This opened my eyes; thought I would share it with you.
I know that many of the several hundred readers of Learning from Dogs are not in the USA. But many are. Hence me deciding, after mulling it over, to publish in full the contents of an email that came in a short while ago from the organisation Change.
Here’s that email.
Dear Paul,
Valentine’s Day, which accounts for 40% of fresh flower sales annually, is fast approaching.
Not always a sweet smell.
If you’re planning to order a bouquet from 1-800-Flowers — the world’s largest florist — you should know where most of those flowers really come from.
At flower farms in Ecuador and Colombia — the countries that export the most to the U.S. — two-thirds of the workers are women. These women are routinely subjected to harassment and even rape from their male supervisors. They suffer eye infections and miscarriages from consistent contact with dangerous pesticides.
In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, they’re routinely forced to work 80-hour weeks with no overtime pay. Attempts to form a union are met with opposition by police and armed forces.
Many retailers — such as Whole Foods and Stop & Shop — have taken the important first step of offering Fair Trade flowers to consumers who want no part of these abuses. Fair Trade certified farms must adhere to strict standards for workers’ rights, which prevents the abuses described above.
1-800-Flowers is the largest florist in the world. Yet they offer no Fair Trade flowers at all.
1-800-Flowers uses a certifying agency called Florverde, which ensures that its flower farms measure up to certain environmental standards — this is a good thing. But Florverde has almost no labor standards: A farm can be certified even if it uses forced labor.Indeed, Florverde is owned by the Association of Colombian Flower Exporters, so it has a financial incentive to keep wages low and suppress workers’ rights.
This is the week before Valentine’s Day — more people will purchase flowers during the next seven days than any other week this year. This is our best opportunity to demand a promise from 1-800-Flowers to join its competitors in offering Fair Trade flowers. So after you sign the petition, please share this email widely and post on Facebook — do everything you can topressure 1-800-Flowers to show a little respect for the women who toil in unbearable circumstances. The women without whom they’d have no flowers to sell.
Click the link below to tell 1-800-Flowers to make a promise this Valentine’s Day to sell Fair Trade flowers:
Since this campaign began, the company has emailed to tell us that it will post more information on its website about the farms that supply their flowers. But this is a far cry from selling fair trade products — and we have much more to do to make sure workers are protected. This is the week to do it.
Thanks for taking action,
Patrick and the Change.org team
If you feel so minded to sign the petition, which can be done by people outside the USA, then that may be done here.
An interesting companion to the World on the Edge book
Regular readers of the Blog will know that yesterday an article was published, the first of a series, looking more closely at the book by Lester Brown of EPI called World on the Edge. That article followed on from this Post, Group Human Insanity, and yesterday’s Post, Total, Utter Madness, Pt 1.
Today, if you will forgive the emotional battering that the book and this film create, I want to draw your attention to a film that was produced in 2007, called What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire.
It was lent to us by John Hulburt, who lives in Payson, and holds many views that are close to the views of the founders of Learning from Dogs. John has offered to write the odd guest article for the Blog, which is fantastic.
Anyway, back to the film. Here are a couple of trailers.
A 2-minute trailer giving an overview of the film ..
and another one dipping into more detail.
And if you still want more, then here’s an interview of the two behind the film, Producer Sally Erickson and Writer/Director Tim Bennett. Twenty-seven minutes long but so what. Watch it!
We really do have so much to learn from dogs! (Before it’s too late!)
The way we are most likely treating Planet Earth is almost beyond comprehension.
I have mentioned before the Earth Policy Institute and Lester Brown’s latest book, World on the Edge. Details of the book are here.
At the time of writing this Post (10am US Mountain Time on the 4th Feb.) I have read through to the end of Chapter 5 of the book and will have it completed soon. It’s opening my eyes hugely!
I have decided over the next week or so to summarise each chapter, hoping that this encourages many readers of Learning from Dogs to reflect, go to the EPI website, buy the book or think about making a difference in any way that you can.
Chapter One, On the Edge, sets the background:
Summer of 2010 sees record-high temperates in Moscow, Russia’s grain harvest shrank by 40 million tons (40%) to 60 million tons.
Record high temperatures in south-central Pakistan were recorded. Snow and glaciers in the Himalayas melted fast, 20 million Pakistanis were affected by the resultant flooding, 2,000 died, 6 million acres of crops damaged.
A 2002 study by Mathis Wackernagel concluded that, “humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. By 1999, global demand’s on the earth’s natural systems exceeded sustainable yields by 20 percent. Ongoing calculations show it at 50 percent in 2007. Stated otherwise, it would take 1.5 Earths to sustain our current consumption.” [my emphasis]
“No previous civilisation has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural supports. Nor will ours.”
Let’s turn to NOAA. A few salient points from there State of the Climate – Global Review for 2010.
For 2010, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature tied with 2005 as the warmest such period on record, at 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F). 1998 is the third warmest year-to-date on record, at 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average.
The 2010 Northern Hemisphere combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest year on record, at 0.73°C (1.31°F) above the 20th century average. The 2010 Southern Hemisphere combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the sixth warmest year on record, at 0.51°C (0.92°F) above the 20th century average.
The global land surface temperature for 2010 tied with 2005 as the second warmest on record, at 0.96°C (1.73°F) above the 20th century average. The warmest such period on record occurred in 2007, at 0.99°C (1.78°F) above the 20th century average.
2010 is becoming the year of the heatwave, with record temperatures set in 17 countries.
Record highs have occurred in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – the three nations at the centre of the eastern European heatwave which has lasted for more than three weeks – but also African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries.
Temperatures in Moscow, which have been consistently 20C above normal, today fell to 31C (86F), and President Dmitry Medvedev cancelled a state of emergency in three out of seven Russian regions affected by forest fires.
Thousand of hectares of forest burned in the fires, killing 54 people and leaving thousands homeless. For days, Moscow was shrouded in smog, and environmentalists raised fears that the blaze could release radioactive particles from areas contaminated in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Wildfires have also swept through northern Portugal, killing two firefighters and destroying 18,000 hectares (44,500 acres) of forests and bushland since late July. Some 600 firefighters were today struggling to contain 29 separate fires.
But the extreme heat experienced in Europe would barely have registered in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Niger, Pakistan and Sudan, all of which have recorded temperatures of more than 47C (115F) since June. The number of record highs is itself a record – the previous record was for 14 new high temperatures in 2007.
The freak weather conditions, which have devastated crops and wildlife, are believed to have killed thousands of elderly people, especially in Russia and northern India. The 2003 European heatwave killed about 15,000 people.
Be worried, be concerned but don’t panic – you and I, all of us, have the collective power to sort this all out. More about this soon.
A guest post from Dr John W Lewis. John and I have known each other for some years now, both of us sharing a group aircraft that was based in Exeter, SW England. His areas of interest and competence are described here. But these days when John and I chat about the world in general and nothing in particular we often come back to the topic of innovation. So bear that in mind as John muses on the rather gloomy nature of a recent post on Learning from Dogs.
John writes:
John Lewis
Having read the recent Post, Group Human Insanity, my first instinct is that I have nothing particular worthwhile to say that has not been said before. But, of course, the time to apply minds is exactly when the answers don’t readily come to mind, so I will continue!
In a way, it’s probably a case of applying the sentiment on the old wartime poster, “Keep calm and carry on!” or as Winston Churchill said, “I’f you’re going through hell, keep going!”.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to change, because we do. It doesn’t mean that we don’t need to put a lot more effort into things that matter, because we do. But, as has been said before, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward, only looking backwards”. In other words, “it is very difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”.
Reading about this kind of thing in books, such as “Freakonomics” or “Drive” or “Switch” suggests that we don’t really understand the mechanism by which behavioural changes happen in populations, although some of the discoveries of Everett Rogers about the diffusion of innovations is relevant here. To refer to another book, there is probably going to be a lot of “Who moved my cheese?” hemming and hawing behaviour going on too.
All we really know is that when the environment (in the most general sense) is changing rapidly, populations are much better off if they are diverse in their characteristics and behaviour; also I believe (but am not sure) that it’s true to say that increased communication assists populations in adapting to changes in the environment.
So the most important thing to do is to let lots of different people do lots of different things in search of ways forward. If you like, we need to split up (within the multidimensional behavioural space in which we operate) into smaller groups to dodge the big boulders.
We need to communicate lots of information and lots of ways of interpreting and verifying not only the information itself, but also the operational implications of that information (which may be very different things). Hopefully this will reduce (but it will never eliminate) instances of mass movements (as in stampedes) based on partial information which misdirect substantial resources into activities that turn out to be dead ends.
If we don’t believe that there are any viable ways forward, then we might as well give up and just enjoy what’s left of the good times!
But if there are ways forward, then the way to find them is to have lots of people scouting ahead on lots of fronts and passing information around so that we maximise the chances of finding those ways forward, and having lots of other people striving to find ways to make use of that information and testing out those ways forward.
Whether this is all obvious, or not, I don’t know; but it probably is. One thing we do know is that telling people what to do is emphatically not going to work! Just look at some of the stories on the Breaking The Mould website.
Instead, we are better off when people are asking questions, gathering information and passing it around. I believe that if these behaviours are adopted in a population, as a result of ‘external’ pressures building up, then changes and innovations will inevitably occur, and this is about the best that we can do! Fortunately, I think that is what tends to happen anyway.
So, in a sense, as I referred to above: “Keep calm and carry on” (By the way, a Google search on that phrase unearths a variety of interesting stuff and variations such as “Get excited and make stuff”)
More close to man for more years than one could ever imagine.
A week ago, there was an article on Learning from Dogs entitled What is the dog? It was primarily based on the work of Dr. George Johnson; his details are here.
Anyway, last Thursday Pete N who is incredibly helpful in passing me items of interest, passed me a link to a series of videos that come under the collective name of Dogs Decoded. They were on the website Top Documentary Films itself an interesting site.
It looks as though the videos are due to be released as a single film later on this year, as this link suggests. Here’s how the three videos are introduced.
Dogs Decoded reveals the science behind the remarkable bond between humans and their dogs and investigates new discoveries in genetics that are illuminating the origin of dogs – with surprising implications for the evolution of human culture.
Other research is proving what dog lovers have suspected all along; dogs have an uncanny ability to read and respond to human emotions.
Humans, in turn, respond to dogs with the same hormone responsible for bonding mothers to their babies. How did this incredible relationship between humans and dogs come to be? And how can dogs, so closely related to fearsome wild wolves, behave so differently?
No more from me. Just find a quiet corner and watch the three videos by clicking on each link in turn. They will blow your mind.
A bit tight on time for today’s Post so just feast your eyes on this image.
Earthrise, from the cabin of Apollo 8
This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the Moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn. The photo is displayed here in its original orientation, though it is more commonly viewed with the lunar surface at the bottom of the photo. Earth is about five degrees left of the horizon in the photo. The unnamed surface features on the left are near the eastern limb of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The lunar horizon is approximately 780 kilometers from the spacecraft. Height of the photographed area at the lunar horizon is about 175 kilometers.
The Apollo 8 mission was the first time man had left the orbit of the Earth.
The photograph was taken on the 24th December 1968 by NASA astronaut William Anders. Within 18 months of this image being published, the environmental movement had started. Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.” Friedrich Nietzsche
I was minded to select this quote because an item in the UK Independent newspaper brought to light a new book from Lester R Brown, founder and President of Earth Policy Institute, called World on the Edge. Here’s what The Independent wrote (selected extracts by me, the full article is here ):
Like many environmentalists, Lester Brown is worried.
In his new book “World on the Edge,” released this week, Brown says mankind has pushed civilization to the brink of collapse by bleeding aquifers dry and overplowing land to feed an ever-growing population, while overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
If we continue to sap Earth’s natural resources, “civilizational collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when,” Brown, the founder of Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute, which both seek to create a sustainable society, told AFP.
“We’ve got to get our act together quickly. We don’t have generations or even decades – we’re one poor harvest away from chaos,” he said.
Global warming is also impacting the global supply of grain, which Brown calls the foundation of the world food economy.
Every one-degree-Celsius rise above the normal temperature results in a 10 percent fall in grain yields, something that was painfully visible in Russia last year, where a seven-week heatwave killed tens of thousands and caused the grain harvest to shrink by 40 percent.
Food prices soared in Russia as a result of the poor harvest, and Russia – which is one of the top wheat exporters in the world – cut off grain exports.
Different grains are staple foods in most of the world, and foods like meat and dairy products are “grain-intensive.”
It takes seven pounds (3.2 kilograms) of grain fed to a cow to produce a pound of beef, and around four pounds (1.8 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of cheese, Brown told AFP.
In “World on the Edge”, Brown paints a grim picture of how a failed harvest could spark a grain shortage that would send food prices sky-rocketing, cause hunger to spread, governments to collapse and states to fail.
Regular readers of Learning from Dogs will understand, because I bang on about it, how the behaviour of dogs over thousands and thousands of years gives us so many metaphors that we can use to rethink how we live, before it’s too late.
(Of course, it’s not just dogs, there are many ‘higher order’ pack animals such as horses, lions and dolphins. to name but a few, that instinctively live in harmony with their surroundings and also we shouldn’t forget some of the earlier human inhabitants of this planet; Eskimos, native North American Indians, Australian Aborigines, that lived similarly in balance with their environment.)
Anyway, back to the theme of this article.
Read a little about Lester, his biography is here. It starts:
Lester Brown
The Washington Post called Lester Brown “one of the world’s most influential thinkers.” The Telegraph of Calcutta refers to him as “the guru of the environmental movement.” In 1986, the Library of Congress requested his personal papers noting that his writings “have already strongly affected thinking about problems of world population and resources.”
Brown started his career as a farmer, growing tomatoes in southern New Jersey with his younger brother during high school and college. Shortly after earning a degree in agricultural science from Rutgers University in 1955, he spent six months living in rural India where he became intimately familiar with the food/population issue. In 1959 Brown joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service as an international agricultural analyst.
Brown earned masters degrees in agricultural economics from the University of Maryland and in public administration from Harvard. In 1964, he became an adviser to Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman on foreign agricultural policy. In 1966, the Secretary appointed him Administrator of the department’s International Agricultural Development Service. In early 1969, he left government to help establish the Overseas Development Council.
As I said, that was just the start; read the full biography here.
Having recently signed up to the EPI mailing list, this morning an email arrived talking further about Lester Brown’s latest book, World on the Edge. Here’s what was in that email.
World on the Edge: Quick Facts
JANUARY 25, 2011
We are facing issues of near-overwhelming complexity and unprecedented urgency. Can we think systemically and fashion policies accordingly? Can we change direction before we go over the edge? Here are a few of the many facts from the book to consider:
Winter temperatures in the Arctic, including Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia, have climbed by 4–7 degrees Fahrenheit over the last half-century. This record rise in temperature in the Arctic region could lead to changes in climate patterns that will affect the entire planet.
Half the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling as aquifers are being depleted. Since 70 percent of world water use is for irrigation, water shortages translate into food shortages.
In Sana’a, the capital of Yemen—home to 2 million people—water tables are falling fast. Tap water is available only once every 4 days; in Taiz, a smaller city to the south, it is once every 20 days.
The indirect costs of gasoline, including climate change, treatment of respiratory illnesses, and military protection, add up to $12 per gallon. Adding this to the U.S. average of $3 per gallon brings the true market price closer to $15 per gallon.
Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. coal use dropped 8 percent. During the same period,300 new wind farms came online, adding 21,000 megawatts of U.S. wind-generating capacity.
“We can get rid of hunger, illiteracy, disease, and poverty, and we can restore the earth’s soils, forests, and fisheries. We can build a global community where the basic needs of all people are satisfied—a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized.” –Lester R. Brown
In a very real sense it’s a book we should all be reading and if so minded you can buy it directly from the EPI here. But there is a health warning, so to speak. That is that each and every one of us has to take a stand to protect the world we live on, to preserve it for our children’s children, and to start the long haul towards sustainability.
Think about one small thing you can do this week to make a positive difference, and do it!
“By the inch it’s a cinch, by the yard it’s hard!”
I have received quite a few emails in response to a mailing sent out by me yesterday promoting the fabulous work being done by a dog rescue centre near Payson, here in Arizona. Thank you for letting me know you are adding your support to this great effort by Tara’s Babies to win $250,000 from Pepsi!
c. Have a Facebook page?
1. Click here
2. Click on “Vote for this Idea”
3. Click on “Login with Facebook account”
4. Click on “Vote for this Idea” again!
Some thought-provoking articles on the need, or otherwise, of continued growth.
Intellectually, most people, if they stopped and thought about it, would not challenge the absurdity of the notion that a finite rock in space, Planet Earth, can handle an infinite increase in the demands and resources of that finite planetary body, our home in space!
Yet the reality is very different. For many complex reasons, way beyond the competencies of this writer to fully explain, we, as in the peoples of Planet Earth, continue to behave as though there are no limits to the resources of this beautiful planet that is home for all of us.
Here are some extracts from some recent items that have passed across my ‘in-box’.
What If We Stopped Fighting for Preservation and Fought Economic Growth Instead?
by Tim Murray
Seriously.
Each time environmentalists rally to defend an endangered habitat, and finally win the battle to designate it as a park “forever,” as Nature Conservancy puts it, the economic growth machine turns to surrounding lands and exploits them ever more intensively, causing more species loss than ever before, putting even more lands under threat. For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks. Nature Conservancy Canada may indeed have “saved” – at least for now – two million acres, but many more millions have been ruined. And the ruin continues, until, once more, on a dozen other fronts, development comes knocking at the door of a forest, or a marsh or a valley that many hold sacred. Once again, environmentalists, fresh from an earlier conflict, drop everything to rally its defense, and once again, if they are lucky, yet another section of land is declared off-limits to logging, mining and exploration. They are like a fire brigade that never rests, running about, exhausted, trying to extinguish one brush fire after another, year after year, decade after decade, winning battles but losing the war.
Just read again the sentence, “For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks.” Powerful ideas.
Anyway, do read the article in full and see if it changes your attitude. Here’s how it ends.
Sir Peter Scott once commented that the World Wildlife Fund would have saved more wildlife it they had dispensed free condoms rather invested in nature reserves. Biodiversity is primarily threatened by human expansion, which may be defined as the potent combination of a growing human population and its growing appetite for resources. Economic growth is the root cause of environmental degradation, and fighting its symptoms is the Labor of Sisyphus.
The next article is from The Christian Science Monitor writing about how scientists are getting a new idea about the rate of loss of polar ice.
The seasonal cooling effect of light-reflecting snow and ice in the Northern Hemisphere may be weakening at twice the rate predicted by climate models, a new study shows, accelerating the impact of global warming.
A long-term retreat in snow and ice cover in the Northern Hemisphere is weakening the ability of these seasonal cloaks of white to reflect sunlight back into space and cool global climate, according to a study published this week.
Indeed, over the past 30 years, the cooling effect from this so-called cryosphere – essentially areas covered by snow and ice at least part of the year – appears to have weakened at more than twice the pace projected by global climate models, the research team conducting the work estimates.
This is a well-constructed article, easy to read with obvious conclusions. Towards the end, the author writes:
Snow appears to have its maximum cooling effect – reflecting the most sunlight back into space – in late spring, as the light strengthens but snow cover is still near its maximum extent for the year. Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has its biggest effect in June, before its annual summer melt-back accelerates, explains Don Perovich, a researcher at the US Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., and a member of the team reporting the results.
The final article that I want to include is one from the website Foreign Policy. I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing it in full because it strikes me as an extremely intelligent commentary on where mankind is in terms of our attitudes to growth.
Humanity has made great strides over the past 2,000 years, and we often assume that our path, notwithstanding a few bumps along the way, goes ever upward. But we are wrong: Within this century, environmental and resource constraints will likely bring global economic growth to a halt.
Limits on available resources already restrict economic activity in many sectors, though their impact usually goes unacknowledged. Take rare-earth elements — minerals and oxides essential to the manufacture of many technologies. When China recently stopped exporting them, sudden shortages threatened to crimp a wide range of industries. Most commentators believed that the supply crunch would ease once new (or mothballed) rare-earth mines are opened. But such optimism overlooks a fundamental physical reality. As the best bodies of ore are exhausted, miners move on to less concentrated deposits in more difficult natural circumstances. These mines cause more pollution and require more energy. In other words, opening new rare-earth mines outside China will result in staggering environmental impact.
Or consider petroleum, which provides about 40 percent of the world’s commercial energy and more than 95 percent of its transportation energy. Oil companies generally have to work harder to get each new barrel of oil. The amount of energy they receive for each unit of energy they invest in drilling has dropped from 100 to 1 in Texas in the 1930s to about 15 to 1 in the continental United States today. The oil sands in Alberta, Canada, yield a return of only 4 to 1.
Coal and natural gas still have high energy yields. So, as oil becomes harder to get in coming decades, these energy sources will become increasingly vital to the global economy. But they’re fossil fuels, and burning them generates climate-changing carbon dioxide. If the World Bank’s projected rates for global economic growth hold steady, global output will have risen almost tenfold by 2100, to more than $600 trillion in today’s dollars. So even if countries make dramatic reductions in carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, global carbon dioxide emissions will triple from today’s level to more than 90 billion metric tons a year. Scientists tell us that tripling carbon emissions would cause such extreme heat waves, droughts, and storms that farmers would likely find they couldn’t produce the food needed for the world’s projected population of 9 billion people. Indeed, the economic damage caused by such climate change would probably, by itself, halt growth.
Humankind is in a box. For the 2.7 billion people now living on less than $2 a day, economic growth is essential to satisfying the most basic requirements of human dignity. And in much wealthier societies, people need growth to pay off their debts, support liberty, and maintain civil peace. To produce and sustain this growth, they must expend vast amounts of energy. Yet our best energy source — fossil fuel — is the main thing contributing to climate change, and climate change, if unchecked, will halt growth.
We can’t live with growth, and we can’t live without it. This contradiction is humankind’s biggest challenge this century, but as long as conventional wisdom holds that growth can continue forever, it’s a challenge we can’t possibly address.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is the CIGI chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada.
As Rob Dietz of CASSE wrote in a recent email to me, “I’m a big Thomas Homer-Dixon fan. His book, The Upside of Down, is outstanding.”
“Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence” Hannah Arendt (1906-1975).
A rare request from Learning from Dogs asking if you will vote on behalf of a dog rescue centre.
Many who follow this Blog will know that my beautiful wife, Jean, is totally devoted to dogs, especially rescue dogs. Over the years that she and her previous husband Ben, who died in 2005, lived in Mexico, Jean must have rescued at least 70 dogs. Even today, we have 11 ex-rescue dogs enjoying a fabulous life in our mountain home here in Payson, Arizona.
So it was a big surprise to come across a dog rescue organisation called Tara’s Babies and find that their sanctuary is in our neighbourhood.
Photo by Wib Middleton
Here’s a description of the organisation taken from the local newspaper from September 9th, 2009.
By Alan R. Hudson
Gazette/Connection Correspondent
It has been nearly five years since Tara’s Babies Animal Welfare began rescuing animals displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Tara’s Babies operates a no-kill animal rescue and sanctuary “off the grid” at the Ellinwood Ranch, near Young.
A few dogs from the dark days of Katrina still remain and many more have been added since. This is no normal animal rescue however: It is operated by three very dedicated and compassionate ordained Buddhists.
Kunzang Drolma, a Buddhist Nun and the director of Tara’s Babies, graciously invited the Connection to spend the afternoon at the facility. When we arrived, she was (as we had anticipated) wearing her Shamtab—the traditional Buddhist robe—as she fed her canine adoptees.
From that article Drolma explains:
“Katrina was a catastrophe that threw it in everyone’s faces but ultimately, every day, hundreds of dogs and cats are being euthanized in shelters because there’s not enough space for them—just because they were abused, homeless, old or sick. And so that’s when we just moved straight into this process of being a no-kill rescue and sanctuary. We will never euthanize.”
What’s needed, explained Drolma, is a paradigm shift. One that is so profound that shelters will become a thing of the past. While euthanasia is something that Tara’s Babies does not agree with, the solution lies at a higher cultural level.
Frankly, my view is that we need solutions to so many of life’s problems to come from a ‘higher cultural level’ but this Post is about helping Tara’s Babies raise more funds to help their mission. It’s easy for any of you to help. You can do it now from your computer.
Go here – http://www.tarasbabies.org/pepsi_refresh.html and read. If you need convincing of the purpose watch this video (the one at that last web page or direct from YouTube as below).
And from that web-link you can read:
Feel free to copy and personalize the following paragraph to send to your friends:
“Have you heard about Tara’s Babies Animal Welfare, a No-Kill Dog Rescue and Sanctuary in Arizona? They started rescuing dogs left homeless and injured by Hurricane Katrina, after their founder, Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, felt compelled to act on seeing the devastation and suffering in the Gulf. They have continued rescuing dogs on death row in overcrowded shelters ever since.
Tara’s Babies Animal Welfare is working to win a $250,000 Pepsi Refresh grant by receiving the most votes for their project in the month of January. The grant will allow them to improve the care they provide to dogs at their beautiful, off-the-grid Sanctuary.
I am going to help Tara’s Babies Animal Welfare by voting for them daily in the Pepsi Refresh grant program and hope that you will too. Please visit www.tarasbabies.org to check them out. You will be able to sign up from their website to support their application to Pepsi Refresh.
The dogs need your vote!”
Here, here! It’s very quick to initiate and then each day all you need to do is to add your daily vote – a few seconds of your life exchanged for the rest of the life of a dog that, otherwise, would have nowhere to go!
Compassion community innovation
Learning from Dogs 