The brown dog with her head nestled against my chest is Loopy. Like Phoebe, the black dog looking at the camera, they are dogs that Jean originally had rescued in Mexico.
Here’s Loopy’s story.
Loopy and Phoebe
When I first met Jean in December 2007 in San Carlos, Mexico, it was immediately clear that she was an animal lover extraordinaire! There were 13 dogs and 6 cats in her home and many other dogs in a fenced off compound not so far away from the house.
Abandoned and stray dogs in that part of Mexico were numerous, there was no humane society and no real care or interest from the Mexicans for these dogs. So many years ago, Jean decided to run her own unofficial dog rescue society, supported by more than a few Americans who had winter homes in San Carlos. Over the years, Jeannie and her team must have rescued and found homes for well over 50 dogs.
In my introduction to the post last Tuesday, Please Help a George, I wrote about how long it had taken for Loopy to bond with me, but Jean’s experience of Loopy goes way back before I entered their lives.
I mentioned above that Jean had a piece of land in San Carlos that she used as a rescue compound for her dogs. One morning, back in 2003, as usual she had gone to the compound to attend to her dogs. Jeannie noticed immediately, cowering in one corner, this young female, brown-haired dog, the dog had been tossed over the fence of the compound. Jean estimated that she was about a year old, hadn’t yet had any pups. The dog had very cold eyes, growled aggressively as soon as Jean approached her; clearly deeply traumatised.
Jean set out food and water before the dog, hoping that whatever had traumatised the dog would soon abate. The dog was named: Loopy!
Despite the fact that Loopy wouldn’t mix with the other dogs in the compound, she was not mean. But the days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and still Loopy would not allow Jean to get close to her. One could only imagine the degree of cruelty that must have been metered out to Loopy – or, rather, one couldn’t imagine it!
Then, one day, when Jean went to the compound, Loopy was amongst the other dogs. Loopy cautiously came up to Jean, sniffed her feet and legs and then, miraculously, allowed Jean to gently stroke her head and back. Loopy’s cold, angry eyes were now soft and brown; Loopy had melted. For obvious reasons, Loopy would never be available for adoption and soon moved into the main house.
When I became a permanent part of the Mexican household in 2008, Loopy was deeply suspicious of me. I was given the cold, hard-eyed stare from Loopy and any attempt by me to touch her was returned with growling, fanged teeth. There were a number of instances where I collected teeth rips across my hands from Loopy.
The aggression towards me lasted a long time, about a year. But then one day, quite unexpectedly, Loopy decided that I was friend, not some reminder of a demon foe from her past. She trusted me, first with strokes and cuddles and then with the most passionate and trusting embraces. I love her so much.
One could wax lyrical about love, patience and trust, but I won’t. The photograph below says it all. We really do have so much to learn from dogs!
A chance dip into the BBC News website a few days ago allowed me to come across an article about the vanishing glaciers in the Himalayas. It just about broke my heart. Here’s what it said,
Rivers of ice: Vanishing glaciers
Stunning images from high in the Himalayas – showing the extent by which many glaciers have shrunk in the past 80 years or so – have gone on display at the Royal Geographical Society in central London.
Between 2007 and 2010, David Breashears retraced the steps of early photographic pioneers such as Major E O Wheeler, George Mallory and Vittorio Sella – to try to re-take their views of breathtaking glacial vistas.
The mountaineer and photographer is the founder of GlacierWorks – a non-profit organisation that uses art, science and adventure to raise public awareness about the consequences of climate change in the Himalayas.
Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya can be seen at the RGS in London until 11 November 2011. Admission free.
All photos courtesy GlacierWorks and Royal Geographical Society. Map copyright Jay Hart. All images subject to copyright.
Music courtesy KPM Music. Audio slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 11 October 2011.
Then follows a 3:59 film made by David Breashears that is so beautiful as well as so upsetting. I don’t have a way of linking to the film directly but it’s easy to watch, just click here and be very moved.
David Breashears has his own website, from where one can learn that,
David Breashears is an accomplished filmmaker, adventurer, author, mountaineer, and professional speaker. Since 1978, he has combined his skills in climbing and filmmaking to complete more than forty film projects.
In 1983, Breashears transmitted the first live television pictures from the summit of Mount Everest, and in 1985 became the first American to reach the summit of Mount Everest twice.
In the spring of 1996, Breashears co-directed and co-produced the first IMAX film shot on Mount Everest. When the now infamous blizzard of May 10, 1996 hit Mount Everest, killing eight climbers, Expedition Leader Breashears and his team were in the midst of making this historic film. In the tragedy that soon followed, Breashears and his team stopped filming to provide assistance to the stricken climbers. After returning to Base Camp, Breashears and his team then regrouped and reached the summit of the mountain on May 23, 1996, achieving their goal of becoming the first to record IMAX film images at Earth’s highest point. Breashears has said that if there is a lesson to be learned from the May 1996 tragedy, it is that for him, success that year was not to be found in reaching the summit, it was that everyone on his team returned safely. The film, titled EVEREST, premiered in March 1998.
As was written in that BBC item, David is the founder of GlacierWorks which is full of beautiful, albeit tinged with sadness, images of the glaciers featured in that BBC item. As the GlacierWorks website explains on the home page,
The Mighty Himalayan Glaciers are Vanishing.
The rate of recession is unprecedented, accelerating and, without some remedy to the problem of climate change, unstoppable. GlacierWorks is a non-profit organization that uses art, science, and adventure to raise awareness about the consequences of climate change in the Greater Himalaya.
Read that first sentence again, “The rate of recession is unprecedented, accelerating and, without some remedy to the problem of climate change, unstoppable.” [my emphasis]
There are a number of videos on YouTube if you search for David Breashears, none up to the beauty of the slide show in the BBC item so don’t miss that at all. However, the following is also worth watching,
OK, a change of topic but one that connects with the underlying message about the disappearing glaciers. This was an article in the American The Nation newspaper written by Naomi Klein, following her speech to the demonstrators at Occupy Wall Street. The article really should be read in full but I wanted to highlight just the following words from Naomi,
The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.
We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.
The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.
Thanks to Bill Mitchell of Billy Blog for linking me to the Naomi Klein speech.
We can afford to build a decent, inclusive society and we must – not tomorrow but now. Start with your local community, think about transition. Some of our grandchildren will be mountaineers – let them see the beautiful rivers of ice.
The ways of our carbon-consuming past & present cannot be continued into the future.
In many ways that sub-heading above is not controversial for millions of citizens of Planet Earth. The challenge is in changing behaviours, ending old habits of energy use, and working towards a truly sustainable relationship with the only planetary home we have!
Like many others, Jean and I are of the view that the Keystone XL Pipeline is not required. Last week there was an update from EPI about this subject illustrating how the pipeline is not required. That update is published in full, as follows,
Plan B Updates
OCTOBER 06, 2011
U.S. Gasoline Use Declining: Keystone XL Pipeline Not Needed
Lester R. Brown
As the debate unfolds about whether to build a 1,711-mile pipeline to carry crude oil from the tar sands in Canada to refineries in Texas, the focus is on the oil spills and carbon emissions that inevitably come with it. But we need to ask a more fundamental question. Do we really need that oil?
The United States currently consumes more gasoline than the next 16 countries combined. Yes, you read that right. Among them are China, Japan, Russia, Germany, and Brazil. (See data.)
But now this is changing. Not only is the affluence that sustained this extravagant gasoline consumption eroding, but the automobile-centered lifestyle that was considered part of the American birthright is fading as well. U.S. gasoline use has dropped 5 percent in four years.
Four key developments are set to further reduce U.S. gasoline use: a shrinking car fleet, a decline in the miles driven per car, dramatic mandated future gains in new car fuel efficiency, and the shift from gasoline to electricity to power our cars.
The U.S. fleet appears to have peaked at 250 million vehicles in 2008. From 1994 through 2007, new-car sales were in the range of 15–17 million per year. Since then they have totaled 10–13 million per year, and they are unlikely to top 14 million again. Retirees likely will exceed sales of new cars throughout this decade.
The contraction that began when the fleet dropped from 250 million in 2008 to 248 million in 2010 is likely to continue. Sales of new cars are not matching those of earlier years in part because the economic prospect has dimmed and in part because we are still urbanizing. Today 82 percent of us live in urban areas where cars are becoming less essential.
On top of urbanization, we also have a change in the manner in which young people socialize. For teenagers in rural communities a half century ago, getting a driver’s license and something to drive—a car, a pickup, or even a farm truck—was a rite of passage. That’s what everyone did.
This too is changing. Today’s teenagers, most of whom grew up in an urban setting, socialize through smartphones and the Internet. For many of them, a car is of little interest. The number of licensed teenage drivers in this country—the car owners of the future—has dropped from a peak of 12 million in 1978 to 10 million today.
Cities are also being redesigned for people. Among other things, this means cities are becoming pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly, with ready access to public transit.
Many cities are building a cycling infrastructure of bicycle trails, dedicated bike lanes, and bike racks for parking. Bike-sharing programs are showing up, too. In Washington, D.C., the Capital Bikeshare program that began in 2010 has expanded to 116 stations with 1,100 bicycles. Within the first year, some 16,000 riders signed up for annual membership in the program. Denver and Chicago have similar bike share programs. And New York City is about to launch a huge program of its own.
The second reason that gasoline use is falling is the decline in miles driven per car. This is partly in response to economic uncertainty and the high price of gasoline. When gas costs nearly $4 a gallon, people think twice before jumping in a car and using a gallon of gasoline to pick up a half-gallon of milk.
A third trend that is reducing gasoline use is the rising fuel efficiency of the U.S. automobile fleet. New cars sold in 2008 averaged 27 miles per gallon. But in early 2009, President Obama raised the average fuel efficiency standard so that those sold in 2016 will get 36 miles per gallon. Additional standards announced in 2011 mean that new cars sold in 2025 will use less than half as much gasoline as the 2008 models.
The game changer in reducing gasoline use is going to come as drivers shift from gasoline to electrically powered vehicles, including plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. General Motors recently introduced the Chevrolet Volt, designed to run largely on electricity, and Nissan unveiled the Leaf, an all-electric vehicle. Beyond these, Toyota is accepting orders for the plug-in version of its Prius hybrid, the pacesetter in fuel efficiency. It will be followed by a steady flow of new plug-in hybrid and all-electric car models coming to market.
Although these electrically powered vehicles are typically more costly to buy, the day-to-day cost of operating them is extraordinarily low. An analysis by Professor Michael McElroy at Harvard indicates that running a car on wind-generated electricity could cost less than the equivalent of 80-cent-a-gallon gasoline.
With the auto fleet shrinking, with the average car being driven less, with the fuel use of new cars to be cut in half by 2025, and with electricity starting to replace gasoline as a fuel, why do we need to build a pipeline to bring crude oil from Canada’s tar sands to oil refineries in Texas? The answer is we don’t.
Lester R. Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge.
There’s a footnote that I would like to add from the Center for Biological Diversity (great website!) that came out in a recent newsletter.
Here it is,
Lawsuit Seeks to Halt Work on Controversial Keystone XL Pipeline
Keystone Pipeline
The hotly contested Keystone XL pipeline hasn’t been approved for construction, but federal officials don’t seem to care; they’ve allowed the pipeline company to mow down 100 miles of native prairie grasslands in Nebraska to clear the way — before any public hearings were held on whether Keystone XL should move forward at all.
The Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth filed a lawsuit in federal court in Omaha Wednesday to halt that work. Specifically, we’re challenging decisions by the State Department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to allow work to begin before a decision’s been made on the pipeline or the public hearings, which look like little more than a sham at this point.
If approved, TransCanada’s 1,700-mile pipeline would carry up to 35 million gallons of oil a day from tar sands in Canada to refineries in Texas. Not only will this project add fuel to the global climate crisis, but the pipeline will cut across Nebraska’s legendary Sandhills, hundreds of rivers and streams, and the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides drinking water for millions of people. TransCanada’s existing pipeline, called Keystone 1, has reportedly leaked 14 times since it started operating in June 2010.
A canine charitable opportunity that deserves wide support.
The details that follow strike a chord with me, strike a chord in a big way. When I first came to live with Jean back in 2008 it was clear that this wasn’t going to be a normal relationship. Why? Because, at that time Jean had 12 dogs living with her in San Carlos, Mexico and my arrival, together with my Shepherd dog, Pharaoh (see home page for a picture of him), took that number to 13. Jean’s dogs were all Mexican rescues; she also ran her own local humane society in San Carlos and over the years had found homes for literally dozens of dogs.
One of those Mexican rescues was a dog called Loopy, who had been terribly treated by local Mexicans. The consequence when I arrived, a stranger in the middle of Loopy’s life with Jean, was that Loopy was very aggressive towards me; my hands have small scars to bear witness to the number of nips Loopy launched in my direction.
It took over a year before I was able to just let my hand ‘accidentally’ brush her side. Slowly Loopy’s trust in me built up until now I can press my face to her face and cuddle her for ages. (To underline the love that Loopy bestows on me, I will get Jean to take a picture and publish that before the end of the week.) So with that in mind, let me turn to the details recently sent to me by friend and colleague, Dapinder Singh, from England.
———————
George and loving owner, Ian.
This is George. He was in an English dog pound and condemned to death.
He had been very badly abused, one eye blinded by what was thought to be a kick, he trusted no-one and had rejected all human contact. He was desperate and in despair.
After an exhaustive search for anyone who take on the rescue of George, we (as in Doris Banham) took him into our care just a day before he was due to be euthanased. His veterinary problems were easier to deal with than the mental ones. His eye was damaged beyond repair causing him constant pain so it had to be removed, teaching George to trust again was much harder.
That journey back to trusting humans was long, George had suffered severe and terrible abuse, but there was no question of giving up on him and slowly but surely he began to live again as we fought to undo the wrongs that had been done to him. After some months with us, a wonderful family came to the rescue and offered George his ‘forever’ home where he found the love that he so deserved. His family are completely devoted to him.
His story, however, could have been a very different one were it not for the work of the team at Doris Banham’s. Below is an extract written by the lovely family who adopted him and from our fantastic volunteer, Sheila, who helped bring George back to life again.
“Hi, Sheila. Here is a shot of George in his new garden. He is settling down very well and seems to be very happy. I will keep you posted as to his progress. All the best Liz and Ian.”
There were a number of photographs sent to Sheila, however I have taken editor’s liberty and moved them to the foot of the article – I want you to stay with this to the point where you can see how to help. Here’s Sheila’s reply,
“WELL THESE BOUGHT ME TO TEARS , OUR GEORGE , THIS IS TRUE RESCUE , THIS IS ALL DOWN TO YOU DORIS BANHAM NOTHING ELSE TO SAY …” SHEILA X.
Are there other Georges out there? You bet! Far too many of them, right across the world. So let’s all do something to help these special creatures, who show us humans just what unconditionally love feels like.
Friday 4th November, 7.30pm – Come to the Hellaby Hall Hotel, Old Hellaby, Maltby, Yorkshire, S66 8SN
Call for tickets now to the Pound Dog Ball telephone number (UK) 07772 538513 or email pogpublications@yahoo.com Full details here.
Please help all the Georges out there by supporting this Charity Fundraising Event: Black Tie, Dinner/Dance at Hellaby Hall, Rotherham, 7.30pm, on Friday 4th November. It’s a don’t miss night…..3 course meal, live entertainment all night and dancing ’til late!!!! It’s going to be a great night.
If you can’t make the Ball but would like to send in a donation then please post a cheque, made out to Pound Dog Ball, to the following address:
c/o Jennifer Smith
Clumber Lodge,
50 Hemingfield Road
Wombwell, S73 0LY.
Or if you prefer an electronic donation, further details are:
Pound Dog Ball
A/C 31542265
Sort 40-45-29 (HSBC)
The account is a charity account, set up only for this event. Once the money has been paid to the charities the account will be closed.
I know that Dapinder, and everyone else involved in helping these precious animals, sends you their heartfelt thanks.
Finally, more photos of George enjoying life as all dogs should. What a wonderful story, an honour to be able to publish it, and promote the Ball, on Learning from Dogs. Please help.
Sometimes when I want to clear a space in my head I like to either listen to music or Draw… This week I had some spare time on my hands and so the Sketch pad and Pastels came out once again..
And here is the result.
I hope you enjoy the result of this German Shepherd Dog I drew in Pastels..
I wasn’t brought up with Dogs my family always had cats, But I just love German Shepherds, well all four legged Dogs and Cats and animals .. But I remember one German Shepherd which was rather special… her name was Xena who belonged to a dear friend..
Xena
She sent me this picture of her some years ago now.. Sadly Xena she is no longer with us…My earliest memory of a German Shepherd was when I was 6 or 7 years of age. I remember I had to walk past the Vicarage gates to the infant school in our village where this huge GS was usually safe behind… His bark I think was worse than his bite.. But to a young girl I was scared of him.. One day the gate was open and he bounded out as I went past, and he barked loudly at me..
My heart raced and I think I started to cry.. as I was on my own.. I remember a woman coming to my aid and saying he wouldn’t hurt me.. as she calmed me down..
The German Shepherd was ushered back behind the gate, But not before someone had let me stroke him and take away my fear.. Or I may have been afraid of dogs in the future..
Funny how when one’s mind is trying to empty itself.. It then becomes full of past memories.. That are triggered by something else..
Have a Great weekend all of you, and Sorry if I didn’t get around to visit all of you but your on my to do list.. Next week as I’m working this weekend..
Maybe less is more is really at the heart of our thirst for something more
A number of disparate recent experiences seem to have an underlying common thread.
See if these strike you in a similar fashion.
Yesterday, Joelle Jordan wrote about joy, about the wonderful relationship that dogs have with the world around them. As Joelle wrote,
Joy is a difficult commodity to come by these days. I don’t mean entertainment, I don’t mean a good laugh, I mean pure joy, where, even just for a single moment, all worries and doubts, frustration and anger are lifted as though by Atlas.
Like so many other humans in our world, I often find myself in a constant state of stress. There always seems to be something to worry about, whether it’s money, job fulfilment, the state of my relationships, getting the house cleaned, finding time to get to the market, and more. If given the chance, I know we all could spend nearly all of our waking hours (and some of our sleeping hours, too) worrying about something. We spend so much time on the many things that inevitably work themselves out, and so little time on things that will create a memory and a crystal moment of joy.
My little dog Charlie spends his time in the completely opposite fashion; spending his waking hours seeking joy, and committing less time to things that worry him.
Charlie seems to exist normally in three states of being; content, happy and utterly joyful.
How many of us can echo Charlie’s existance in our own lives?
Then last Sunday, Father D’s sermon spoke about our tendency to develop habitual behaviours and rarely challenge the point of them.
The truth is that we get used to doing things a certain way and keep doing them without ever thinking of what we are doing. We say things in the liturgy without even thinking of what we are saying. I’m sure many people utter the words in the Book of Common Prayer without thinking of the theology behind the words, or the relationship between church and state that they express.
Later on,
There was a desire for “something more” but it was hard to put a finger on what it was. I realized from these conversations that we are involved today in a time of intense searching. Few of us are satisfied with what the church and society have served up.
The honest among us will readily admit we lead fractured lives – with a disembodied spirituality on one side, and a soulless daily existence on the other. We are desperate for something more, for a faith with the power to transform both ourselves and our world.
“…. we are involved today in a time of intense searching“! That smacked me right in the eye!
These are clearly challenging times with mankind facing increasing odds of an ecological disaster of Old Testament proportions, and much of the western world on the cusp of a long and difficult recession. It is so easy to go on “doing things a certain way and keep doing them without ever thinking of what we are doing” while we wait for the leaders of our societies to fix our problems.
The truth is that we have to be the first to change, to question what we do on a daily basis and amend it if it is not truly healthy for us and for the planet. As was said in that sermon, “It means bringing forth each day the fruits of the Spirit: Love, joy, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
Go back and read yesterday’s Post and reflect on how many of those ‘fruits’ are the ways of dogs.
My final connection with the theme of today’s essay is with a recent series from the BBC called ‘Status Anxiety’. The programmes are still on YouTube and the first 10 minutes is below,
Status Anxiety discusses the desire of people in many modern societies to “climb the social ladder” and the anxieties that result from a focus on how one is perceived by others. De Botton claims that chronic anxiety about status is an inevitable side effect of any democratic, ostensibly egalitarian society. De Botton lays out the causes of and solutions to status anxiety.
Or if you prefer, all 2 hours 23 minutes may be watched on Top Documentary Films, described thus,
De Botton's book
Why doesn’t money (usually) buy happiness? Alain de Botton breaks new ground for most of us, offering reasons for something our grandparents may well have told us, as children.
It is rare, and pleasing, to see a substantial philosophical argument sustained as well as it is in this documentary. De Botton claims that we are more anxious about our own importance and achievements than our grandparents were. This is status anxiety.
Alain quotes philosophical writings, such as Democracy in America, a report by Alexis de Tocqueville on his visit to the USA in 1831. De Tocqueville noted that American equality, notable in those times, was accompanied by a climate of envy.
We jump to present-day USA, and see what, to de Botton, are some awful examples ofThe American Way. A Christian preaches get rich. A steelworker tells of his insecure life in an industry being closed down through others’ love of money.
Our protagonist points out the advantage of high status: those with high status will enjoy the care and attention of the world. Then joins this advantage with the illusion, orattempt at meritocracy in the USA, mentioning Jefferson’s notion of an aristocracy of talent.
Some of the messages towards the end of the programme are very thought-provoking indeed. Let me draw this all together.
If you own a dog, or a cat, or any pet, stop a while today and see how their simplicity of life brings them so much more. Naturally, we can never live life in the same way that our pet does but there are strong metaphors that carry equally strong messages for us. Less is more.
Now watch the last part of Status Anxiety even if you didn’t watch the first segment above, Reason? Watch and it will become clear.
I know that expression from my days as a private pilot. It makes such obvious sense, especially in a single-engined light aircraft with one pilot on board. It’s all about risk.
Frederick Herzberg, the famous American psychologist, coined the term ‘hygiene factor’. It was the second part of a two-factor approach to the management of people. According to Herzberg’s theory, people are influenced by two sets of factors, motivation factors and hygiene factors. More background on this aspect here.
To me, as I reflect on the messages offered in the Sceptical Voices article, Part One and Part Two, the concepts of risk and hygiene seem totally appropriate to the topic of AGW, Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Whether or not AGW is a valid theory behind the rapid change in global warming is utterly irrelevant. It is the risk to humanity that matters. There is absolutely no harm done from assuming that AGW is happening and that feedback processes run a grave risk of tipping planetary conditions out of control, and getting that wrong.
On the other hand, assume that AGW is such an uncertain concept that it really isn’t wise to adjust our life styles, and getting that wrong would endanger the human species.
Think of being on a commercial airline flight and you become aware that one of the two pilots in the cockpit is incapacitated through food poisoning. No doubt that you, with all your fellow passengers, would vote for an immediate diversionary landing. It’s to do with risk.
From the perspective of Herzberg, a co-ordinated program by the world’s leading governments to tackle AGW might also improve the overall motivation of their peoples in a whole manner of ways.
Yes, question all we want, yes, there are other important issues to resolve in the world, but WHAT IF “Climate Change/Global Warming“ is for real, what then?
Dan wrote also in that Part One piece,
And by “peel-back-the-onion”, I mean that any ardent, independent researcher should publish both sides of the story as a matter of course. Especially in regards to global warming.
But publishing both sides of the story is not the argument. The argument is the risk to humanity of doing nothing, and getting it wrong.
That well-respected weekly newspaper The Economist had a recent article about the melting of Arctic ice, from which is quoted,
Arctic sea ice is melting far faster than climate models predict. Why?
Sep 24th 2011 - from the print edition
ON SEPTEMBER 9th, at the height of its summertime shrinkage, ice covered 4.33m square km, or 1.67m square miles, of the Arctic Ocean, according to America’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC). That is not a record low—not quite. But the actual record, 4.17m square km in 2007, was the product of an unusual combination of sunny days, cloudless skies and warm currents flowing up from mid-latitudes. This year has seen no such opposite of a perfect storm, yet the summer sea-ice minimum is a mere 4% bigger than that record. Add in the fact that the thickness of the ice, which is much harder to measure, is estimated to have fallen by half since 1979, when satellite records began, and there is probably less ice floating on the Arctic Ocean now than at any time since a particularly warm period 8,000 years ago, soon after the last ice age.
That Arctic sea ice is disappearing has been known for decades. The underlying cause is believed by all but a handful of climatologists to be global warming brought about by greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet the rate the ice is vanishing confounds these climatologists’ models. These predict that if the level of carbon dioxide, methane and so on in the atmosphere continues to rise, then the Arctic Ocean will be free of floating summer ice by the end of the century. At current rates of shrinkage, by contrast, this looks likely to happen some time between 2020 and 2050.
Re-read the sentence, “The underlying cause is believed by all but a handful of climatologists to be global warming brought about by greenhouse-gas emissions.” In particular, “by all but a handful of climatologists” Think of risk.
That article, which should be read in full, concludes thus,
A warming Arctic will bring local benefits to some. The rest of the world may pay the cost.
Indeed, the rest of the world may pay the cost! As I wrote, it’s all about risk.
So whether or not one wants to believe every word of that Economist article is irrelevant. Or whether one should have believed, or not, the article in New York’s The Sun newspaper back in 2007,
By SETH BORENSTEIN, Associated Press | December 12, 2007
WASHINGTON — An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.
Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by the Associated Press.
“The Arctic is screaming,” a senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo., Mark Serreze, said.
Last year, two scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040. This week, after reviewing his own new data, a NASA climate scientist, Jay Zwally, said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”
So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models? “The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,” Mr. Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal, said. “Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.” [My emphasis, PH]
So, in conclusion, scepticism is healthy and is an important aspect of open debate within an open society, part of determining truth, however challenging that simple concept might be.
But eventually one needs to take a position, to take a stand on the really important issues in life and in the case of climate change the risk of being too sceptical, too cautious is to put the lives of future generations at stake. For me, and I guess for tens of thousands of others, that is a risk too far.
A fascinating point of view of the relationship between humans and animals.
Jean and I were at our regular gardening college class yesterday. It was all about the growing of vegetables. OK, I can hear you thinking, what on earth does that have to do with today’s topic? Simply because the tutor, Cayci V., mused at the start of her lesson how gardeners were great animal lovers and then proceeded to list all the animals she and her husband kept at their home in Globe, about an hour from Payson, Arizona. Cayci admitted to having 5 dogs, 15 cats, 2 emus, 2 llamas, numerous chickens. She also had 2 bison that recently died having been poisoned by Oleander cuttings. Anyway, to the article.
A recent article on the BBC News Magazine was about the need for humans to have contact with animals. It was presented by John Gray who is a political philosopher and author of the book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism which argues that free market globalization is unstable and is in the process of collapsing! H’mmm. John is also the author of the book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, a book that was described by the British Observer newspaper thus,
There is unlikely to be a more provocative or more compelling book published this year than Straw Dogs. A long-time scourge of the delusions of global capitalism, John Gray is one of the most consistently interesting and unpredictable thinkers in Britain. He is unpredictable because, unlike most political commentators, he never ceases to question the underlying assumptions of his own beliefs and prejudices.
Anyway, I’m at risk of digressing, as many of you will regularly notice! The article by John Gray on the BBC News website was published over a couple of weeks ago and, therefore, I feel it not too great a copyright sin to reproduce it in full on Learning from Dogs. It’s a fascinating article.
Why does the human animal need contact with something other than itself, asks John Gray.
Many years ago an eminent philosopher told me he’d persuaded his cat to become a vegan. To begin with I thought he was joking. Knowing a bit about cats, I couldn’t take seriously the idea that they’d give up their predatory ways.
“You must have provided the cat with some pretty powerful arguments,” I said jokingly. “It wasn’t as difficult as you may think,” he replied rather sternly.
He never explained exactly how the transformation was achieved. Was his cat presented with other cats that had converted to veganism – feline role models, so to speak? Had he prepared special delicacies for his cat – snacks that looked like mice but were made of soya, perhaps?
Beginning to suspect that the philosopher might after all be serious, I asked if the cat went out. He told me it did. That answered a part of my puzzlement. Evidently the cat was supplementing its vegan diet by hunting, natural behaviour for cats after all.
I was still a little perplexed though. Cats tend to bring their hunting trophies back home and I wondered how the philosopher had missed seeing them. Had the cat hidden them out of sight? Or were the cat’s trophies prominently displayed but disregarded by the philosopher, marks of atavistic feline behaviour that would eventually disappear as the cat progressed towards a new kind of meat-free life?
The conversation tapered off and I never did get to the bottom of the mystery. The dialogue did set me thinking. Evidently the philosopher thought of the cat as a less evolved version of himself that, with a lot of help, could eventually share his values. But the idea that animals are inferior versions of humans is fundamentally misguided.
Each of the millions of species that evolution has thrown up is different and particular, and the animals with which we share the planet aren’t stages on the way to something else – ourselves. There’s no evolutionary hierarchy with humans perched at the top. The value of animals – or as I’d prefer to say other animals – comes from being what they are. And it’s the fact that they are so different from humans that makes contact with them so valuable to us.
Human qualities
Some philosophers – not many it must be admitted – have in the past understood this. The 16th Century French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, loved cats because he knew he would never be able to enter their minds. “When I play with my cat,” he asked, “how do I know she is not amusing herself with me rather than I with her?”
Montaigne didn’t want his animal companions to be mirrors of himself, he wanted them to be a window from which he could look out from himself and from the human world.
Never more than partly domesticated, cats are never fundamentally humanised. Montaigne found them lovable for precisely this reason, it wasn’t that he was suggesting we should emulate cats. Wiser than the philosopher who believed he’d converted his cat to veganism, he understood that the good life means different things for animals with different natures. What he questioned was the idea that one kind of life, the kind humans alone can live, is always best.
It’s true that cats don’t have some of the capacities we associate with morality. They seem to lack empathy, the capacity of identifying with the emotions of others. This may explain what has often been described as cruelty in their behaviour, toying with captured mice for example. Attributing cruelty to cats seems a clear case of anthropomorphism – the error of projecting distinctively human qualities onto other species.
Cats are not known to display compassion, but neither do they inflict pain and death on each other in order to gratify some impulse or ideal of their own. There are no feline inquisitors or suicide bombers. Pedants will say that this is because cats lack the intellectual equipment that is required to formulate an idea of truth or justice. I prefer to think that they simply decline to be enrolled in fanaticism, another peculiarly human trait.
Dogs seem to be capable of showing human-like emotions of shame, but though they are more domesticated they still remain different from us. And I think it’s their differences from us, as much as their similarities, that makes them such good companions.
Whatever you feel about cats and dogs, it seems clear that the human animal needs contact with something other than itself. For religious people this need may be satisfied by God, even if the God with whom they commune seems too often all-too-human. For many landscape gives a sense of release from the human world, even if the land has been groomed and combed by humans for generations, as it has in England.
The contemplation of field, wood and water intermingling with wind and sky still has the power to liberate the spirit from an unhealthy obsession with human affairs. Poets such as Edward Thomas and Ted Hughes have turned to the natural world in an attempt to escape a purely human view of things. Since they remained human and used human language in the attempt, it’s obvious that they couldn’t altogether succeed. It’s also obvious that searching for a way of looking at the world that’s not simply human expresses a powerful human impulse.
The most intense example of this search I know is that recorded by John Baker in his book The Peregrine. First published in 1967 and recently reissued, the book is seemingly a piece of nature writing which slowly reveals itself as the testament of someone struggling to shed the point of view of a human observer.
Renewed humanity
Baker records his pursuit of two pairs of peregrines, which had arrived to hunt in the part of East Anglia where he lived. Alone he followed the birds for over 10 years. Concentrating the decade-long quest into a single year in order to recount it in the book, he writes of the peregrine: “Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom of the hunting life.”
He tells us that he came late to the love of birds. “For years I saw them only as a tremor on the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion.”
In time the human observer seemed to be transmuted into the inhuman hawk. “In a lair of shadow,” Baker writes, “the peregrine was crouching, watching me… We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men.”
Note how Baker switches suddenly from describing the hawk watching him to describing how “we” flee from humans. Baker found a sensation of freedom in the feeling that he and the hawk were fused into one. Sharing in the “exaltation and serenity” of the birds’ life he could imagine that he’d shed his human identity, at least for a time, and could view the world through hawks’ eyes.
Of course he didn’t take this to be literal truth. He knew he couldn’t in the end be anything other than human. Yet he still found the pursuit of the peregrine deeply rewarding, for it opened up a temporary exit from the introspective human world.
John Baker’s devotion to the peregrine hadn’t enabled him to see things as birds see them. What it had done was to enable him to see the world through his own eyes, but in a different way. His descriptions of the landscape of East Anglia are exact and faithful to fact. But they reveal that long-familiar countryside in a light in which it looks as strange and exotically beautiful as anything in Africa or the Himalayas. The pursuit of a bird had revitalised his human perceptions.
What birds and animals offer us is not confirmation of our sense of having an exalted place in some sort of cosmic hierarchy, it’s admission into a larger scheme of things, where our minds are no longer turned in on themselves. Unless it has contact with something other than itself, the human animal soon becomes stale and mad. By giving us the freedom to see the world afresh, birds and animals renew our humanity.
A fascinating, beautiful and incredibly thought-provoking essay.
There are a few sayings that I would have loved to have authored! ‘We are what we eat‘, is one of them. ‘The world reflects back what we think about most‘, is another.
But anyway, this article is not about sayings, it’s about food. And to get straight to the point, I’m going to republish something that recently appeared on the Chris Martenson blog.
Joel Salatin, proprietor of Polyface Farms and highly-visible champion of sustainable farming, thinks modern humans have become so far removed from a natural connection to the food they eat that we no longer have a true understanding of what “normal” food is.
The rise of Big Ag and factory farming over the past century has conditioned us to treat food mechanically (as something to be recoded and retooled) vs. biologically. And we don’t realize that for all our industrialization and optimization, we’re actually getting less yield and less nutrition than natural-based processes can offer.
Whether we like it or not, the arrival of Peak Oil is going to force us to realize that our heavily-energy intensive practices can’t continue at their current scale. And with world population still increasing exponentially, we’ll need to find other, more sustainable ways of growing our food.
“What we view today as “normal,” I argue, is simply not normal. Just think about if you wanted to go to town 120 years ago. If you wanted to go to town, you actually had to go out and hook up a horse. That horse had to eat something, which means you had to have a patch of grass somewhere to feed that horse, which meant you had to take care of some perennial in order to feed that horse in order to go to town. And so throughout history, you had these kinds of what I call ‘inherent boundaries,’ or brakes, on how much a single human could abuse the ecology.
And today, during this period of cheap energy, we’ve been able to extricate ourselves from that entire umbilical, if you will, and just run willy-nilly as if there is no constraint or restraint. And now we are starting to see some of the outcome of that boundless, untied progression. And so the chances are, the way to bet, is that in the future we are going to see more food localization, we are going to see more energy localization, we are going to see more personal responsibility in ecological lifestyle decisions, because it’s going to be forced on us to survive economically. We are going to have to start taking some accounting of these ecological principles.”
Joel, his family, and the team at Polyface Farms dedicate themselves to developing environmentally, emotionally, and economically-enhanced food prototypes and advocate for duplicating their production around the world.
In this interview, Chris and Joel explore what constitutes truly sustainable agriculture and the reasons why our current system has departed so far from it, as well as practical steps individuals can take to increase their own personal resiliency around the food they eat (in short: “find your kitchen,” source your food locally, and grow some yourself).
There’s a recording of the interview and a transcript, both of them from here. Want to know more about Joel Salatin? Keep reading!
And if you think this is exciting and a powerful reminder of the speed at which the ‘New World’ is coming to us, then stop by tomorrow and read a recent article from Rob Hopkins from Transition Culture – will blow your mind away!
Reflections on these present times, concluding part.
I closed yesterday with, So maybe there’s a blindness with humans, and then set out the characteristics of that blindness. One of those characteristics being,
Our obsession with how things are now prevents us from reflecting on those signs that indicate changes are under way, even when the likely conclusions are unmistakeable. The ecological and climatic changes being the most obvious example of this strange blindness that mankind possesses.
Let’s move this on a little. The arguments from a wide range of scientists are overwhelmingly in favour of the proposition that mankind is using vastly more resources from the planet than the planet can provide. Take oil. This graph show past and projected oil production for the whole Earth out to 2050, less than 40 years away.
Here’s an extract from that website which I encourage you to read in full,
The part before 2007 is historical fact. The part that comes afterward is an ASPO extrapolation.
This graph is worth careful attention as a lot of world history is written into it. Note the steep rise in oil production after World War II. Note that 1971 was the peak in oil production in the United States lower 48. There is a sliver of white labled Arctic oil. That is mostly Alaskan Prudhoe Bay oil, which peaked in 1990. Prudhoe Bay was almost big enough to counteract the lower 48 peak of 1971. The sliver is very narrow now. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 is very visible. The oil produced by non-OPEC countries stayed nearly constant while OPEC production nearly halved. The embargo caused the world economy to slow. But the high cost of energy spurred the development of energy efficient automobiles and refrigerators and a lot of other things. Note the effect of the collapse of the Russian economy in 1990 on Russian oil production. Note the rapid increase in oil production when the world economy boomed near the end of the twentieth century. Oil was $12 a barrel at that time. Note that European (North Sea) oil peaked in 2000. Note especially what would have happened if the 1973 embargo had not occurred. It is possible that the world would now be on the steep part of the right side of the Hubbert curve.
Take population growth. Here’s a graph that shows that going through seven billion, which is due shortly, is likely to be way short of the eventual peak. Likely peak might be in the range of eight to ten billion! Just take a look at that graph,
Take global warming. Here’s a graph from NASA, from which I quote,
The five warmest years since the late 1880s, according to NASA scientists, are in descending order 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2006. (reported in the year 2007!)
No apologies for bashing you around the head with these graphs and figures – most people have a good sense about these aspects of our life on this planet. But, in a very real sense, that’s the point.
The point that despite powerful and obvious evidence, mankind has great difficulty accepting obvious trends and understanding that whatever ‘today’ feels like, ‘tomorrow’ is almost certainly not going to be more of the same.
At the risk of hammering this point to death, here are two pictures and some text to show how quickly ‘today’ changes and becomes ‘tomorrow’.
Scientist left speechless as vast glacier turns to water
THESE images show the astonishing rate of break-up of an enormous glacier in north Greenland – from ice to water in just two years.
The before and after photographs, which left a Welsh scientist who led the 24-month project “speechless”, reveal the worrying effects of climate change in an area previously thought too cold to be much affected.
The Petermann glacier pictured August, 5th, 2009Petermann glacier, pictured from same position, July 24th, 2011
Dr Alun Hubbard, a reader at Aberystwyth University’s Centre for Glaciology, returned from the Petermann Glacier in north-west Greenland a month ago, but did not see the stark images documenting the changes until this week.
He said: “Although I knew what to expect in terms of ice loss from satellite imagery, I was still completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the break-up, which rendered me speechless. It was just incredible to see. This glacier is huge, 20km across, 1,000m high.”
“It’s like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it’s full of water.”
“It’s quite hard to get your head around the scale of the change. To be able to see that, everything changed in such a short period of time, I was speechless.”
Do read the full article on the Wales Online website here.
Stay with me a little longer, if you will.
Yves Smith in her wonderfully broad and addictive Blog, Naked Capitalism, had the first part of a powerful interview with Satyajit Das published on the 7th. Here are a couple of extracts,
It’s amazing how much money you can make just shuffling paper backwards and forwards. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece praising John Paulson who made a killing from the subprime disaster as an entrepreneur. But what did he make? What did he leave behind? Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued: “I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence. US financial services increased its share of value added from 2% to 6.5% but is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”
Just let that quote from Paul Volcker stay with you for a while. Satyajit goes on to say,
Management and directors of financial institutions cannot really understand what is going on – it’s simply not practical. They cannot be across all the products. For example, Robert Rubin, the former head of Goldman Sachs and Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, encouraged increased risk taking at CitiGroup. He was guided by a consultant’s report and famously stated that risk was the only underpriced asset. He encouraged investment in AAA securities assuming that they were ‘money good’. He seemed not to be aware of the liquidity puts that Citi had written which meant that toxic off-balance sheet assets would come back to the mother ship in the case of a crisis. Now, if he didn’t understand, others would find it near impossible. And I’m talking about executive management.
Non executives are even further removed. Upon joining the Salomon Brothers Board, Henry Kaufman, the original Dr. Doom found that most non-executive directors had little experience or understanding of banking. They relied on board reports that were, “neither comprehensive … nor detailed enough … about the diversity and complexity of our operations.” Non-executive directors were reliant “on the veracity and competency of senior managers, who in turn … are beholden to the veracity of middle managers, who are themselves motivated to take risks through a variety of profit compensation formulas.”
Kaufman later joined the board of Lehman Brothers. Nine out of ten members of the Lehman board were retired, four were 75 years or more in age, only two had banking experience, but in a different era. The octogenarian Kaufman sat on the Lehman Risk Committee with a Broadway producer, a former Navy admiral, a former CEO of a Spanish-language TV station and the former chairman of IBM. The Committee only had two meetings in 2006 and 2007. AIG’s board included several heavyweight diplomats and admirals; even though Richard Breeden, former head of the SEC told a reporter, “AIG, as far as I know, didn’t own any aircraft carriers and didn’t have a seat in the United Nations.”
In other words, there is no shortage of information from all corners of the world to show, with very little doubt, that the last few decades have seen unprecedented mistakes by national governments, mistakes in corporate governance, a lack of understanding of economic fundamentals, poor financial and social management, and on and on and on.
But practically all of us, and I mean all of us, didn’t see it at the time, didn’t see where it was heading and only now, when it is full in our faces, do we get it and see it for what it has really been, a long period of over two decades where the ‘me‘ has been more important than the ‘us‘.
That me versus us even being promoted, if that’s the right word, by a British Prime Minister twenty-five years ago. That quote from Margaret Thatcher back in 1987, “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” (Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987)
Let me draw this all together, yesterday’s part and this concluding part.
There is significant evidence, real hard evidence, that the patterns of mankind’s behaviours of the last few decades cannot continue. Simply because mankind will go over the edge of self-extinction. Darwin’s evidence and all that! We have to accept that humans will see the bleedin’ obvious before it is too late. We have to keep the faith that our species homo sapiens is capable of huge and rapid change when that tipping point is reached, so eloquently written by Paul Gilding in his book, The Great Disruption, reviewed by me here. We have to embrace the fact that just because the world and his wife appears to be living in total denial, the seedlings of change, powerful change, are already sprouting, everywhere, all over the world.
So let’s welcome those changes. Let’s nurture those seedlings, encourage them to grow and engulf our society with a new richness, a new fertile landscape.
Let’s embrace the power of now, the beauty of making today much better and letting go of tomorrow.
For today, I am in charge of my life,
Today, I choose my thoughts,
Today, I choose my attitudes,
Today, I choose my actions and behaviours.
With these, I create my life and my destiny.
It’s very difficult to make predictions, especially when they involve the future!
Learning from Dogs 