Category: Environment

A humour break!

My son’s last day with us is today.

I was in Bend with him on Friday and got an insight into the amazing world of skiing.

Skiing that was on the slopes of Mt. Bachelor, about 20 miles from Bend.

The timing was perfect as a major snow storm hit the region Thursday night, continuing on Friday, as the following photograph shows.

Friday 27th. View of the Pine Marten Express ski lift from the balcony of the West Village Lodge at 6,300 ft altitude.

I returned on Saturday on roads that made the journey ‘interesting’.

Heading South on OR-97. Picture taken around 9am some 10 miles south of Bend.

But Alex stayed on for a further day to benefit from brilliant weather behind the storm and able to share such scenes as this one!

Breath-taking view. — Breath-taking view from 7,200 feet.

All of which is a preamble to a very funny item that Alex sent to me.

A woman brought a very limp parrot into a veterinary hospital. As she lay her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird’s chest. After a moment or two, the Vet shook his head sadly and said, “I’m so sorry, Polly has passed
away.”

The distressed owner wailed, “Are you sure? I mean, you haven’t done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something.”

The vet rolled his eyes, shrugged, turned and left the room returning a few moments later with beautiful black Labrador. As the bird’s owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the dead parrot from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.

The vet led the dog out but returned a few moments later with a cat. The cat jumped up and also sniffed delicately at the ex-bird. The cat sat back, shook its head, meowed and ran out of the room. The vet looked at the woman and said, “I’m sorry; but like I said, your parrot is most definitely, 100% certifiably …dead.”

He then turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill which he handed to the woman. The parrot’s owner, still in shock, took the bill. “$150!” she cried. “$150 just to tell me my bird is dead?!”

The vet shrugged. “If you’d taken my word for it, the bill would only have been $20, but with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan, what did you expect?“

Best wishes.

Picture parade eighty-five

Not bad for a dog who will be the human equivalent of aged 96 this coming June.

Pictures of Pharaoh playing in our creek taken last Tuesday.

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What a magnificent animal he is! Thank you, Pharaoh, for being the dog you are!

Creativity from the heart.

A guest post.

When I started blogging back in July, 2009, I had not the slightest idea of what to expect. Frankly, if I had had any expectations, I still would have never realised the web of friendships that would result. In fact, it is only the sense, the strong sense, of friendship that flows from followers and friends of Learning from Dogs that keeps me at it. Many of those that follow this place are themselves bloggers and are followed by me in turn.

All of which is an introduction to an email that arrived some six days ago. This is what I read:

Hi Paul,
I posted this on my site, Scribble Darts from the Heart, yesterday. I was wondering if you would consider it as a guest post for your site. I know the actual event between polar bear and dog took place several years ago and you may have already shared something in this regard but I thought I would run it by you and see what you think.
Cheers, Mary 🙂

I dropped in to Mary’s blogsite and thought her idea of a guest post was wonderful. It is a very short guest post but you will love it! (And you will need a handkerchief nearby!)

ooOOoo

Miracle of Play

My Haiku today was inspired by the heartwarming story of a polar bear and sled dog that played together daily for over a week.

Here is that story.

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Trust, openness and friendship.

So much to learn from our beautiful animals.

Please help.

Reblogged from Exposing the Big Game

I follow the blogsite Exposing the Big Game. The bye-line on the home page explains, “Forget Hunter’s Feeble Rationalizations and Trust Your Gut Feelings: Making Sport of Killing Is Not Healthy Human Behavior“. Some of the posts that are published are incredibly difficult to read.

But this post does at least allow those that hate hunting for sport to register their feelings.

ooOOoo

Who the F**k Hunts Giraffes for Sport and How You Can Stop Them

Please sign and share these petitions.

Stop trophy hunting giraffes
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/929/929/857/stop-trophy-hunting-giraffes/
…
Stop hunting giraffes for sport
http://forcechange.com/12033/stop-hunting-giraffes-for-sport/

Stop any kind of safari hunting in South Africa
https://www.causes.com/actions/1742571-stop-any-kind-of-safari-hunting-in-south-africa

Stop the savage and sickening trophy and sport hunting
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-the-savage-and-sickening-trophy-and-sport-hunting/

Complete ban on trophy hunting in South Africa and a full census
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/complete-ban-on-trophy-hunting-full-census-carried-ou.html?

Stop the legal killing of wildlife in trophy hunting
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/stop-the-legal-killing-of-wildlife-stop-hunting/sign.html

End WWF partnership with pro-hunting lobby
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Yolanda_Kakabadse_is_WWFs_International_President_and_USAID_WWF_End_your_partnership_with_the_USA_ProHunting_Lobby_Group/

Ban lion farming and trophy hunting
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/147/069/549/ban-lion-farming-and-trophy-hunting/?cid=FB_TAF

Stop the canned hunting of large cats in South Africa
https://www.change.org/p/ms-lakela-kaunda-stop-the-canned-hunting-of-large-cats-in-south-africa

USF&WService save the lions from mass extinction
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/US_Fish_and_Wildlife_Service_Save_African_Lions/?sfmqQib

Zambian tourist board: to reinstate ban on hunting lions and leopards
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/

ooOOoo

If you have any issues with any of the links, just move on. Please sign just as many as you can.

There’s a bit of a smell!

The incredible power of the nose of a dog.

Young Oliver had an upset tummy during the night resulting in the bedroom carpet needing a little ‘sorting out’ after midnight. Thus I was very grateful that a human’s sense of smell is very much inferior to that of the dog!

Oliver sleeping in front of the wood-stove yesterday morning.

I couldn’t escape the irony that today’s post was inspired by an email from friend Dan Gomez. His email included the link to an article on the Brain Links website. It was called How a Dog Actually “Sees” the World Through Smell. Here’s how the article opened:

“The world of scents is at least as rich as the world of sight.”

Even though smell is the most direct of our senses and the 23,040 breaths we take daily drag in a universe of information — from the danger alert of a burning odor to the sweet nostalgia of an emotionally memorable scent — our olfactory powers are not even mediocre compared to a dog’s. The moist, spongy canine nose is merely the gateway into a remarkable master-machine which can detect smells in concentrations one hundred-millionth of what we humans require to smell something, and then transmute them into immensely dimensional and useful information about the world. So magnificent is the dog’s olfactory brawn — including the ability to sniff out skin, breast, bladder, and lung cancers with an astounding degree of accuracy and to literally smell fear — that to our primitive human perception it appears like nothing short of magic.

The article also included this short TED Talk but I have taken the liberty of including the paragraph that preceded the YouTube video.

How that neurobiological magic happens is what cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz — who heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College but has also produced a canon of invaluable insight on how we humans construct our impressions of reality — explains in this short animation from TED-Ed, based on her illuminating book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (public library):

Do go across and read the full article.

Mind you, referring back to our overnight doggy incident, I did find one paragraph slightly at odds with my personal views on the subject. It was this one:

We humans tend not to spend a lot of time thinking about smelling. Smells are minor blips in our sensory day compared to the reams of visual information that we take in and obsess over in every moment.

I’m here to tell you that at 1am yesterday morning, my sense of smell was anything other than a minor blip!

OK, before I close, I just want to alert all you dear readers to the fact that from later today until early March my son, Alex, is visiting us. His plans are to find somewhere in Oregon to enjoy some skiing but the very mild Winter so far may put a spanner in those works.

For obvious and natural reasons, writing posts for Learning from Dogs will not be a daily high priority. So if you read a number of posts previously published in earlier times you will understand why. Thank you.

Feeding the souls of man and dog!

A most fabulous idea of sharing poetry in the wild.

One of the great advantages of having a dog, or nine, is that there are endless opportunities to go walking with them.

The other day, Jean and I became aware of the most wonderful idea: The Stanza Stones Walk. Here’s how that walk is explained on the website:

THE STANZA STONES PROJECT

The Stanza Stones Walk: An Alternative devised by Mick Melvin.

A fifty mile upland walk from Marsden to Ilkley visiting the six Stanza Stones carved with poems written by Simon Armitage.

Why create an alternative walk?

I have created this walk as an alternative to the 47 mile trail created by the team working with the Ilkley Literature Festival, not because it is my intention to denigrate the walk which was produced by the team. Far from it, the trail which they created is a fine outing and one that will satisfy the desires of most people wishing to visit the Stanza Stones.

My purpose was to devise an upland walk linking the stones which did not stick to recognised footpaths or to existing well-known walking trails. This has not always been possible, since I felt that it was necessary to follow the Pennine way or Millennium Way on occasions, in order to visit significant places of interest i.e. Blackstone Edge.

In addition I believe that considering the walk was motivated by literature, it should visit the places that inspired some of the area’s finest writers, Haworth and Mytholmroyd. My objective is to create six more circular walks to each of the stones which will be suitable for a day’s walking. These walks will be posted on the site as I complete them.

The seven Stanza Stones, each carved with a poem written by the poet Simon Armitage, are at locations which in general follow the Pennine watershed. The Stanza Stones project, which started at Ilkley Festival in August 2010, is focused on poems specially written by Simon stirred by his response to the Pennine Watershed and the relationship between the landscape and language of Yorkshire. The seven stones will form a permanent moorland trail across the watershed from Ilkley to Marsden the home town of the poet. The Stanza Stones poems are reproduced here by kind permission of Simon Armitage.

Isn’t that an incredibly wonderful idea!

Here’s a photograph of one of the stones bearing Simon Armitage’s poetry.

Blackstone Edge

The third Stanza Stone has now been completed at Cow’s Mouth Quarry near Blackstone Edge. The quarry is situated about 20 minutes walk along the track (Pennine Way) which starts at the White House pub. The Pub is on the A58 road between Halifax and Littleborough just beyond Blackstone Edge Reservoir. As you approach the quarry from the White House, watch for a small stone arched bridge spanning the catch water drain on you right about 75 yards before the crags. The path from the bridge affords a close up view of the face carrying the carving. The poem can also be seen from the main path if you continue along the gravelled track. A circular walk can be made if you continue on the track, taking the right turn to White Holme Reservoir returning to Blackstone edge and the White House on a good path over Byron Edge.

RAIN

Be glad of these freshwater tears,
Each pearled droplet some salty old sea-bullet
Air-lifted out of the waves, then laundered and sieved, recast as a soft bead and returned.
And no matter how much it strafes or sheets, it is no mean feat to catch one raindrop clean in the mouth,
To take one drop on the tongue, tasting cloud pollen, grain of the heavens, raw sky.
Let it teem, up here where the front of the mind distils the brunt of the world.
© Simon Armitage 2010

Whether or not you will ever have the chance to enjoy this walk, do go across to the Stanza Stones website and just revel in the poetry and the nature.

You can find out more about the poet, Simon Armitage, here on The Poetry Foundation’s website.

Surely a walk to feed the souls of both man and dog!

Caring changes lives

Possibly the most important lesson to be learnt from dogs.

As is the way, a number of separate happenings seemed to be ‘singing from the same song sheet’ in bringing about today’s post.

Earlier yesterday morning Jean and I had a meeting with the executive director of an important charity that is helping the many homeless and disadvantaged young persons in this part of Oregon. For example, Jean and I were told that there were 300-500 homeless teenagers in Josephine County alone (Josephine County is where our home is.)

One of the ideas that was floated in the conversation was how kids are so loving to animals and whether our dogs and horses might help.

Then later, when back home, I recalled that over two years ago I published a post called Sticks and stones.

It wasn’t a long post and is republished now.

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Sticks and stones

I make no apologies for today’s post being more emotional and sentimental. The phrase ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me‘ is well known throughout the English-speaking world and surprisingly goes back some way. A quick web search found that in the The Christian Recorder of March 1862, there was this comment:

Remember the old adage, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me’. True courage consists in doing what is right, despite the jeers and sneers of our companions.

So if in 1862 the saying was referred to as an ‘old adage’ then it clearly pre-dated 1862 by some degree. A few days ago, Dusty M., here in Payson, AZ, sent me a short YouTube video called The Power of Words. I’m as vulnerable as the next guy to needing being reminded about what’s important in this funny old world.

Then I started mulling over the tendency for all of us to be sucked into a well of doom and gloom. Take my posts on Learning from Dogs over the last couple of days, as an example. There is no question that the world in which we all live is going through some extremely challenging times but anger and negativity is not going to be the answer. As that old reference spelt out so clearly, “True courage consists in doing what is right, despite the jeers and sneers of our companions.” So first watch the video,

then let me close by reminding us all that courage is yet something else we can learn from dogs.

In 1925, a ravaging case of diphtheria broke out in the isolated Alaskan village of Nome. No plane or ship could get the serum there, so the decision was made for multiple sled dog teams to relay the medicine across the treacherous frozen land. The dog that often gets credit for eventually saving the town is Balto, but he just happened to run the last, 55-mile leg in the race. The sled dog who did the lion’s share of the work was Togo. His journey, fraught with white-out storms, was the longest by 200 miles and included a traverse across perilous Norton Sound — where he saved his team and driver in a courageous swim through ice floes.

More about Togo another day.

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One of the comments left to that post back in November, 2012 was from Virginia Hamilton. Her website, Canine Commandos, is about just that: dogs helping youngsters. This is what Virginia wrote:

Our sermon today was about sticks and stones which is perfect timing because my sixth graders are throwing words at each other and it is hurting. So I looked up the phrase and found you. We were shown the video in a faculty meeting and since you tie into dogs I was hoping to find “the answer.” When you look at the website you’ll see out community project where I have twenty schools training in three shelters. One would think that because these kids are so loving to the animals that they could pass that kindness to each other. Any words of wisdom? Also check this out. Thank you, Virginia.

Now I would be the first to admit that there’s a difference between a homeless young person and a gifted young person. Yet the difference may not be so great. In this one sense: that caring for an animal changes lives and what young people, from all backgrounds and circumstances, need to learn is the power of unconditional love.

Not just caring for dogs, horses and cats, by the way.

Picture parade eighty-two

As I wrote last week:

Something a little different for this week. Mother Nature Network put out an email earlier in January that opened, thus:

Dear friend of Mother Nature, We all see the beauty in a sunset or in a gorgeous painting, but can you appreciate the art in bacteria, climate images or preserved animal remains? These beautiful examples show how for centuries, art and science have danced a well-choreographed routine. The result has been some breathtaking creativity.

The pictures were so wonderful that I have offered the first six for today and the balance in a week’s time.

So without further ado, here is the balance of those paintings.

Leonardo da Vinci

As if he wasn’t busy enough, Italian painter, architect, engineer, sculptor and inventor Leonardo da Vinci was also fascinated with anatomy. He was so intrigued by the human body that by the end of his life da Vinci claimed he had dissected more than 30 corpses. He filled pages and pages with incredibly detailed drawings of body parts, accompanied by thousands of explanatory notes. U.K. heart surgeon Frances Wells, author of “The Heart of Leonardo,” recalled seeing da Vinci’s drawings for the first time as a medical student, “I remember thinking that they were far better than anything we had in modern textbooks of anatomy,” he said. “They were beautiful, accurate, absorbing – and there was a liveliness to them that you just don’t find in modern anatomical drawings.”

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Earth as art

The Earth looks pretty darn cool from way, way up in the sky. Technically, NASA’s Landsat series of Earth observation satellites are critical for understanding scientific issues related to land use and natural resources. But really, they take some pretty remarkable images of mountains, valleys, islands and just general patterns in the forests and grasslands. Showing off this natural artistic sensibility, the U.S. Geological Survey created a series of “Earth as Art” images that are absolutely gorgeous. (And if you’re a fan, don’t miss NASA’s global maps, which are mesmerizing.)

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Climate science

Marco Tedesco, associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at City College of New York, sees the beauty in climate science. Coastal flooding. Cloud cover. Melting ice. To make climate work more attractive to the less weather-obsessed, he gathered colleagues from his school’s music, graphic design and video game design departments. The project, called Polarseeds, resulted in a multimedia art exhibit featuring photography, music and video, all centered on the beauty in climate science. Data on Greenland’s melting ice was transformed into music and the gallery featured photos of cracking ice.

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Botanical illustrations

Centuries ago, botanical drawings were key to helping people keep records of plants that had healing properties. The incredibly detailed illustrations of herbs and other plants were designed so that botanists and doctors could recognize the species for medicinal purposes. The oldest surviving example of botanical art, the Codex Vindebonensis, dates back to 512 A.D. The illustrations became more detailed and accurate as the centuries unfolded and now have taken on an artistic rather than medical purpose. There has been a recent resurgence in the art form through groups such as the American Society of Botanical Artists.

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Preserved animal art

Japanese artist Iori Tomita sees beauty in death. He blends chemistry and art as he explores the natural beauty of the skeletal system in sea life. In his series “New World Transparent Specimens,” Tomita chemically bleaches and then dyes preserved animal bodies of fish, turtles, seahorses and other creatures. A chemical mix breaks down the protein and muscle, but leaves the collagen so the bodies keep their forms. Dyes then color the bones and tendons of the specimens, which are preserved in brightly lit glycerin.

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Pharaoh’s serpent

Mercury thiocyanate is an inorganic chemical compound that makes for some pretty dramatic moving art when it’s ignited. In the science world, mercury thiocyanate (typically present as a white powder) has several uses in chemical synthesis, but its real claim to fame is in pyrotechnics. When it’s lit, the compound produces a long spiraling column of ash and smoke that looks like a moving snake. These used to be sold in firework stores, but now you’re only likely to see them in a chemistry class because of claims of toxicity. The modern version is a nontoxic “black snake” that makes a less spectacular — albeit safer — presentation.

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Back to wonderful photographs next Sunday.

Rain stops play.

Or, to be more precise, any form of post for today.

The weather forecast for Southern Oregon for yesterday included very significant rain.

They were not wrong.

By the time I sat down to think about Saturday’s post, around 2pm, we had already had 3.2 inches of rain (8.1 cm) and our attention, understandably, was on more important matters, such as the integrity of our driveway bridge over Bummer Creek.

So if you will forgive me, I’ll just offer a few pictures and leave it at that.

Starting with a picture that Jean expressly said I couldn’t publish!

I shall probably be denied access to the bedroom after showing you all how my wife likes to dress up!

What lucky horses to have such a devoted ‘Mum’ that feeds them every morning; whatever the weather.

Only one way in or out: over the bridge!

Neighbours who have been here much longer than us say they haven’t seen so much rain fall in such a short time.

Bummer Creek in full flood - this photograph is of the Creek just 50 yards upstream of the bridge. — Bummer Creek in full flood – this photograph is of the Creek just 50 yards upstream of the bridge.

This is an old dam for irrigation purposes. One doesn’t want to reflect too long that a cubic yard of water weighs a ton!

Luckily the house and immediate surroundings are elevated. — Luckily the house (off picture to the right) and immediate surroundings are elevated.

So that’s it for today.

Another picture parade for tomorrow assuming I haven’t been lynched by my lovely wife for showing that earlier photograph.

Oh, which reminds me! I took a couple!

She is rather cute, don't you think! — She is rather cute, don’t you think!

Voting for hope.

Considered reflections to yesterday’s post.

Yesterday, I published Bitter Lake ripples, a post that, in turn, was my response to the fabulous comments left by readers of my earlier post Oil, money, banks, guns and blood. The overall feeling I read in those comments was one of terrible uncertainty about these present times. Or in the words of Sue Dreamwalker in response to a comment left by Patrice Ayme.

I have to say Patrice.. I agree with your comment here… And yes people are not understanding the whole of what is going on.. The Truth of it would seem unbelievable..

Patrice, in a post published on Monday entitled Arm Ukraine, Disarm Bankers sent shivers down my spine with the suggestion, the strong suggestion, that Ukraine, if not handled properly by ‘the West’ could be a tipping point into another major war between Europe (and the USA?) and Russia. Here’s an extract from Patrice’s post:

The way it was said, in conjunction with Putin’s recent admission that Russian “volunteers” were fighting in Ukraine, is basically a declaration of war. On top of this, the head of the Eastern Ukraine rebels declared that he was raising a 100,000 men army. This means he expect tens of thousands of Russian troops (Putin’s “volunteers”) to cross the border.

This is not contained. Putin is billowing out of control, all by himself. One has to see what the combination of Putin’s dictatorial powers, media control, psychology and sinking economy leads to. Let me spell it out.

Once Putin has conquered Ukraine, he will push for more: he is already partly occupying Moldavia, WEST of Ukraine. Putin is also messing up with Hungary: there were street demonstrations about this, just yesterday, in Budapest. Putin uses the fact that Hungary is extremely dependent upon Russia’s fossil fuels. Merkel, who desperately wants to avoid war with Putin, flew to Budapest in emergency, to sort the situation out.

Patrice continues the warning of possible terrible times ahead in a subsequent post: Mental Inertia, Evil’s Friend, published yesterday.

Just as it takes a long time to erect, or change a vast building, so it is with the brain. The brain has inertia. Thus psychological inertia.

This mental inertia is why human beings tend to go on with a task, or with an attitude, once they got launched into it (a Jihadist laden with explosives just flew by).

Once a force is applied to an object, for example a propaganda to a brain, it tends to gather momentum, and develop ever more inertia.

Putin of course creates his own propaganda, and then can listen to it, reinforcing his deviance, in a self-reflective way. It’s all the more efficient if others repeat his ideas, and he listens to them. Actually that’s not just a problem with Putin, but with all Great Leaders. (And that’s one reason why Great Leadership has to be discontinued, and replaced by Direct Democracy.)

This amplifies the inertia.

By not fiercely opposing Putin, one collaborates with him. It is not just a question of sanctions. Putin is a liar, and an aggressive one, he should be publicly called for what he is.

Thus in terms of my own personal ideas, I freely admit to struggling to see things clearly. Simply because I find it very difficult to get to the heart of these international issues through not having access to clear, impartial commentators who know what they are speaking about. As Patrice infers much of the media is corrupted by self-serving agendas.

However, on balance, despite Patrice Ayme being a ‘nom-de-plume’ and me having no idea who the person behind the label really is, I do trust his (?) writings and believe that Patrice writes from a position of having very good access to the inner workings of the US Government. (I am not privy to anything to support my proposition; just my guess.)

The other commentator whose opinions and judgements are trusted by me in equal fashion is George Monbiot. Mr. Monbiot has been gracious to grant permission to me for his essays to be republished here on Learning from Dogs.

On the 28th January, Mr. Monbiot published an essay that in words better than I could write encapsulates my response to the comments left on my Bitter Lake ripples post. Here is that post from George Mobiot.

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The Lamps Are Coming On All Over Europe

28th January 2015

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th January 2015

Here is the first rule of politics: if you never vote for what you want, you never get it. We are told at every election to hold our noses, forget the deficiencies and betrayals and vote Labour yet again, for fear of something worse(1). And there will, of course, always be something worse. So at what point should we vote for what we want, rather than keep choosing between two versions of market fundamentalism? Sometime this century? Or in the next? Follow the advice of the noseholders and we will be lost forever in Labour’s Bermuda triangulation.

Perhaps there was a time when this counsel of despair made sense. No longer. The lamps are coming on all over Europe. As in South America, political shifts that seemed impossible a few years earlier are now shaking the continent. We knew that another world was possible. Now, it seems, another world is here: the sudden death of the neoliberal consensus. Any party that claims to belong to the left but does not grasp this is finished.

Syriza, Podemos, Sinn Fein, the SNP; now a bright light is shining in England too, as the Green party stokes the radical flame that Labour left to gutter. On Tuesday morning, its membership in England and Wales passed 50,000(2); a year ago it was less than 15,000. A survey by the website voteforpolicies.org.uk reports that in blind tests (the 500,000 people it has polled were unaware of which positions belong to which parties), the Green Party’s policies are more popular than those of any other. If people voted for what they want, the Greens would be the party of government.

There are many reasons for this surge, but one of them must be a sense of popular ownership. Green party policies are determined democratically. Emerging from debates led mostly by younger members(3), they feel made for their time, while those of the major parties appear trapped in the 1980s.

Let me give you a flavour of the political transformation the Green Party seeks. There would be no prime minister of the kind we have today, no secretaries of state. Instead, Parliament would elect policy committees which in turn appoint convenors(4). It would also elect a First Minister, to chair the convenors’ committee. Parliament, in other words, would be sovereign rather than subject to the royal prerogative prime ministers abuse, leaders would be elected by the whole body and its various parties would be obliged to work together, rather than engage in perennial willy-waving.

Local authorities would set the taxes they chose. Local currencies, which have proved elsewhere to have transformative effects in depressed areas (see Bernard Lietaer’s book The Future of Money(5)) would become legal tender(6). Private banks would no longer be permitted to create money(7) (at the moment they issue 97% of our money supply, in the form of debt). Workers in limited companies would have the legal right, following a successful ballot, to buy them out and create cooperatives(8), with funding from a national investment bank.

The hideously unfair council tax system would be replaced by land value taxation(9), through which everyone would benefit from the speculative gains now monopolised by a few. All citizens would receive, unconditionally, a basic income(10), putting an end to insecurity and fear and to the punitive conditions attached to benefits, which have reduced recipients almost to the status of slaves.

Compare this vision of hope to Labour’s politics of fear. Compare it to a party so mesmerised by the City and the Daily Mail that it has promised to sustain the Tory cuts for “decades ahead”(11) and to “finish that task on which [the Chancellor] has failed”: eradicating the deficit.

Far too late, a former Labour minister, Peter Hain, now recognises that, inasmuch as the books need balancing, it can be done through measures like a financial transaction tax and a reform of national insurance(12), rather than through endless cuts. These opportunities have been dangling in front of Labour’s nose since 2008(13), but because appeasing the banks and the corporate press was deemed more important than preventing pain and suffering for millions, they have not been taken. Hain appears belatedly to have realised that austerity is a con, a deliberate rewriting of the social contract to divert our common wealth to the elite. There’s no evidence that the frontbench is listening.

Whether it wins or loses the general election, Labour is probably finished. It would take a generation to replace the sycophants who let Blair and Brown rip their party’s values to shreds. By then it will be history. If Labour wins in May, it is likely to destroy itself faster and more surely than if it loses, through the continued implementation of austerity. That is the lesson from Europe.

Fearful voting shifts the whole polity to the right. Tony Blair’s obeisance to corporate power enabled the vicious and destructive policies the Coalition now pursues(14). The same legacy silences Labour in opposition, as it pioneered most of the policies it should oppose. It is because we held our noses before that there is a greater stink today. So do we keep voting for a diluted version of Tory politics, for fear of the concentrate? Or do we start to vote for what we want? Had the people of this nation heeded the noseholders a century ago, we would still be waiting for the Liberal Party to deliver universal healthcare and the welfare state.

Society moves from the margins, not the centre. Those who wish for change must think of themselves as the sacrificial margin: the pioneering movement that might not succeed immediately, but that will eventually deliver sweeping change. We cannot create a successful alternative to the parties that have betrayed us until we start voting for it. Do we start walking, or just keep talking about the journey we might one day take?

Power at the moment is lethal. Whichever major party wins this election, it is likely to destroy itself through the pursuit of policies that almost no one wants. Yes, it might mean five more years of pain, though I suspect in these fissiparous times it won’t last so long. And then it all opens up. This is what we must strive for; this is the process that begins in May by voting, regardless of tactical considerations, for parties offering a genuine alternative. Change arises from conviction. Stop voting in fear. Start voting for hope.

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/09/labour-tories-vote-osborne

2. Green Party office, by email, 27th January 2015

3. http://bright-green.org/green-movement/how-the-green-party-changed-itself-to-make-the-greensurge-possible/

4. http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/pa.html

5. http://www.lietaer.com/writings/books/the-future-of-money/

6. http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ec.html#EC678

7. http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ec.html

8. http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/in.html

9. http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ec.html

10. http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ec.html

11. http://press.labour.org.uk/post/87284550049/long-termism-in-public-finance-speech-by-chris

12. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/22/labour-radical-counter-greens-peter-hain

13. I was not the first to propose these alternatives to austerity Peter Hain has just discovered, but even I had got there by 2011: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/06/march-26-protest-aims-first-draft

14. http://www.monbiot.com/books/captive-state/

ooOOoo

I said that Mr. Monbiot’s words were much finer than my own. No better illustrated than by his closing three sentences:

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Who the F**k Hunts Giraffes for Sport and How You Can Stop Them

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“The world of scents is at least as rich as the world of sight.”

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Sticks and stones

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The Lamps Are Coming On All Over Europe

“Change arises from conviction. Stop voting in fear. Start voting for hope.”

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