems.  The Canadians will keep trying to get it out to market, but it would definitely ensure that more of that oil will stay in the ground longer and that, at least, would be a start.  Even better, the politics of it are simple. For once, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives can’t get in the way.  The president alone decides if the pipeline is “in the national interest.” There are, however, already worrisome signs within the Obama administration.  Just this week, based on a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, Neela Banerjee of the Los Angeles Timesreported that, in 2009, the State Department’s “energy envoy” was already instructing Alberta’s fossil-fuel barons in how to improve their “oil sands messaging,” including “increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories.” This is the government version of Murdochian-style enviro-hacking, and it leads many to think that the new pipeline is already a done deal.

Still, the president can say no.  If he does, then no pipeline — and in the words of Alberta’s oil minister, his province will be “landlocked in bitumen” (the basic substance from which tar-sands oil is extracted). Even energy-hungry China, eager as it is for new sources of fossil fuels, may not be able to save him, since native tribes are doing a remarkable job of blocking another proposed pipeline to the Canadian Pacific.  Oil, oil everywhere, and nary a drop to sell. (Unfortunately that’s not quite true, but at least there won’t be a big new straw in this milkshake.)

An Obama thumbs-down on the pipeline could change the economics of the tar sands in striking ways. “Unless we get increased [market] access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck,” said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary.

Faced with that prospect, Canada’s oilmen are growing desperate. Earlier this month, in a classic sleight of hand, they announced plans for a giant “carbon capture and sequestration” scheme at the tar sands. That’s because when it comes to global warming, tar sands oil is even worse than, say, Saudi oil because it’s a tarry muck, not a liquid, and so you have to burn a lot of natural gas to make it flow in the first place.

Now, the oil industry is proposing to capture some of the extra carbon from that cooking process and store it underground.  This is an untested method, and the accounting scheme Alberta has adopted for it may actually increase the province’s emmissions.  Even if it turns out to work perfectly and captures the carbon from that natural gas that would have escaped into the atmosphere, the oil they’re proposing to ship south for use in our gas tanks would still be exactly as bad for the atmosphere as Saudi crude. In other words, in the long run it would still be “essentially game over” for the climate.

The Saudis, of course, built their oil empire long before we knew that there was anything wrong with burning oil. The Canadians — with American help, if Obama obliges the oil lobby — are building theirs in the teeth of the greatest threat the world has ever faced. We can’t unbuild those Saudi Arabian fields, though happily their supplies are starting to slowly dwindle. What we can still do, though, is prevent North America from becoming the next Middle East.

So there will be a battle, and there will be nothing complicated or abstract about it.  It will be based on one question: Does that carbon stay in the earth, or does it pour into the atmosphere?  Given the trillions of dollars at stake it will be a hard fight, and there’s no guarantee of victory. But at least there’s no fog here, no maze of technicalities.

The last climate bill, the one the Senate punted on, was thousands of pages long. This time there’s a single sheet of paper, which Obama signs… or not.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of 350.org, and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book, just out in paperback, is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Copyright 2011 Bill McKibben

Final note from yours truly.

Guess what I read about on the BBC News website on the 15th, the day that I put this article together?  I read about a fabulous new ship about to start construction at the Samsung Heavy Industries shipyard in South Korea.  When launched and loaded, at 600,000 tonnes, it will be the world’s largest ship.  Wow that’s impressive!

Now read here as to what is the purpose of this ‘ship’.  Here’s a flavour of that BBC news item,

Shell has unveiled plans to build the world’s first floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) platform. The 600,000-tonne behemoth – the world’s biggest “ship” – will be sited off the coast of Australia. But how will it work?

FLNG project in figures

Deep beneath the world’s oceans are huge reservoirs of natural gas. Some are hundreds or thousands of miles from land, or from the nearest pipeline.

Tapping into these “stranded gas” resources has been impossible – until now.

At Samsung Heavy Industries’ shipyard on Geoje Island in South Korea, work is about to start on a “ship” that, when finished and fully loaded, will weigh 600,000 tonnes.

That is six times as much as the biggest US aircraft carrier.

By 2017 the vessel should be anchored off the north coast of Australia, where it will be used to harvest natural gas from Shell’s Prelude field.

Yes, it’s more technology to enable us to use more carbon!  As the article (just) touches on,

But there has been opposition from environmentalists. Martin Pritchard from Environs Kimberley says he is concerned about the potential for “oil leaks and spills”.

WWF Western Australia, [my inserted link, Ed.] meanwhile, argues that the underwater wellheads and pipelines will harm the tropical marine environment, and estimates the project will emit more than two million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year.

Sort of reminds me of that old Devonshire saying (and you need to imagine hearing it in that wonderful dialect that just still exists in this far part of SW England)

“All the world’s a little queer except thee and me …. and I have me doubts about thee!”

We are all very ‘queer’ indeed!

Two years today!

Learning from Dogs first saw the light of day two years ago.

It all started on July 15th, 2009, during a very hot summer down in San Carlos, Mexico where I was first living with Jean.

Now, some 1,000 posts later life is very different.  Jean and I are now married and living incredibly happily, with our twelve dogs and six cats, in Payson, Arizona, some 80 miles NE of Phoenix, up at 5,000 feet on the fringe of the world’s largest Ponderosa Pine forest.

Ponderosa pine forest

So apologies if today’s Post is partly reflective on the last two years.  It also seems appropriate to revisit the reasons why so many articles on the Blog aren’t about dogs.

I feel the need to do that because the number of new readers now is just staggering.

The first full month was August 2009.  Wordpress stats reveal that there were 1,172 unique viewers of the Blog.  The last full month was, of course, June 2011.  Wordpress figures were 31,664 unique viewers!  That’s over a 1,000 viewers a day, and the trend is still upwards!

I am, of course, deeply moved by this response.  Thank you, one and all!

In writing Learning from Dogs, I have tried to stay close to the theme that dogs are a metaphor for change for mankind.  But that doesn’t mean that this is a doggy Blog.

As I wrote on the Welcome page, “Dogs live in the present – they just are!  Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have. They don’t judge, they simply take the world around them at face value.”

Learning from Dogs is a Blog about the fundamental truths that we need to be reminded of, for our long-term survival. Dogs teach us the importance of integrity, of faith and loyalty and of unconditional love.

But just as importantly, dogs are a reminder that our evolution to Neolithic man may have been an evolutionary mistake.  Stay with me for just a while.

Dogs were domesticated a mind-numbing number of years ago.  There is good evidence that dogs were co-operating with man 30,000 years ago.  However, one might speculate why the DNA of the dog separated from the grey wolf approximately 100,000 years ago.  Was it because they evolved even that far back as domesticated companions to man?  Science can’t tell us that yet.

But 30,000 years ago man was most definitely a hunter-gatherer.  Archaeologists have pondered whether the domesticated dog allowed man to be so successful as a hunter-gatherer that, in time, man was able to evolve into farming which, of course, we describe more accurately as the Neolithic Revolution.

Here’s an extract from WikiPedia,

The “Neolithic” Revolution is the first agricultural revolution—the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Archaeological data indicate that various forms of domestication of plants and animals arose independently in six separate locales worldwide ca. 10,000–7000 years BP (8,000–5000 BC), with the earliest known evidence found throughout the tropical and subtropical areas of southwestern and southern Asia, northern and central Africa and Central America.

However, the Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history, into sedentary societies based in built-up villages and towns, which radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g., irrigation and food storage technologies) that allowed extensive surplus food production.

These developments provided the basis for concentrated high population densities settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing).

There’s one sentence that just jumps off the ‘page’.  It’s this one. “During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history”

Here’s a quick bit of history about Homo Sapiens, from here,

Neanderthal man: from 230,000 years ago

Around 250,000 years ago Homo erectus disappears from the fossil record, to be followed in the Middle Palaeolithic period by humans with brains which again have increased in size. They are the first to be placed within the same genus as ourselves, as Homo sapiens(‘knowing man’).

By far the best known of them is Neanderthal man — named from the first fossil remains to be discovered, in 1856, in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf, in Germany. The scientific name of this subspecies is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. The Neanderthals are widely spread through Europe and the Middle East, and they thrive for an extremely long period (from about 230,000 to 35,000 years ago). Bones of animals of all sizes, up to bison and mammoth, and sophisticated stone tools are found with their remains.

Thus as a species we, as in H. sapiens, survived for approximately 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers!

Now after just 12,000 years, give or take, as ‘farmers’ we are facing the real risk of extinction. Go back to that WikiPedia extract above and re-read “concentrated high population densities settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing)“.

If you want to fully comprehend the mess we, as in man, have got ourselves into, then watch the stunning movie What a Way To Go: life at the end of the empire.  That movie website is here or you can watch it from here.  (I will be reviewing the film on Learning from Dogs in the next couple of weeks.)

The filmmakers, Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson, towards the end of the film muse if mankind must go back to some form of hunter-gatherer society, not literally, of course, but ‘back’ to a form of society that is fundamentally sustainable with the world upon which we live.  As successful as Neanderthal man.  Here’s where dogs may have critically important lessons for mankind.

  • Dogs form small packs, up to a maximum of 50 animals
  • They have a simple hierarchy within the pack; the alpha female (who has first choice of breeding male and makes the very big decisions about whether the pack should move to a better territory), the beta male (always a dominant male that teaches the young pups their social skills and breaks up fights within the pack – my Pharaoh, as seen on the home page, is a beta GSD), and the omega dog (the clown dog, male or female. whose role is to keep the pack happy through play).
  • They survive through an extraordinary relationship with humans but if they have to revert to the ‘wild’ they survive as hunter-gatherers.

Maybe humans, at heart, also share certain similar characteristics:

  • We are happiest in social groups of less than 50
  • We much prefer simple methods of group order, where rules and discipline are managed within the group.  (Think about how easily we form all sorts of local clubs and groups.)
  • A ‘local’ approach to survival through deep and extensive group co-operation would be so much more effective than what most of us presently experience in our societies.

That’s why so many of the articles that appear on Learning from Dogs focus on the madness of what we experience so often in our present enormous, faceless, distant societies.

Back to Sally Erickson, one of the film makers mentioned earlier.  Here’s what she wrote in her Blog

Our world is in need of healing at every level. We as a species aren’t going to survive, the way we are going. If we don’t heal ourselves, evolve a new consciousness, and fundamentally change the way we live, human beings won’t make it.

Where’s it all heading?  Who knows?  I am reminded of that wonderful quote attributed to Niels Bohr but, more likely, from an unknown author (although Mark Twain is often suggested), “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

Happy Birthday, Learning from Dogs.  Thank you to all of you that have supported this venture over the last two years.

The peculiar nature of H. sapiens

Just a few recent items to underline what a strange species we are!

This is being written on the 8th, not too many hours after the successful launch of the very last Shuttle space flight.  Forget the [valid] question of cost, this launch sufficiently inspired nearly a million people to travel to the Kennedy Space Center to watch this historic flight.  That adventuring drive is a wonderful aspect of mankind.

Now to another view of mankind.

Washington’s Blog of the 3rd July, 2011 has an in-depth review of how “the Japanese government, other governments and nuclear companies have covered up the extent of the Fukushima crisis.”  In that excellent piece, there is a reference to material in the British Guardian newspaper (I’m taking the liberty of re-publishing quite a long extract from Washington’s Blog).

British Shenanigans

It’s not just the Japanese. As the Guardian notes:

British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known.

Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse…

Officials stressed the importance of preventing the incident from undermining public support for nuclear power.

***

The Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, who sits on the Commons environmental audit committee, condemned the extent of co-ordination between the government and nuclear companies that the emails appear to reveal.

***

The official suggested that if companies sent in their comments, they could be incorporated into briefs to ministers and government statements. “We need to all be working from the same material to get the message through to the media and the public.

***

The office for nuclear development invited companies to attend a meeting at the NIA’s headquarters in London. The aim was “to discuss a joint communications and engagement strategy aimed at ensuring we maintain confidence among the British public on the safety of nuclear power stations and nuclear new-build policy in light of recent events at the Fukushima nuclear power plant”.

Other documents released by the government’s safety watchdog, the office for nuclear regulation, reveal that the text of an announcement on 5 April about the impact of Fukushima on the new nuclear programme was privately cleared with nuclear industry representatives at a meeting the previous week. According to one former regulator, who preferred not to be named, the degree of collusion was “truly shocking”.

The Guardian reports in a second article:

The release of 80 emails showing that in the days after the Fukushima accident not one but two government departments were working with nuclear companies to spin one of the biggest industrial catastrophes of the last 50 years, even as people were dying and a vast area was being made uninhabitable, is shocking.

***

What the emails shows is a weak government, captured by a powerful industry colluding to at least misinform and very probably lie to the public and the media.

***

To argue that the radiation was being released deliberately and was “all part of the safety systems to control and manage a situation” is Orwellian.

And – as the Guardian notes in a third article – the collusion between the British government and nuclear companies is leading to political fallout:

“This deliberate and (sadly) very effective attempt to ‘calm’ the reporting of the true story of Fukushima is a terrible betrayal of liberal values. In my view it is not acceptable that a Liberal Democrat cabinet minister presides over a department deeply involved in a blatant conspiracy designed to manipulate the truth in order to protect corporate interests”. -Andy Myles, Liberal Democrat party’s former chief executive in Scotland

“These emails corroborate my own impression that there has been a strange silence in the UK following the Fukushima disaster … in the UK, new nuclear sites have been announced before the results of the Europe-wide review of nuclear safety has been completed. Today’s news strengthens the case for the government to halt new nuclear plans until an independent and transparent review has been conducted.” -Fiona Hall, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the European parliament

It’s us, all of us, that create the systems, the political and government systems that are at the heart of this approach to life.

But it’s also us, all of us, that ‘write’ such beautiful stories as this one from NPR Music.

Paul Simon has brought joy to so many for so long, but on this night he made Rayna Ford’s dream come true. During a show in Toronto on May 7, Rayna Ford, a fan from Newfoundland, called out for Simon to play “Duncan,” and said something to the effect that she learned to play guitar on the song. In a moment of astonishment and disbelief, Paul Simon invited her on stage, handed her a guitar and asked her to play it for the crowd. When she strapped on the guitar, the audience went crazy. In a few strums, the band played along, tears ran down Rayna Ford’s cheeks and Simon stood by her side in smiles.

It was an absolute moment of sobbing joy for Ford and for the crowd. It was a moment so beautiful, so human, it could almost be a story in a Paul Simon song. Excuse me while I wipe my own tears. Go Rayna and all the Raynas out there with dreams. As the song says:

Oh, oh, what a night
Oh, what a garden of delight
Even now that sweet memory lingers
I was playing my guitar
Lying underneath the stars
Just thanking the Lord
For my fingers,
For my fingers

What a strange lot we are!