Category: Culture

This year of separation.

Ultimately, a message of hope.

Today’s title came from a recent chat ‘across the garden fence’ with our neighbours, Dordie and Bill. At their request we had walked our two horses over to the fence-line between our two properties so Dordie and Bill could meet and fondle them. The warm afternoon sunshine was beautiful and while the horses munched the newly-found grass, we grown-ups talked about this and that and generally tried to put the world to rights!

We talked about the strangeness of present times. Not just in the USA but across the world. Bill thought 2013 would be the year of separation. I queried what he meant by that.

Bill replied, “I sense that by the end of the year, the vast majority of people will have decided if climate change is or is not a significant issue.” There would be few who remained neither unconcerned nor undecided.

That resonated with me and neatly put the framework to today’s post. Stay with me while I journey to the destination that this year will be the year of hope.

I am one of many who subscribe to the online magazine Grist. They describe themselves, thus:

Laugh now — or the planet gets it.

You know how some people make lemonade out of lemons? At Grist, we’re making lemonade out of looming climate apocalypse.

It’s more fun than it sounds, trust us!

Grist has been dishing out environmental news and commentary with a wry twist since 1999 — which, to be frank, was way before most people cared about such things. Now that green is in every headline and on every store shelf (bamboo hair gel, anyone?), Grist is the one site you can count on to help you make sense of it all.

The weekly Grist digest that arrived in my in-box that same day as when we were chatting with Dordie and Bill included a number of key stories.

Here’s one that smacked me in the eye.

The 32 most alarming charts from the government’s climate change report

By Philip Bump

Just reading about the government’s massive new report outlining what climate change has in store for the U.S. is sobering. In brief: temperature spikes, drought, flooding, less snow, less permafrost. But if you really want to freak out, you should check out the graphs, charts, and maps.

Now I’m not going to republish all 32 charts but will include just these two, because the message is clear.

It’s possible that sea levels could only rise eight inches. It is also possible that they could rise over six-and-a-half feet.

—-

Sea-level rise will affect different areas to different degrees — but note the map at lower right. On the Georgia coast, “hundred year” floods could happen annually.

OK, that first chart takes a while to absorb the full implications. The second one doesn’t!

The full range of charts is chilling. While they refer to the USA, the messages apply to the whole world.

Then in that same Grist weekly summary was this story.

If you aren’t alarmed about climate, you aren’t paying attention

By David Roberts

There was recently another one of those (numbingly familiar) internet tizzies wherein someone trolls environmentalists for being “alarmist” and environmentalists get mad and the troll says “why are you being so defensive?” and everybody clicks, clicks, clicks.

I have no desire to dance that dismal do-si-do again. But it is worth noting that I find the notion of “alarmism” in regard to climate change almost surreal. I barely know what to make of it. So in the name of getting our bearings, let’s review a few things we know.

We know we’ve raised global average temperatures around 0.8 degrees C so far. We know that 2 degrees C is where most scientists predict catastrophic and irreversible impacts. And we know that we are currently on a trajectory that will push temperatures up 4 degrees or more by the end of the century.

David then works his way through those ‘things we know’ in a powerful manner. Do read the full article, please! This is his conclusion:

All this will add up to “large-scale displacement of populations and have adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems.” Given the uncertainties and long-tail risks involved, “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.” There’s a small but non-trivial chance of advanced civilization breaking down entirely.

Now ponder the fact that some scenarios show us going up to 6degrees by the end of the century, a level of devastation we have not studied and barely know how to conceive. Ponder the fact that somewhere along the line, though we don’t know exactly where, enough self-reinforcing feedback loops will be running to make climate change unstoppable and irreversible for centuries to come. That would mean handing our grandchildren and their grandchildren not only a burned, chaotic, denuded world, but a world that is inexorably more inhospitable with every passing decade.

Take all that in, sit with it for a while, and then tell me what it could mean to be an “alarmist” in this context. What level of alarm is adequate?

So am I stark staring mad for having hope in my mind? Stay with me for just a little longer. Then form your own judgment.

Recall the post that I published on Tuesday hitting out at the British newspaper The Daily Mail. Towards the end of that post, in discussing the recently released American National Climate Assessment, I wrote this:

That’s why this report is to be encouraged, nay embraced. Of all the nations in the world, the one that should be setting the lead is the United States of America. As the banner on that globalchange.gov website proclaims: Thirteen Agencies, One Vision: Empower the Nation with Global Change Science

So go and read the report. For your sake and all our sakes.

Because the more informed you and I are, the better the chances of real political leadership taking place in this fine nation.

Now with that in mind let’s go to the final Grist article.

A new grand strategy for the U.S., built around sustainability

By David Roberts

Let’s just accept it: America’s current political and economic systems are incapable of responding adequately to climate change. As things stand, reducing carbon emissions — or more broadly, shifting to sustainability — is a kind of add-on, a second-tier consideration, bolted onto systems and institutions that were built for other purposes.

A little later, David writes:

So what would a new U.S. grand strategy built around sustainability look like? That’s the question tackled by “A New U.S. Grand Strategy,” a piece in Foreign Policy by Patrick Doherty, director of the Smart Strategy Initiative at the New America Foundation.

It’s a hugely ambitious and wide-ranging piece, far too much to even summarize adequately here. Bookmark it. Instapaper it. Pinterest it to your iCloud, or whatever kids do these days. But let’s take a quick look.

Doherty identifies four central challenges facing the U.S.:

Economic inclusion: People are swarming out of poverty around the world (especially in China). Over the next 20 years, the global middle class will welcome around 3 billion new members. That’s going to put intense stress on natural, economic, and political systems that are already showing signs of strain.

Ecosystem depletion: Pretty sure Grist readers are familiar with this one.

Contained depression: Rather than a recession, the U.S. faces a “constrained depression,” with the full effects of low aggregate demand and high debt being masked by policy. No amount of fiscal or economic stimulus will revive a system that has exhausted itself.

Resilience deficit: Our industrial supply lines and value chains are efficient, but lack redundancy; they are brittle. Our infrastructure is old and crumbling, $2.2 trillion in the hole, and that’s just for the aging Cold War stuff, never mind building water, power, and transportation systems suited to an era of climate disruption.

“These four challenges,” Doherty says, “are the four horsemen of the coming decades.” And they are inter-dependent. They must be solved together. It’s a rough situation.

With these in mind, Doherty proposes a new grand strategic concept: “The United States must lead the global transition to sustainability.“

What a vision for the United States of America. That this Nation will be the most wonderful example of how man can learn, adapt and change. David Roberts concludes:

Here are Doherty’s main suggestions for how to realign the U.S. economic engine:

Walkable communities: More and more Americans want to live in dense, walkable areas; get rid of regulations that hamper them and start building them.

Regenerative agriculture: Farmers can produce “up to three times the profits per acre and 30 percent higher yields during drought” with agricultural techniques that also clean water and restore soils. America must “adopt modern methods that will bring more land into cultivation, keep families on the land, and build regional food systems that keep more money circulating in local economies.”

Resource productivity: “Energy and resource intensity per person will have to drop dramatically.” That imperative can drive “innovation in material sciences, engineering, advanced manufacturing, and energy production, distribution, and consumption.”

Excess liquidity: Channel all the corporate cash that’s sitting around in funds into long-term investments in America by taxing waste and creating regional growth strategies.

Stranded hydrocarbon assets: Figure out how to devalue the immense amount of carbon that’s still sitting underneath the ground without unduly traumatizing the economy.

Obviously the devil is in the details on this stuff, but at a broad level, this is about as eloquent and forward-thinking as it gets. I love the idea of using sustainability in a muscular way, to revive regional economies and nurture the middle class. I recommend reading the whole thing.

I, too, recommend reading “A New U.S. Grand Strategy – Why walkable communities, sustainable economics, and multilateral diplomacy are the future of American power.” (NB: You will have to register with Foreign Policy before access to the report is possible, but it’s free.)

So, the wall-to-wall stream of information that is shouting out how quickly the planet is changing is the fuel that is going to feed the fires of hope.

Let me leave you with the most beautiful words of an ancient philosopher – Aristotle.

Hope is a waking dream.

A crisp recovery!

Lovely item from last year.

Reported on the BBC News 31st October, 2012

Hedgehog trapped in crisp packet in Weston-super-Mare

A baby hedgehog which found itself stuck in a crisp packet has been released after a three-and-a-half hour rescue involving six people.

The animal became trapped after it crawled into the empty wrapper in a railed off area near steps in Weston-super-Mare.

A shopkeeper heard rustling and saw the hedgehog – now named Crispian – stick his nose out.

Workers had to cut through the railings and help rescuers reach the hedgehog.

Jules Bishop, from Prickles Hedgehog Rescue, said Crispian crawled into the area as he was attracted to the warmth of the packet and the smell.

“He’s thriving now and will be here all winter as he’s so tiny,” she said.

“I want to thank all the people involved because obviously without their commitment and dedication this little hog would have had no way to survive.

“He was very, very cold and dehydrated when I emptied him out of the crisp packet.”

Do drop in on the website of Prickles Hedgehog Rescue, from where this gorgeous picture was found.

out and about in soft release on a summers evening

Essence of wisdom, page three.

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

My concluding essay on the subject of wisdom starts off with this quotation by Martin Luther King, Jr. That he was best known for using nonviolent civil disobedience to achieve political aims in the 1950’s and 60’s may not be inappropriate today.

I started with looking at our brain in recognition of the strange ways in which we humans make sense of the world, then yesterday looked at how we confuse what we do with what is best for us, surely the essence of wisdom. Today, I want to conclude with a reflection on the gap between the new wisdom of millions of citizens and the failure of so many leaders to recognise this wisdom. When I use the word wisdom in this context, it’s probably more in the sense of awareness. The growing awareness by millions of us that something isn’t right and that our democratic representatives and leaders are way behind.

I will support my argument by referring to a number of media items that have surfaced in recent days.

Let’s start with this weather forecasting chart from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Australia’s “dome of heat” has become so intense that the temperatures are rising off the charts – literally.

The air mass over the inland is still heating up – it hasn’t peaked

The Bureau of Meteorology’s interactive weather forecasting chart has added new colours – deep purple and pink – to extend its previous temperature range that had been capped at 50 degrees.

The range now extends to 54 degrees – well above the all-time record temperature of 50.7 degrees reached on January 2, 1960 at Oodnadatta Airport in South Australia – and, perhaps worryingly, the forecast outlook is starting to deploy the new colours.

“The scale has just been increased today and I would anticipate it is because the forecast coming from the bureau’s model is showing temperatures in excess of 50 degrees,” David Jones, head of the bureau’s climate monitoring and prediction unit, said.

Just reflect on that! 54 degrees Centigrade is 129 degrees Fahrenheit!

On January 4th, just 5 days ago, Bill Moyers held an interview with climate change communication expert Anthony Leiserowitz who explained why climate change gets the silent treatment, and what we should do about it. Here’s a trailer to that programme.

I very strongly recommend you put an hour to one side and watch the full programme available here.

Next comes a recent item on Christine’s fantastic blog 350 or bust. I forgot to ask Christine for permission to reproduce her article but am confident that republishing it on Learning from Dogs carries her full support.

New Report Connects Dots Between Political Inaction & Growing Cost Of Climate Change

This is a reposting from The Earth Story’s Facebook page:

“The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down. “ –Flip Wilson

A new publication issued by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in the journal “Nature” has reported that the chances of keeping temperatures below a 2 degree rise is now largely in the hands of policy makers.

The challenge of a changing climate can now only be fought with the backing of political agenda – and as most people will agree, this seems bleak.

Of all the uncertainties with regard the effects of climate change, including geophysical and social uncertainties; political uncertainty ranked as the number 1 factor in determining the fate of our species and our planet.

What went wrong? Maybe we have been advertising climate change in an ineffective manner, considering how politically charged the world is?

The burdens of climate change are often communicated in relation to extreme weather events, melting ice caps, lives lost, loss of biodiversity, endangered species etc., but it would appear that to some this doesn’t seem to ring a bell; probably as the bell doesn’t chime as “cha ching cha ching”.

So what happens if we try to communicate climate change in relation to cost?

In 2012, in the United States alone, there were 11 natural disasters that cost over $1 billion – and this does not yet include the almost country wide drought or hurricane sandy, and let’s not forget the multiple other disasters which did not make the 1 billion benchmark. It is predicted that events, like the ones that swept the entire globe in 2012, will increase in frequency and in destructive force if we do not keep temperatures below the 2 degree rise on pre-industrial temperatures.

If we do not change our ways by 2020, the research group have found that the probability of keeping the temperature within the assigned two degree window drops below 50% (best case) or 20% (worst case) – no matter how much money is spent in the effort.

It is predicted that money will not matter; it’s almost bittersweet.

2012 was an eye opening year in terms of our natural environment. From here on out, let’s try change our ways; not our climate. The clock is ticking.

“… the chances of keeping temperatures below a 2 degree rise is now largely in the hands of policy makers.” Further comment by me is pointless – the message is already crystal clear.

The implications of the changes that are being imposed on all of us were picked up in a recent article in the British newspaper The Telegraph: Rising food prices will reap a bitter harvest. Here’s a flavour (sorry!) of the article.

British shoppers should brace themselves for “massive” food price rises in 2013, says the aptly named Mark Price, managing director of Waitrose. Is he correct, or is this just another retailer trying to soften up public opinion before imposing price hikes?

Liam Halligan goes on to write (my emphasis):

It strikes me that Price most certainly is right and his statement deserves more comment and consideration. For it is almost inevitable that many crucial foodstuffs will become considerably more expensive during 2013, not least due to recent weather patterns. More fundamentally, the food price rises we’ll see over the coming year will also reflect longer-term non-cyclical trends, not least the burgeoning world population.

During 2013, in fact, rising food prices are likely not only to have a serious impact on the global economy, but could well spark violence and political upheaval, not least in the Middle East.

The importance of the trend Price has highlighted, then, goes way beyond the tills of upmarket British supermarkets. It’s certainly the case, though, that UK food production looks weak, as heavy rainfall in 2012 meant many crops were ruined and farmers couldn’t plant as much as they wanted for 2013. Despite a very dry first quarter, 2012 was this country’s second-wettest year since records began in 1910.

I don’t want to quote any more from the article but read it and realise how the world in 2013 may be unrecognisable beyond our wildest imaginations.

OK, going to round this off.

Firstly, by asking you to read a recent item in Democracy Journal. This is how the article starts.

Everyone’s Fight: The New Plan to Defeat Big Money

The 2012 campaign is by now mercifully out of our systems, but it remains worth reflecting on some of the dubious firsts that occurred during this election. This was the first presidential campaign to cost more than $2 billion. It was also the first time neither candidate accepted any public financing or the limits that come with it. Finally, it was the first presidential election after Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that allowed around $600 million in super PAC donations this cycle, and many millions more to nonprofit “social welfare” groups that aren’t required to disclose their donors.

But even these bleak facts don’t do justice to the problem of Big Money. Campaign spending isn’t even our most dire money-in-politics problem. That would be the thousands of lobbyists and many millions of their dollars that are devoted to the warping of our public policy. These powerful lobbies control most outcomes on Capitol Hill, and the problem is far worse than it was 20 years ago.

Read the rest here.

Lastly, by returning to another recent item from Bill Moyers.

Citizens, Not Consumers, Are Key to Solving Climate Crisis

January 4, 2013

by Lauren Feeney

Annie Leonard spent 20 years working for environmental organizations, studying where our stuff comes from and where it goes. She followed waste from industrialized countries to apartheid-era South Africa, where it was dumped in black townships, to Haiti, where it was disguised as fertilizer and dumped on a beach, to Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines where we sent everything from e-waste to used car batteries for recycling in a process too dirty for our own backyard.

Then, in 2007, she made a short animated film about our consumer culture and the damage it does to the environment. The Story of Stuff went viral (chances are you’ve seen it — more than 15 million people have) and spawned a whole series of videos that explain complicated environmental and political concepts in an irresistibly simple and engaging way. We reached Annie via email to talk about the latest installment, The Story of Change. This one’s a bit of a departure — instead of looking at the problem, it proposes a solution.

It included this video:

Can shopping save the world? The Story of Change urges viewers to put down their credit cards and start exercising their citizen muscles to build a more sustainable, just and fulfilling world.

I shall close with another quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Essence of wisdom, page two.

Doing the right thing has power.

Thus wrote Laura Leggett Linney. Maybe Laura doesn’t fit into the same folder as Confucius (she’s well and truly alive for one thing) but the quote was perfect, hence the connection.

Yesterday, I offered an overview of the human brain. Today I want to expand on the idea of “how we jumble up how we act with what is best for us” as was put in yesterday’s introduction.

In researching for today’s essay, the power of the Internet quickly found the quotation by ex-President Lyndon B. Johnson that “Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It’s knowing what’s right.” Reflecting on the escalation of America’s involvement in Vietnam that was a product of LBJ’s term of office, perhaps his quotation carries a certain pathos that wasn’t intended at the time of its pronouncement! In other words, it’s not the ‘knowing‘ but the ‘doing‘ that is critical, as LBJ’s legacy so clearly illustrated. Johnson might have better said, “Knowing what’s right is sometimes hard. Doing what’s right is sometimes even harder.”

To illustrate the challenge of converting these fine concepts into the grind of daily life, I’m going to use a recent essay published by Ian Welsh. Ian is a frustrated author who writes about his experiences in completing a book on Prosperity. It struck me as a fabulous insight into the vagaries of homo sapiens and one that lent itself beautifully to what I am trying to convey today.

Ian very promptly gave me written permission to republish his essay on Learning from Dogs. So what I am going to do is to add my own thoughts to Ian’s essay in a way that hopefully supports the proposition that we are far from being logical creatures.

To know what to do is not enough

by Ian Welsh – January 2nd, 2013

For the past year I’ve been writing a book on prosperity, by which I mean widespread affluence. It’s been slow going, not because I don’t believe I know the general technical requirements of prosperity (I do, if I didn’t, I shouldn’t be wasting anyone’s time, including mine, writing the book), but because the real problem isn’t the technical details like eliminating bottlenecks, or redistributing income, or setting up positive feedback loops, or avoiding fraud, or stopping financialization, or any of the dozens of other subjects I either visit at chapter length or touch on briefly. The problem as with, say, stopping smoking, isn’t so much what to do, it is how it comes that we do it. When do we make the decision we’re willing to do what it takes, sufferer the negative consequences of getting to a better place, and then push ourselves through those consequences?

Let’s dally with that phrase, “isn’t so much what to do, it is how it comes that we do it.” On the 1st January, I published an article called Why? It included a film by Simon Sinek looking at the Why, How, and What of human decision-making. The film supports the thesis that those who succeed act, think and do things differently; the crucial point being that spending time on understanding why you do what you do is very revealing. You can see the resonance between Simon Sinek and Ian Welsh, can’t you? If we better understand ‘why’ we want to do something, we can better think 0f what is the best way of achieving that.

Back to Ian’s essay.

This is a huge problem in individuals, as the weight loss, addiction, psychology, psychiatry and self-help industries attest. There is, generally, more money in not solving a problem, as drug makers with their palliatives understand, than in solving it. The people who have power and money and influence in the status quo are not sure that in a new world, with a new economy, and the new ethics which must undergird that new economy, they will be on top. They are right to believe so. They are creatures of the current world, and in being created, have created the world they are unsteady masters of. Their ethics and morals, their way of business, of living, of apportioning power and influence and money must go if there is to be widespread affluence. Their methods have been tried for 40 odd years now, and if measured against the human weal, have failed. They will not, they cannot adapt, not as a group. They were not selected for the skills it takes to create a new type of affluent society, they have not even been able to maintain the mass affluence of the old society, and not just because they have not wanted to. They would be a different elite, made up of different people with different ethics, talents and skills if they did want to.

This paragraph is just laden with powerful ideas.

First, the recognition that millions opt for the palliative rather than the cure. Second, that these same millions live in present times that are controlled undemocratically by plutocrats. Thirdly, changing to a new, better order is not going to come easily. Ergo, for the last few decades there has been a massive failure of wisdom. Applying that failure to millions does not, of course, avoid the charge that each of us, individual by individual, each in our own tiny manner, has contributed to that failure of wisdom.

Ian amplifies this idea, as you will see by reading on.

Ordinary people also have the wrong ethics, the wrong morality. Much is written about why consumerism is bad, but the ultimate problem of consumerism is not how it makes us feel but that the consumer passively chooses from a menu created by others, not to fill the consumer’s real needs, but to benefit those who created the menu. Such a passive people cannot understand that choosing choices without creating choices is not choice, it is the illusion of choice.

So while my book has a lot of general principles of the sort which books on prosperity often have, such as about trade, and productivity and technological change, that isn’t the most important part. The part that matters isn’t about the technical requirements of prosperity, it’s about why and when people do what is required to achieve prosperity, and when they don’t. And when, having obtained it, they throw it away.

“Such a passive people cannot understand that choosing choices without creating choices is not choice, it is the illusion of choice.” Pick the bones out of that!

On we go. Going to let you read Ian’s closing four paragraphs as one piece.

Our society is ours. A tautology, but one we forget too often. As individuals we often feel powerless, as a mass, we have created our own society. There are real constraints, physical constraints on what society we can have, based on the resources we have, the technology we have mastered and what we understand about ourselves and our world, but those constraints are not, right now, so tight as to preclude widespread affluence, to preclude prosperity.

They are, however, tight enough to preclude continuing to do the same thing, led by the same sorts of people, and expect anything but decline, repeated disasters and eventual catastrophe. We can be affluent and prosperous, we can spread that affluence and prosperity to those who do not have it now, but we cannot do it if we insist on keeping the current forms of our economy, including our current forms of consumption. This does not mean doing with less, it means doing with different things, valuing different things. Those new values will be better for us, objectively, they will make us both happier and healthier, just as most addicts are happier once they’ve broken their addiction, or rather once they’ve gone through withdrawal and rebuilt their lives.

We can choose not to do so. We have, in certain respects, already chosen not to do so, as with our refusal to do anything about climate change until it is too late (the two problems are combined, climate change is a subset of the political and economic problems we have). We can, also, choose to make the necessary changes, not only to avoid the worst catastrophes (disasters are now inevitable, there are consequences to failure, stupidity and greed), but to create an actual, better, world, a world in which the vast majority are healthier, happier and doing work they care about.

The monster facing us, as usual, is us. The monsters are always us, our brothers and sisters, and the one in the mirror. And it is those monsters I’ve been wrestling this past year.

Reflect on those three points that I made earlier: how we don’t put the cure as the top priority, how we are dominated by the greed and power of the relatively few, how difficult changing our present society would be. Not a pretty picture!

Then look at yourself in that mirror, either literally or metaphorically, and say to the face you see peering back at you: “This is my society. Yes, I do feel powerless but I have to embrace the cold, hard truth that I am part of my society and that change will only occur if I subscribe to the new values that I require.”

That has real power!

Essence of wisdom, page one.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Thus spoke Confucius, albeit not in the English language! But, nonetheless, those words from so, so long ago (he lived to the age of 73 – from 551 until 479 BCE) resonate very strongly 2,500 years later.

That was the easy bit!

I’m not entirely clear as to why a variety of items that have crossed my ‘in-box’ in recent days seem to offer some sort of cohesive sense. But they do to me and I’m going to draw them together. I will leave you to be the judge as to how well it worked!

Thus over the next three days I am going to reflect on three topics. The challenge of how we humans make sense of the world, how we confuse what we do with what is best for us, surely the essence of wisdom, and the growing gap between the wisdom of millions of citizens and their leaders.

I should quickly add that much of my musings are due to this scribe standing on the shoulders of giants than seeing clearly from his own level.

Today, I shall start with the brain. Your brain, my brain, the brains of humans. The reason this trilogy starts with the brain is that, ultimately, everything we humans think, feel and do comes from this brain of ours. Our brain is who we are.

Let me offer you this video made by Bristol University in England. Just a little over 6 minutes long it sets out the functional story of our brain.

(An animated tour around the human brain commissioned for Brain Awareness Week in 2010)

But there is so much more to this ancient body organ.

The Big Think website has been publishing a series called The 21st Century Brain. The latest episode published on November 6th was called Consciousness: The Black Hole of Neuroscience. It starts thus:

What’s the Big Idea?

“By the word ‘thought’ (‘pensée’) I understand all that of which we are conscious as operating in us.” –Renee Descartes

The simplest description of a black hole is a region of space-time from which no light is reflected and nothing escapes. The simplest description of consciousness is a mind that absorbs many things and attends to a few of them. Neither of these concepts can be captured quantitatively. Together they suggest the appealing possibility that endlessness surrounds us and infinity is within.

But our inability to grasp the immaterial means we’re stuck making inferences, free-associating, if we want any insight into the unknown. Which is why we talk obscurely and metaphorically about “pinning down” perception and “hunting for dark matter” (possibly a sort of primordial black hole). The existence of black holes was first hypothesized a decade after Einstein laid the theoretical groundwork for them in the theory of relativity, and the phrase “black hole” was not coined until 1968.

Likewise, consciousness is still such an elusive concept that, in spite of the recent invention of functional imaging – which has allowed scientists to visualize the different areas of the brain – we may not understand it any better now than we ever have before. “We approach [consciousness] now perhaps differently than we have in the past with our new tools,” says neuroscientist Joy Hirsch.

Later on is this:

So there’s no reason to assume that consciousness is eternally inexplicable. However, it may never be explained through neurobiology, says David Chalmers, the philosopher who originally made the distinction. “In so many other fields physical explanation has been successful… but there seems to be this big gap in the case of consciousness,” he says. “It’s just very hard to see how [neurological] interactions are going to give you subjective experience.”

The fascinating essay concludes:

It’s no different than any other aspect of the brain that we cannot presently explain, she [Hirsch] says:

For example, we don’t understand how the brain creates colors. That’s a perception that is very private – I don’t know that your perception of blue is like my perception of blue, for example. Smells are another one. I don’t know that your perception of the smell of an orange is like mine. These are the hard problems of neuroscience and philosophy that we haven’t made a great deal of progress on.

What do you think? Is the distinction between “hard problems” and “soft problems” useful, or reductive? Does the brain create consciousness? Will we ever empirically understand where it comes from or how it works?

But it was one of the comments to the piece that jumped off the screen at me. From Beatriz Valdes and slightly edited by me, the comment offered:

Human consciousness happens in the human brain. The human brain’s functions are rooted in what the human senses relay to it. Self consciousness, consciousness of what is around us, is the result of thinking. There would be no thoughts if the brain were a tabula rasa (Latin for blank slate), had no input from the senses. Therefore, consciousness is quite local, quite mortal, quite dependent on the gray matter inside our skulls.

Local and mortal. Very profound (I think!).

So, if you like me suffer from time to time from understanding oneself, don’t worry. There are plenty of others – aren’t there? As Professor Dan Dennett makes it all clear below.

Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don’t we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.

Philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes and are not what we traditionally think they are. His 2003 book Freedom Evolves explores the way our brains have evolved to give us — and only us — the kind of freedom that matters.

Good, glad that’s all clear. 😉

Stay with me for ‘page two’ of Essence of wisdom coming out tomorrow.

Beautiful photographs, part two.

Sent to me by long-term friend Dan Gomez. Enjoy.

This second set carries on from yesterday’s selection. You will see from one of the comments from yesterday that blogger Pedantry noticed there was a problem with” the height description on the second through fifth images in this set“. Feedback from others who had this problem would be helpful as I can pass the details back to WordPress.

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The Grand Canyon Skywalk

The Grand Canyon Skywalk is a transparent horseshoe-shaped cantilever bridge and tourist attraction in Arizona near the Colorado River on the edge of a side canyon west of the main canyon. USGS topographic maps show the elevation at the Skywalk’s location as 4,770 ft (1,450 m) and the elevation of the Colorado River in the base of the canyon as 1,160 ft (350 m).

In other words, the height of the vertical drop directly under the skywalk is between 500 ft (150 m) and 800 ft (240 m).

Commissioned and owned by the Hualapai Indian tribe, it was unveiled March 20, 2007, and opened to the general public on March 28, 2007. It is accessed via the Grand Canyon West Airport terminal or a 120-mile (190 km) drive from Las Vegas, which includes a 10-mile (16 km) stretch of dirt road which is currently under development.

The Skywalk is east of Meadview and north of Peach Springs with Kingman being the closest major city.

Palawan Underground River or St. Paul Subterranean River.

The longest navigable underground river in the world.

This is the most famous cave in the Philippines. The longest underground river was discovered a few years back in Mexico somewhere in the Yucatan.

The St. Paul underground river in Palawan, Philippines may not be the longest underground river in the world anymore, but it is still the world’s longest navigable underground river. The navigable part of the river inside the 4000-acre cave of the St. Paul subterranean river stretches 15 kilometers in length (9.3 miles). St. Paul Cave is the third deepest cave in the country.

The Seven Sisters waterfall in Norway.

Plitvice Lakes National Park in the Lika region of Croatia.

A hotel window view in the United Arab Emirates!

Jasper Park Lodge, Jasper, Alberta, Canada

Villas Vista Hermosa, Costa Rica

Norway!

Sea caves near Benagil Beach, Algarve, Portugal.

Barcelona, Spain.

The village of Hallstatt in Austria.

Victoria Falls, in southern Africa on the Zambezi River at the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Beautiful display of nature’s balance: Predators and Prey.

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Beautiful photographs, part one.

Sent to me by long-term friend Dan Gomez. Enjoy.

Isn’t it beautiful!

A Paradise Tanager…mostly found in South America.

At Wat Samphran in Nakhon Pathom Province there is a 17 storey building that has a giant dragon climbing to the roof.
The head is at the top where there is a shrine and the tail is on the ground floor. The dragon is hollow and it is possible to walk up some sections of it.

This house was designed by Rudy Ricciotti. The unique architecture includes a pool house, which is like a window in the living room where you can enjoy not only swimming in the water, but the person swimming in it with the effect of the outdoor landscape which is reflected through the window.

The Aiguille du Midi cable car leaves from the centre of Chamonix. It takes visitors up to 3,842m (12,605 feet) for a stunning view of the French Swiss and Italian alps.

Paradise! Jungfrau Mountain Range in Switzerland

HallgrÃmskirkja (244 ft), is the largest church and the sixth tallest architectural structure in Iceland.

The Melisanni Cave, Greece. This beautiful cave, which was discovered in 1951 and is surrounded by forests, features in Greek mythology as the cave of the nymphs.

New Town Hall in Hanover, Germany.

Thermal baths inside a cave – Miskolc Tapolca, Hungary

Piva Canyon, Bosnia and Herzegovina

…

Lake Mellisani on the island of Kephalonia, Greece.

Manarola, Italy.

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Hope you found these photographs as captivating as I did.

Another set of stunning pictures tomorrow.

Hachikō, a lesson in faithfulness.

Note: This post was first published in August, 2010 and has remained a very popular read on Learning from Dogs since then.

So here is that post once again, albeit with a few minor changes.

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More than a film, a message from dogs to mankind.

We recently watched a film about an Akita dog called Hachi, Hachikō in Japanese, that demonstrates the loyalty that dogs can offer their human companions.

It’s a very moving film. Expect to shed many tears. Even more so when one reflects that the Hollywood film is based, reasonably accurately, on a true story. The details of this story are in Wikipedia from which is quoted:

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

Hachikō was given away after his master’s death, but he routinely escaped, showing up again and again at his old home. Eventually, Hachikō apparently realized that Professor Ueno no longer lived at the house. So he went to look for his master at the train station where he had accompanied him so many times before. Each day, Hachikō waited for Professor Ueno to return. And each day he did not see his friend among the commuters at the station.

The permanent fixture at the train station that was Hachikō attracted the attention of other commuters. Many of the people who frequented the Shibuya train station had seen Hachikō and Professor Ueno together each day. They brought Hachikō treats and food to nourish him during his wait.

This continued for nine years with Hachikō appearing precisely when the train was due at the station

Now watch and weep.

Back to the Wikipedia entry:

That same year, another of Ueno’s faithful students (who had become something of an expert on the Akita breed) saw the dog at the station and followed him to the Kobayashi home (the home of the former gardener of Professor Ueno — Kikuzaboro Kobayashi) where he learned the history of Hachikō’s life. Shortly after this meeting, the former student published a documented census of Akitas in Japan. His research found only 30 purebred Akitas remaining, including Hachikō from Shibuya Station.

Professor Ueno’s former student returned frequently to visit the dog and over the years published several articles about Hachikō’s remarkable loyalty. In 1932 one of these articles, published in Tokyo’s largest newspaper, threw the dog into the national spotlight. Hachikō became a national sensation. His faithfulness to his master’s memory impressed the people of Japan as a spirit of family loyalty all should strive to achieve. Teachers and parents used Hachikō’s vigil as an example for children to follow. A well-known Japanese artist rendered a sculpture of the dog, and throughout the country a new awareness of the Akita breed grew.

Eventually, Hachiko’s legendary faithfulness became a national symbol of loyalty.

Hachikō died on March 8, 1935. He was found on a street in Shibuya. His heart was infected with filarial worms and 3-4 yakitori sticks were found in his stomach. His stuffed and mounted remains are kept at the National Science Museum of Japan in Ueno, Tokyo.

A dog offers loyalty, trust and love in exchange for being treated with integrity and compassion.

That’s why we have so much to learn from dogs.

Why?

“Why do you get out of bed in the morning, and why should anyone care?”

These words are spoken by Simon Sinek just before the three-minute mark in the video that follows. As Wikipedia explains,

Simon O. Sinek (born October 9, 1973) is an author best known for popularizing a concept of The Golden Circle.

He joined the RAND Corporation in 2010 as an adjunct staff member, where he advises on matters of military innovation and planning. His first TEDx Talk on “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” is the 7th most viewed video on TED.com.

His 2009 book on the same subject, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009) delves into what he says is a naturally occurring pattern, grounded in the biology of human decision-making, that explains why we are inspired by some people, leaders, messages and organizations over others.

He has commented for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, FastCompany, CMO Magazine, NPR and BusinessWeek, and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, BrandWeek, IncBizNet.

This new year that we are now in is going to require millions of us to think and do differently. As Einstein so famously quoted, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results“. More than ever before we need different results and that means thinking and doing differently.

Enjoy the video.

Change, as far as the eye can see.

Of the matters of man for the coming year.

Like countless others, when we look back 12 months and recall what we thought 2012 had in store, we now realise that we didn’t have a clue! As the silly expression goes, “I can predict anything except those things that involve the future!”

So repeating the process is stupid; I have no doubt that 2013 will be brim full of surprises. At all levels: personal, local, national and global. But ….. (You knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you!)

But a conversation that I had with Peter McCarthy on the 27th December resonated with me to such a degree that I felt the urge to pen some thoughts. I worked with Peter some years ago at Clevedon Hall, we shared an interest in flying a TB20 and both of us studied for our CAA Instrument Rating. We became good friends.

Clevedon Hall, Somerset, England. — Clevedon Hall, Somerset, England

So come with me today for a stroll around the grounds of change, possibly an epochal period of change.

Let’s start with what may be the biggest catalyst of change heading our way – our broken political system.

Christine of 350orbust fame published this yesterday.

The view that many western societies are a very long way from being fair is growing. If you want to dig a little deeper into the appalling statistics of the USA, for example, dip into a recent essay written by Charles Hugh Smith that appeared on Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity blog.

It’s a long essay packed full of powerful facts and statistics. Try this one:

6. The assets that generate unearned income are highly concentrated, and as a result so is the unearned income. The top 1% owns twice as much stock-market wealth as the bottom 90%. This income-producing wealth enables the top 1% to act as a financial aristocracy, buying influence and favors from equivalently concentrated political Elites.

Let me go to Charles’ conclusion:

What few dare admit, much less state publicly, is that the Constitutional limits on the financial Aristocracy and the Tyranny of the Majority have failed. This guarantees a future Constitutional crisis as each political class – the financial Aristocracy, the top 24% who pay most of the taxes, the dwindling middle class and the bottom 50% who depend on Federal transfers – will battle for control as the Status Quo collapses under the weight of its unsustainable promises.

H’mmm!

Back to the conversation with Peter. He felt that there was a massive failure of the democratic process in the UK, and by implication in the USA.

Peter continued by saying that many elected politicians, especially at the level of local politics, weren’t smart people. Smart, innovative, entrepreneurial people chose not to go into politics. Those that were elected had too much power and too many vested interests for the good of the societies that they were meant to represent. In the USA the involvement of private money in politics is nothing short of corruption of the highest order; my personal opinion, no less and no more.

In moderation, Churchill’s saying comes to mind. “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

Let’s move on.

No-one can deny that in so many areas of our lives, the degree of change seems unprecedented. Whether we are speaking of the huge social changes at work, enormous technological changes, such as the way that we communicate with each other, medical practises, and on and on. Then add in the consequences of the change in the Earth’s climate, whether or not one sees this as the outcome of man’s activities and …. well, you get the idea!

Here’s a lovely perspective from Alex Jones who writes the blog, The Liberated Way. Just a few days ago, Alex wrote this:

As hard and gloomy as some of my blog posts on the future of humanity have been, I thought it time to offer good news as to where we are heading. I shall call this the global realignment. Few will disagree that the current activities and ideas of humanity in relation to the environment are unsustainable and point to our self-destruction. History also shows that whenever a crisis occurs traumatic events and the ideas of new thinkers causes a paradigm shift in attitudes and thinking.

Contrary to the fantasy of many people, there will be no celestial champion on a white horse riding forward to save humanity from itself. The change will come from a series of traumatic events and individual thinkers which will plant the seeds of change, which will ripple forward as a tsunami of changes of ideas and attitudes on a global scale.

So much change. So much uncertainty. Such a feeling of being lost in unfamiliar lands.

Or have we been here before?

Have you heard of the Kondratieff Wave?

The Kondratieff Wave (Kondratiev Wave or K-wave) theory is proposing the existence of the extra-long, 50+ years long cycles of growth in the modern market (capitalist) economy. The theory was proposed in 1920s by Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev.

Wikipedia has a good summary available here. A Google search will find much more material, such as this chart:

The Wikipedia entry has a simpler diagram, see below, that shows the four stages of each cycle.

So how to draw this to a close?

In a sense, in a very real sense, there isn’t a close. The future has always been uncertain and as history shows change is the only constant.

Peter concluded that a better society was ahead and hoped that he would live sufficiently long to witness it. That gets my vote!

Happy New Year to you.

Thank you for taking an interest in Learning from Dogs.

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Happy New Year to you.

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