A big vote of thanks to Paul for plugging away for so long without any contribution from me. Unlike Paul who is retired, well retired in the sense of a paying job, I have a family, a dog (Jess) and the usual set of household overheads to cover, so the week is very much a working week for me. Ergo, I shall never be able to contribute to Learning from Dogs in the same manner as Paul but a regular contribution is assured. To get things rolling again, I want to re-publish an article that I wrote on my business blog the other day.
Removing the fear of the unknown
Seeing the light
I’ve been working with most of my clients recently through painful transformations brought about by the economic downturn.
An interesting metaphor really because since the first wave of uncertainty triggered panic, first noticed in the UK banking system, I have been picking up on that uncertainty that feels like it’s stalking the globe and has been for some time. Recent stock market crashes have simply exacerbated this and that, coupled with the riots taking place in major cities in the UK, make for pretty disturbing reading.
Interestingly, I, too, have been aware of an underlying fear that was difficult either to name or source.
It has been rather like a deep river in that whilst the surface feels slow-moving, currents are moving things powerfully below.
So this ‘fear’ has caused a few household changes.
1) We now are the proud owners of 12 chickens. Our youngest son and I have dug up the back lawn and planted vegetables and built a poly tunnel.
2) We have also installed a wood burning cooker. Right back down to the base of Maslow’s triangle really!
Maslow's triangle of needs
These feelings have brought about such change everywhere and I wonder seriously whether we will ever return to what was; indeed would we want to?
I might not have mentioned it in previous blogs but as well as an engineering background, in latter years, I have focused on how success in business is linked directly to aspects of relationships and how we are in our relationships with others, so things like integrity, self-awareness and the ability to see the point of view of others, and modify our approach appropriately.
To inform this, some 7 years ago, I embarked on an MA in Core Process Psychotherapy, primarily to work on myself so that I could be the best I could be in my relationships, in and out of work.
The point I’m trying to make is that the same panic I notice in many of the companies I work in, and in me, is based on fear of the unknown and on a lack of trust in all its forms. I’ve deliberately underlined that last phrase because it is so incredibly important.
The truth is that we get more of what we focus on.
So we can choose to focus on the constant news of more difficulties, hardship and redundancies, or we can focus on what is working.
In the workplace this positive focus has been pulling people together across functions and sites and pooling resources and ideas.
When we realise we’re not doing this alone it’s amazing how much lighter a load can feel and how much more inspired we all feel.
I also notice how humour begins to flow and what a powerful antidote for doom and gloom that is.
Transformation is never easy but the rewards far exceed the effort put in ten fold.
So what is it going to be? Are we all going to bow down to the god of Doom & Gloom, fear and anxiety, heaping more and more gifts around it, or are we going to start noticing and focusing on the other neglected god – that of relationship, joy, trust, abundance and lightness?
Whatever the future holds for us all a belief in our inherent ability to adapt and change and focus on the greater good rather than fear, anxiety, greed and selfishness is the only sustainable way forward.
Yesterday, I introduced a 50-minute film concerning the famous biologist E O Wilson, Lord of the Ants which, as well as being a wonderful tribute to Prof. Wilson, also allowed us humans to have a better understanding of our deeper human issues.
Coincidentally, around the same time of watching that film, I saw an article on the Grist website that referred to some research published in Nature magazine. This what I read, first from Grist, reprinted with the kind permission of Libby S., Senior Marketing Manager of Grist.
Scientists have been doing studies for years that show you are more likely to suffer from mental illness if you live in a city. What they haven’t figured out is why.
Now, researchers in Germany have conducted experiments that they believe might begin to get at the neuroscience behind the crazy-making nature of urban areas.
Publishing in the journal Nature, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg’s Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, looked at how social stress affected the minds of subjects, some city-dwellers and some not.
If we then turn to that article in Nature (to get access you will need to arrange prior free sign-up) we get to read this,
City living marks the brain
Neuroscientists study social risk factor for mental illness.
Epidemiologists showed decades ago that people raised in cities are more prone to mental disorders than those raised in the countryside. But neuroscientists have avoided studying the connection, preferring to leave the disorderly realm of the social environment to social scientists. A paper in this issue of Naturerepresents a pioneering foray across that divide.
Using functional brain imaging, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg’s Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, showed that specific brain structures in people from the city and the countryside respond differently to social stress (see pages 452 and 498). Stress is a major factor in precipitating psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.
The work is a first step towards defining how urban life can affect brain biology in a way that has a potentially major impact on society — schizophrenia affects one in 100 people. It may also open the way for greater cooperation between neuroscientists and social scientists. “There has been a long history of mutual antipathy, particularly in psychiatry,” says sociologist Craig Morgan at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. “But this is the sort of study that can prove to both sides that they can gain from each others’ insights.”
I feel uncomfortable about reproducing more of this fascinating study without some formal permission to do so, therefore, if you want to read the full article then do sign up for access at the Nature website.
Back to the article from Grist written by Sarah Goodyear, Grist’s cities editor,
I called Dr. Meyer-Lindenberg to ask him more about the implications of his experiment, and what he thought might be the cause of heightened sensitivity to social stress among urban dwellers.
“On the neural level, we find two things,” he told me. “A, the neural effects are completely dissociated, so current urban living only affects the amygdala, urban upbringing only affects the cingulate. And B, these areas are associated with these illnesses. The amygdala is sort of a danger center, and it’s critically important for fear. And it is clear that the amygdala is a major player in depression. The cingulate is a prefrontal area regulating negative emotion, and it’s known to be one of the earliest areas affected by schizophrenia.”
So what accounts for the hyperactivity of the amygdala-cingulate circuit in urban dwellers? “That exact circuit that we found hyperactive has also shown to be activated when someone comes too close to you and crowds your personal space,” Meyer-Lindenberg told me.
But he cautioned against inferring that mere density of population is at fault. “It’s still speculation,” he said. “There could be myriad components of the urban experience that might or might not be bad for you from the point of your risk for mental illness. No one really knows. People are annoyed by noise or by traffic, or it could also be lead, or air pollution, but there’s no evidence base to say this is an important factor, this is not an important factor. Therefore there’s no basis for urban planning that’s grounded in human biology, at least with regard to mental illness.”
Later in the Grist article, Dr. Meyer-Lindenberg told Sarah Goodyear,
“Social status is closely linked to socioeconomic variables. What we found in our imaging studies is that if your social status becomes labile, and especially if you are in danger of losing it, a very similar brain circuit becomes active. There is a convergence of socially relevant risk factors on that circuit.”
Different types of urban environments might also affect people in different ways. “It’s very different if you live in Manhattan and you sort of live in a series of overlapping villages, if you will, or if you live in a city like Sao Paolo, in which no such microstructure is immediately available to you, or if you live in a large spread-out area,” said Meyer-Lindberg.
The social connections that are fostered in more walkable neighborhoods could help city dwellers from losing it. “A previous study found that that the size of your social support network is actually correlated to the size of the exact brain circuit we found in this study,” Meyer-Lindenberg said. “So that’s a protective factor. The more friends you have, the bigger those brain structures are.”
Already, more than half the human population lives in cities. That proportion will only increase. New cities are springing up all over the developing world, some built to order, some completely unplanned. The form they take could be crucial.
More knowledge about what exactly drives people could lead to concrete solutions that would make for better mental health — the same way the discovery of how disease was spread by waterborne germs finally ended the scourge of cholera in London.
“I think it would be important to make cities better, given that we can’t escape cities, given the dynamics of urbanization,” said Meyer-Lindenberg. “That’s a reality that we’re not going to get rid of.”
Fascinating article made doubly interesting by E O Wilson’s lifetime study of ants!
Underlining what 30,000 years of domestication produces!
This video, just under 6 minutes long, may well be ‘old news’ to many dog owners but still very much worth a viewing.
Scamp
And while I think about, if you didn’t see the video about Scamp and his ability to identify, and then comfort, humans very close to death, when it first appeared on Learning from Dogs, then do drop back to here and watch it. It’s from the Extraordinary Animals series from Channel Five on British television and just 22 minutes long.
Unlike my recent review of Capt. Luis Montalvan’s book Until Tuesday which came about as a result of an invitation from the UK publishers, Headline Publishing, this review of Mr. Gilding’s book is totally off my own bat. I should also declare that I have recently been in email contact with Paul Gilding with some pleasant outcomes. To the review.
The way ahead.
Regular readers of Learning from Dogs will know that I have been making recent references to this book, which I have now finished reading. On the 25th I quoted from the book in a post that I called The blame game. I used a quote from Chapter 5, Addicted to Growth, namely “Growth goes to the core of the society we have built because it is the result of who we are and what we have decided to value.”
Then the next day again when writing about Tim Bennett’s movie, What a Way To Go, when I reflected on Paul Gilding’s opinion that, ” the quicker that mankind recognises the massive levels of denial presently in place, the quicker that mankind will commit to the scale of change that is required“.
Now if mankind’s efforts to change to a sustainable way of life were proportional to the number of books, films and essays written about the subject then, frankly, the task would be complete. There’s an awful lot out there! Here’s a list of the books that I have read in the last few years:
The Human Side of Enterprise – Douglas McGregor
Motivation and Personality – Abraham Maslow
The Power of Pause – Terry Hershey
Earth in the Balance – Al Gore
The Spectrum of Consciousness – Ken Wilber
Politics Lost – Joe Klein
Why America Doesn’t Work – Chuck Colson & Jack Eckerd
The Art of Happiness – HH Dalai Lama & Howard C Cutler
Eaarth – Bill McKibben
Stabilizing an Unstable Economy – Hyman P. Minsky
The Next 100 Years – George Friedman
World of the Edge – Lester Brown
and finally
The Great Disruption – Paul Gilding
And, of course, this doesn’t even scratch the number of online journals, essays and articles that have been read in conjunction with writing hundreds of posts on this Blog.
So what’s the point?
On p.260, Chapter 20 Guess Who’s in Charge?, Paul Gilding writes,
We need to fully acknowledge the challenging times and inevitable suffering ahead but stay focused and determined to move forward and past this. Easy to say, harder to do.
So yes, it is challenging to know how to respond to all this and what to do personally. It is easy to see what the world should do, but what should you do?
but what should you do? Talk about a thump on the back of the head!
This is about me!
Of all the books that have influenced how I see the world and my opinions, the one book that has rammed home to me that this is about me, about my attitudes and behaviours, is The Great Disruption. For a long time I haven’t needed convincing that man is screwing up the planet. For ages, I’ve been sure that our greed and materialism were fundamentally incompatible with the planet. I have been so good at ‘talking the talk’ ….. but ….
But the way that Mr. Gilding has so comprehensively approached every aspect of how my past behaviours have been incompatible with the future needs of my little grandson, Morten, (and all the grandchildren in the world) is powerfully inspiring. I now totally and utterly believe that only I am in charge of making a difference.
Why The Great Disruption touched me in this way when so many other books and articles haven’t done so isn’t clear. Perhaps it was in the opening paragraphs?
The earth is full.
[skip one paragraph]
This means things are going to change. Not because we will choose change out of philosophical or political preference, but because if we don’t transform our society and economy, we risk social and economic collapse and the descent into chaos. The science on this is now clear and accepted by any rational observer. While an initial look at the public debate may suggest controversy, any serious examination of the peer-reviewed conclusions of leading science bodies shows the core direction we are heading in is now clear. Things do not look good.
These challenges and the facts behind them are well-known by experts and leaders around the world, and have been for decades. But despite this understanding, that we would at some point pass the limits to growth, it has been continually filed away to the back of our mind and the back of our drawers, with the label “Interesting – For Consideration Later” prominently attached. Well, later has arrived.
I nodded silently in agreement when reading that.
Was it the opening paragraph to Chapter 4, Beyond the Limits – The Great Disruption?
The plans we have been making for our economies, our companies, and our lives have all been based on a key assumption that is clearly wrong. This assumption is that our current economic model will carry on unless we choose to change it – in other words, no action means more of the same.
This resonated strongly with me because I happen to believe, without any specialist economic skills to my name – just a gut sense, that the economic situation now afflicting so many economies across the world is not cyclical but the start of a breakdown of the policies and behaviours of the last 20 years or more. In other words, the Great Disruption was in my face already! As is written on p. 87 in Chapter 6, Global Foreshock – The Year That Growth Stopped,
My view, firmly held at the time and since, is that 2008 was the year that growth stopped. It was the year, as Thomas Friedman said, “when Mother Nature and Father Greed hit the wall at once”.
The Power of a New Future
But, in the end, the real power that I found in this book was the strength of Gilding’s argument that we will change, that seeing the future as hopeless is wrong, that man has the ability to commit to huge change when there is no alternative. Ergo, p121 Chapter 9 When the Dam of Denial Breaks,
To argue we are naturally greedy and competitive and can’t change is like arguing that we engage naturally in murder and infanticide as our forebears the chimps do and therefore as we did. We have certain tendencies in our genes, but unlike other creatures we have the proven capacity to make conscious decisions to overcome them and also the proven ability to build a society with laws and values to enshrine and, critically, to enforce such changes when these tendencies come to the surface.
So don’t underestimate how profoundly we can change. We are still capable of evolution, including conscious evolution. This coming crisis is perhaps the greatest opportunity in millennia for a step change in human society.
This quote is towards the end of the last chapter that spells out, as so many other books have done, that our global society Has a Very Big Problem. Thus from page 123 onwards, slightly less than half-way through the book, Paul Gilding devotes huge detail to describing how we will change. Frequently, the comparison used is World War II,
British poster from 1940
When Great Britain went to war in World War II, do you think they had clarity on all the details of transitioning into a war economy before they made the decision to act? Of course they considered it, as we must, but it wasn’t a determining issue because there was no choice. Do you think President Roosevelt calculated the United States could win the war by increasing military spending to 37 percent of U.S. GDP and producing a nuclear bomb before he decided to enter the war? Of course not: he just knew they had to succeed and so they would. He had confidence in human ingenuity delivering under pressure, when it’s given defined parameters and political support, and so must we.
From p. 164, Chapter 12 Creative Destruction on Steroids.
That’s what ended up being the real inspiration for me. That it’s not about the complex problems looming large; as so many that Jean and I chat to here in Payson, AZ, readily admit to being worried. It’s not news! The majority of the world’s citizens know the trends are not good.
No, what really socked me between the eyes was reading all the many and varied ways that we are changing (note present tense), that the Great Disruption is, in fact, mankind moving to a new era. One where we will have less inequality, less poverty, be happier, have extended life-spans and a future that goes on for thousand of years.
The Future is Here.
The phrase ‘life-changing’ is often used but this book is truly life-changing. The book will motivate you in ways that you can’t imagine. It will inspire you but, above all, it will show you the way ahead. Read it.
A retrospective muse about the present global challenges.
A few days back I posted an article by Tom Engelhardt called The Great American Carbon Bomb. It attracted a number of comments including a couple from Learning from Dogs supporter, Patrice Ayme. Here is one of those comments,
Dear Paul: There is a gentleman leading the Tour de France, right now. He was not given a chance, especially in the mountains. However, he has been going day by day, and has now worn the Yellow Jersey for more than a week, supported by his inferior, but dedicated team. His philosophy: humility, and do the job day by day, trying his best, although he strongly doubts that he is up to the task.
We, as humankind, or, rather, our hubristic leaders are doing the exact opposite. We are not doing our best, and it’s precisely because those leaders are not humble and not honest, and so very sure we are going to pull out OK, because that’s what we do best, and have always done, and thus will always do.
Verily all indicators are that of an unfolding catastrophe. All signals are loud and clear that way. So it’s really not the moment to say:”Oh, BTW, we are very resilient and totally great, so it’s just a matter of time before we put it all together OK. So now let’s all pull together, and it’s fine.”
In truth we are on the verge of an irreversible situation, as the CO2 poisoning will turn, within a decade or so, into a political, and then military issue.
PA
Patrice is an angry man (not a criticism by the way – so many of us are angry!) and anger is a great reason to find someone, something, anything, to blame! I suspect, wearing my cloak of an amateur psychologist, that a core reason why we feel anger is that, so often, the causes of our anger are our own errors. Anger at one’s self is much more difficult to deal with!
Anyway, back to the plot.
Like Patrice I also feel badly let down by our ‘leaders’. Especially with regard to the nightmare of economic and ecological issues fast approaching.
Then I read this in Paul Gilding’s book, The Great Disruption, that has been featured on this Blog a couple of times.
Our addiction to growth is a complex phenomenon, one that can’t be blamed on a single economic model or philosophy. It is not the fault of capitalism or Western democracy, and it is not a conspiracy of the global corporate sector or of the rich. It is not a bad idea that emerged in economics, and it is not the result of free market fundamentalism that emerged in the 1980s with globalization. While each of those factors is involved, it is too simple and convenient to blame any of them as the main driver. Growth goes to the core of the society we have built because it is the result of who we are and what we have decided to value. [Chapter 5, Addicted to Growth, p66]
That last half of that last sentence – ‘it is the result of who we are and what we have decided to value.‘ That strikes me as the core truth. It is the reason why Patrice, and me, and countless thousands of others across the globe, are so angry. At heart we all know that the circumstances we find ourselves in are, in great part and before we ‘saw the light’, the result of earlier personal values which we now know were not compatible with a sustainable relationship with the planet we all live on.
It is very good news. That anger is fuelling change. As Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book The Tipping Point societies change when something of the order of 18% of individuals emotionally commit to change.
While being born an Englishman in 1944 has me slightly ahead of the so-called Baby Boomer period, which in American terms, ergo the U.S. Census Bureau, is defined as those born between January 1st, 1946 and December 31st, 1964, American and British people born in those ‘boomer’ years after WWII share many attitudes.
However, there is one stark difference between the UK and the USA regarding that period; the Vietnam War.
U.S. military advisors arrived beginning in 1950 and that U.S. involvement escalated in the early 1960s, with U.S. troop levels tripling in 1961 and tripling again in 1962.
Many good young Americans paid the ultimate price for that involvement (58,220 U.S. service members died in the conflict).
Why do I mention this? Because just as so many Americans have no idea of the scale of enemy bombing that England suffered during WWII, just as many Brits have no idea of the scale of the ‘draft’ (i.e. conscription) that was employed by the U.S. Government as the Vietnam involvement grew.
Now keep that in mind as a means of adding context to what follows.
Until Tuesday is a book of many extremes. It is a powerful book, a disturbing book, and a book about the beauty, dignity and, sadly, the madness of man.
I have been talking to a good friend of my life-long Californian pal, Dan Gomez. Let me just call him Tom. Tom saw service in Vietnam. This is how Tom describes his early experiences.
I was young and keen for some adventure. I had watched many war movies so I knew exactly what war was all about. So I enlisted as a soldier and was shipped out to Vietnam. After 60 days, I had experienced sufficient to know that things were not as they were portrayed by the media and the reality of Vietnam was very different to those movies. I had seen enough and was ready to come home.
Except that it didn’t work that way. I was there for a full tour of duty.
It became increasingly apparent by our behavior that we were not there to liberate the masses. We were there because some politicians had a theory and because of it didn’t want the locals to have a democratic election. So good people were put into harm’s way, died or were severely injured for no other reason than some politicians had a theory – that proved to be false in the end.
Through it all, the biggest pain that I suffered was to see my Government operating under false pretences, with no integrity and no dignity. It left me with a deep anger and mistrust of government that is still deep inside me.
Tom’s very personal and intimate sharing of his experiences of Vietnam resonates powerfully with what Captain Montalvan experienced in Iraq. Here’s an extract from the book,
I am an American soldier. I am an expert and I am a professional.
But at the same time, I was coming unmoored, my mind dwelling on the hand-to-hand struggle for my life, the Syrian ambush, the sandstorms, the riots, and Ali, Emad and Maher, the men left behind.
I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
The wife of one of my best men from Al-Waleed had become pregnant during his midtour leave. The foetus was fatally deformed, but Tricare, the army’s health service, doesn’t provide abortions under any circumstances, and she was forced to carry the child to term. I will never accept defeat. Little Layla was born without a nose and several internal organs. Her parents had no financial resources on a soldier’s pay to provide her comfort. I emailed everyone I knew for help – hundreds of dollars were sent to the sergeant and his family. Nevertheless, it was heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking, to hold Layla in my hands. I will never quit. She lived eight weeks, and the difficulty of her life, and the inhumanity of forcing that existence not only from her but her parents too – I will never leave a fallen comrade – fuelled my downwards drive.
I was angry with the army. Not on the surface, but underneath, in the depth of my mind. Why did Layla and her parents have to endure that pain, especially after everything they had already endured? Why were they forcing our regiment back to Iraq just ten months after our return? Why weren’t they helping us cope with our pain? We were badly banged up. We were undermanned and underequipped. The army didn’t care. They were churning us through. They cared more about getting us back to Iraq and making the numbers than they did about our health and survival.
It was the summer of 2004. Victory was slipping away. Everyone could see that, but the media kept pounding the message: ‘The generals say there are enough men. The generals say there is enough equipment. The generals say everything is going well.’ It was a lie. The soldiers on the line knew it because we were the ones suffering. We were the ones who endured days of enemy mortar fire when we arrived in Iraq without weapons or ammunition, as my eighty troopers had in Balad in 2003; we were the ones going back in 2005 without adequate recovery time or armour for our Humvees. And that is the ultimate betrayal: when the commanding officers care more about the media and the bosses than about their soldiers on the ground. [Chapter 5, An American Soldier, pps 88-89]
So the first thing that most definitely comes out of the pages of Until Tuesday is the depth of disconnect between Montalvan as an active soldier in the front line and his nation. Just like Tom in Vietnam!
It’s not until Chapter 8, The Thought of Dogs, that the author moves on from his obsessiveness about his military experiences to his future world. Please realise that when I use the word ‘obsessiveness’, in no way is it used as a derogatory term. One of the symptoms of mental insecurity is the ease with which we can obsess on things in our lives.
Here’s how Chapter 8 starts,
I can’t tell you how much my life changed when I read the email on 1 July 2008. (A Tuesday, I just realised. I’ll have to add that to my list of fake reasons for Tuesday’s name.) The Wounded Warrior Project, the veteran service organisation I went with to the Bruce Springsteen concert, forwarded the message. They forwarded messages every day, actually, but I usually didn’t read them. This tagline intrigued me: ‘WWP and Puppies Behind Bars’. Puppies behind bars?
The message was almost as simple: ‘Dear Warriors, please note below. Puppies Behind Bars has 30 dogs a year to place, free of charge, with veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan who are suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injuries or physical injuries. I’ve attached the Dog Tags brochure which explains the programme, as well as the Dog Tags application.’
As soon as I read the attached description, I knew the programme was for me. I suffered from debilitating social anxiety, and the dogs were trained to understand and soothe emotional distress. I suffered from vertigo and frequent falls, and a dog could keep me stable. Because of my back I could barely tie my own shoes, and a dog could retrieve and pick things up for me. I was the perfect candidate. I was down, but I was working towards a future. I was a leader, so I would never give up. And I was lonely. Terribly, terribly lonely.
From this point onwards the remaining 189 pages of Until Tuesday are about Luis Montalvan’s recovery built upon the foundation of his beautiful relationship with Tuesday, his service dog.
Of course there are ups and downs, as there are in all our lives, but the overall message is clear. A dog loves a human in the most beautiful and purest fashion of all. That unconditional, undemanding love for the humans in that dog’s life unlock even the most damaged souls. Tuesday unlocked the private hell that Captain Montalvan endured for so long.
In the privacy of a deep hug of your dog lays release. From that release comes peace, understanding and the desire to re-connect with the larger world. There is no greater gift than that.
So standing back in terms of reviewing this book (I reviewed the UK edition) here are my thoughts.
It’s a deeply moving book which many, but especially dog owners, will be touched by.
It’s a book that offers real hope and inspiration, most certainly for those who are going through their own private hell.
It’s a very American book and, at times, when reading it I did wonder if some UK readers might find themselves culturally disconnected.
Overall, this is a book that needs to be read.
Perhaps I should close by saying this. I didn’t have to pay for the book, it was sent to me on a complimentary basis once I had agreed to do the review. In the UK Until Tuesday is published by Headline Publishing. However, having read the book I realise that to have missed the opportunity of reading it would have left my life a little poorer.
Footnote
A note for all those that have been good enough to read to the end! This post published today is the 1,000th post since Learning from Dogs first saw the light of day on July 15th, 2009. That it has reached this point is a direct result of the number of readers and the support that so many of you give to this rather crazy enterprise! Thank you all!
There’s no question that when one stays very still and closely watches a dog’s behaviour you see an amazing level of awareness. Even when they appear to be deeply asleep anything sensed by their ‘being’ is registered immediately. A small tale, by way of example. Many years ago when Pharaoh and I lived in the Devon village of Harberton, we frequently shopped in the town of Totnes, just 3 miles away. Many times, I would be walking up the High Street with Pharaoh nicely to heel being passed by many people walking the opposite way on the same pavement.
Totnes High Street
Every once in a while, during the fraction of time that it took for someone to pass us by, Pharaoh would utter a low, throatal growl without even slowing his pace. I always presumed that something, way beyond my level of consciousness, had disturbed Pharaoh during that instant of time.
Real awareness, or if you prefer, consciousness is not some touchy/feely concept but a true understanding about just what the heck is going on.
So do watch the following video of Peter Russell discussing Rediscovering Ourselves; it’s very relevant.
Then have a read of a couple of items on Peter’s website. The first is about runaway climate change, and here’s an extract,
Runaway Climate Change
The most dangerous aspect of global warming.
Global Warming is bad enough. Over the last hundred years, average global temperatures have increased by 0.75°C, one third of that rise occurring in the last twenty years. The 2007 report by The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that, by 2090, temperatures will have risen between 2 and 6 degrees.
Even a two degree rise in temperature would be disastrous. Changes in climate will lead to more intense storms, longer periods of drought, crop failures in many developing countries, the destruction of nearly all the coral reefs, the melting of much of the polar ice, the flooding of many low-lying urban areas, the possible collapse of the Amazonian rain forest, and the extinction of 20-30% of the planet’s species. The IPCC projects that this could happen by 2050.
If the temperature were to rise by six degrees, the prognosis is extremely bleak. At this temperature, the entire planet will be ice-free. Sea levels will rise by 70 meters. Many species of tiny plankton will cease to exist, and the problem would echo up the food chain, bringing the extinction of many fish, sea mammals, and the largest whales. Much of the land will now be desert. Hurricanes of unimaginable ferocity will bring widespread ecological devastation. If, as is possible, the ozone layer were destroyed, the burning ultraviolet light could make life on land impossible. Evolution would have been set back a billion years. It would be a planetary catastrophe.
Read the rest of that essay here. Now on to the next extract, from here,
The Under-rated Approach to Carbon Reduction
As critical as it is to reduce future carbon emissions, it is equally critical, perhaps even more critical, to get much of the CO2 that as already been released—and which is responsible for the current warming—out of the atmosphere and back into the ground where it belongs.
This approach, known as carbon capture and sequestration, has until now been largely ignored, and for several reasons. The atmosphere is so huge, it would seem to be an impossible task. There are possible technologies, but they are not nearly so well-developed as alternative energy sources. Many are still only ideas on paper. Where technologies of carbon capture have been developed they are mostly for capturing CO2 from smokestacks. Valuable as this may be, it is still dealing with the problem of future carbon emissions. What we need are technologies that will remove from the atmosphere the carbon that we already emitted, and then sequestrate it (put it away) in a stable form.
It is to this end that Sir Richard Branson announced his $25 million prize (Virgin Earth Challenge) for technologies that could capture a billion tons of carbon a year from the atmosphere (about one tenth of what we now release each year). Nor is it just Richard Branson who believes we must make this an equally important approach to the problem. His team includes Al Gore, James Lovelock, Sir Crispin Tickell (former UK ambassador to the UN), and James Hansen, the head climate scientist at NASA).
Again, the full article, a ‘must-read, in my opinion, is here.
It is really about awareness! Dogs have so much to teach us!
A powerful and insightful essay from Bill McKibben about our love affair with carbon-based energy.
Introduction
I subscribe to a number of Blogs and one of them is TomDispatch. Here’s how Tom describes what the writings are all about.
Tom Engelhardt launched Tomdispatch in November 2001 as an e-mail publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” The site now features Tom Engelhardt’s regular commentaries and the original work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben, and Mike Davis to Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Robert Lipsyte, and Elizabeth de la Vega. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is associate editor and research director.
Tomdispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.
I read the TomDispatch essay from Bill McKibben on the 14th. It caught my eye, not only because of the power of Bill’s conclusions, but also because I was deeply impressed with Bill’s book ‘eaarth’, which I reviewed on Learning from Dogshere and here.
Tom Engelhardt has given written permission for that TomDispatch to be re-published in full on Learning from Dogs. It now follows.
First the introduction by Tom Engelhardt,
The Great American Carbon Bomb
These days, even ostriches suffer from heat waves. More than 1,000 of them reportedly died from overheating on South African farms during a 2010 drought. As for American ostriches, the human variety anyway, at the moment it should be increasingly hard for them to avoid extreme-weather news. After all, whether you’re in sweltering heat, staggering drought, a record fire season, or a massive flood zone, most of us are living through weird weather this year. And if you’re one of the lucky few not in an extreme-weather district of the USA, you still won’t have a problem running across hair-raising weather stories, ranging from the possible loss of one out of every ten species on this planet by century’s end to the increasing inability of the oceans to soak up more atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Then, of course, there are those other headlines. Here’s a typical one: “As Water Rises, Florida Officials Sit on Their Hands” (a former member of the just abolished Florida Energy and Climate Commission points out that, thanks to Republican governor Rick Scott and the legislature in the part of the country most vulnerable to rising sea levels, “there is no state entity addressing climate change and its impact”). And here’s another: “Economy Keeps Global Warming on the Back Burner for 2012” (American climate-change “skeptics” are celebrating because “the tide of the debate — at least politically — has turned in their favor” and “political experts say that… concerns over global warming won’t carry much weight in the 2012 election”). And then there are the polls indicating Americans are confused about the unanimity of the scientific consensus on climate change, surprisingly dismissive of global-warming dangers, worry less about it than they did a decade ago, and of major environmental issues, worry least about it.
It’s true, of course, that no weird-weather incident you experience can definitively be tied to climate change and other factors are involved. Still, are we a nation of overheating ostriches? It’s a reasonable enough conclusion, and in a sense, not so surprising. After all, how does anyone react upon discovering that his or her way of life is the crucial problem, that fossil fuels, which keep our civilization powered up and to which our existence is tethered, are playing havoc with the planet?
TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben, author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is a man deeply committed to transforming us from climate-change ostriches to climate-change eagles. Perhaps it’s time, he suggests, for the environmental movement to get one heck of a lot blunter. Tom
Here’s the essay from Bill,
Will North America Be the New Middle East?
It’s Yes or No For a Climate-Killing Oil Pipeline — and Obama Gets to Make the Call
By Bill McKibben
The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last 18 months. Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire. First Pakistansuffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, and this spring and summer, it’s the Midwest that’s flooding at historic levels.
The year 2010 saw the lowest volume of Arctic ice since scientists started to measure, more rainfall on land than any year in recorded history, and the lowest barometric pressure ever registered in the continental United States. Measured on a planetary scale, 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in history. Jeff Masters, probably the world’s most widely read meteorologist, calculated that the year featured the most extreme weather since at least 1816, when a giant volcano blew its top.
Since we’re the volcano now, and likely to keep blowing, here’s his prognosis: “The ever-increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases humans are emitting into the air put tremendous pressure on the climate system to shift to a new, radically different, warmer state, and the extreme weather of 2010-2011 suggests that the transition is already well underway.”
There’s another shift, too, and that’s in the response from climate-change activists. For the first two decades of the global-warming era, the suggested solutionsto the problem had been as abstract as the science that went with it: complicated schemes like the Kyoto Protocol, or the cap-and-trade agreement that died in Congress in 2010. These were attempts to solve the problem of climate change via complicated backstage maneuvers and manipulations of prices or regulations. They failed in large part because the fossil-fuel industry managed, at every turn, to dilute or defang them.
Clearly the current Congress is in no mood for real regulation, so — for the moment anyway — the complicated planning is being replaced by a simpler rallying cry. When it comes to coal, oil, and natural gas, the new mantra of activists is simple, straightforward, and hard to defang: Keep it in the ground!
Two weeks ago, for instance, a few veteran environmentalists, myself included, issued a call for protest against Canada’s plans to massively expand oil imports from the tar sands regions of Alberta. We set up a new website, tarsandsaction.org, and judging from the early response, it could result in the largest civil disobedience actions in the climate-change movement’s history on this continent, as hundreds, possibly thousands, of concerned activists converge on the White House in August. They’ll risk arrest to demand something simple and concrete from President Obama: that he refuse to grant a license for Keystone XL, a new pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico that would vastly increase the flow of tar sands oil through the U.S., ensuring that the exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands will only increase.
Forget the abstract and consider the down-and-dirty instead. You can undoubtedly guess some of the reasons for opposition to such a pipeline. It’s wrecking native lands in Canada, and potential spills from that pipeline could pollute some of the most important ranchlands and aquifers in America. (Last week’s Yellowstone River spill was seen by many as a sign of what to expect.)
There’s an even bigger reason to oppose the pipeline, one that should be on the minds of even those of us who live thousands of miles away: Alberta’s tar sands are the continent’s biggest carbon bomb. Indeed, they’re the second largest pool of carbon on planet Earth, following only Saudi Arabia’s slowly dwindling oilfields.
If you could burn all the oil in those tar sands, you’d run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would mean if not hell, then at least a world with a similar temperature. It won’t happen overnight, thank God, but according to the planet’s most important climatologist, James Hansen, burning even a substantial portion of that oil would mean it was “essentially game over” for the climate of this planet.
Halting that pipeline wouldn’t solve all tar sands problems. The Canadians will keep trying to get it out to market, but it would definitely ensure that more of that oil will stay in the ground longer and that, at least, would be a start. Even better, the politics of it are simple. For once, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives can’t get in the way. The president alone decides if the pipeline is “in the national interest.” There are, however, already worrisome signs within the Obama administration. Just this week, based on a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, Neela Banerjee of the Los Angeles Timesreported that, in 2009, the State Department’s “energy envoy” was already instructing Alberta’s fossil-fuel barons in how to improve their “oil sands messaging,” including “increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories.” This is the government version of Murdochian-style enviro-hacking, and it leads many to think that the new pipeline is already a done deal.
Still, the president can say no. If he does, then no pipeline — and in the words of Alberta’s oil minister, his province will be “landlocked in bitumen” (the basic substance from which tar-sands oil is extracted). Even energy-hungry China, eager as it is for new sources of fossil fuels, may not be able to save him, since native tribes are doing a remarkable job of blocking another proposed pipeline to the Canadian Pacific. Oil, oil everywhere, and nary a drop to sell. (Unfortunately that’s not quite true, but at least there won’t be a big new straw in this milkshake.)
An Obama thumbs-down on the pipeline could change the economics of the tar sands in striking ways. “Unless we get increased [market] access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck,” said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary.
Faced with that prospect, Canada’s oilmen are growing desperate. Earlier this month, in a classic sleight of hand, they announced plans for a giant “carbon capture and sequestration” scheme at the tar sands. That’s because when it comes to global warming, tar sands oil is even worse than, say, Saudi oil because it’s a tarry muck, not a liquid, and so you have to burn a lot of natural gas to make it flow in the first place.
Now, the oil industry is proposing to capture some of the extra carbon from that cooking process and store it underground. This is an untested method, and the accounting scheme Alberta has adopted for it may actually increase the province’s emmissions. Even if it turns out to work perfectly and captures the carbon from that natural gas that would have escaped into the atmosphere, the oil they’re proposing to ship south for use in our gas tanks would still be exactly as bad for the atmosphere as Saudi crude. In other words, in the long run it would still be “essentially game over” for the climate.
The Saudis, of course, built their oil empire long before we knew that there was anything wrong with burning oil. The Canadians — with American help, if Obama obliges the oil lobby — are building theirs in the teeth of the greatest threat the world has ever faced. We can’t unbuild those Saudi Arabian fields, though happily their supplies are starting to slowly dwindle. What we can still do, though, is prevent North America from becoming the next Middle East.
So there will be a battle, and there will be nothing complicated or abstract about it. It will be based on one question: Does that carbon stay in the earth, or does it pour into the atmosphere? Given the trillions of dollars at stake it will be a hard fight, and there’s no guarantee of victory. But at least there’s no fog here, no maze of technicalities.
The last climate bill, the one the Senate punted on, was thousands of pages long. This time there’s a single sheet of paper, which Obama signs… or not.
Guess what I read about on the BBC News website on the 15th, the day that I put this article together? I read about a fabulous new ship about to start construction at the Samsung Heavy Industries shipyard in South Korea. When launched and loaded, at 600,000 tonnes, it will be the world’s largest ship. Wow that’s impressive!
Now read here as to what is the purpose of this ‘ship’. Here’s a flavour of that BBC news item,
Shell has unveiled plans to build the world’s first floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) platform. The 600,000-tonne behemoth – the world’s biggest “ship” – will be sited off the coast of Australia. But how will it work?
Deep beneath the world’s oceans are huge reservoirs of natural gas. Some are hundreds or thousands of miles from land, or from the nearest pipeline.
Tapping into these “stranded gas” resources has been impossible – until now.
At Samsung Heavy Industries’ shipyard on Geoje Island in South Korea, work is about to start on a “ship” that, when finished and fully loaded, will weigh 600,000 tonnes.
That is six times as much as the biggest US aircraft carrier.
By 2017 the vessel should be anchored off the north coast of Australia, where it will be used to harvest natural gas from Shell’s Prelude field.
Yes, it’s more technology to enable us to use more carbon! As the article (just) touches on,
But there has been opposition from environmentalists. Martin Pritchard from Environs Kimberley says he is concerned about the potential for “oil leaks and spills”.
WWF Western Australia, [my inserted link, Ed.] meanwhile, argues that the underwater wellheads and pipelines will harm the tropical marine environment, and estimates the project will emit more than two million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year.
Sort of reminds me of that old Devonshire saying (and you need to imagine hearing it in that wonderful dialect that just still exists in this far part of SW England)
“All the world’s a little queer except thee and me …. and I have me doubts about thee!”
Two recent videos highlight the mystery and fascination of determining what, exactly, is consciousness.
Before I get started, it crossed my mind that some readers on Learning from Dogs might struggle finding any link between the the title of the Blog and such esoteric topics as consciousness. Let me try and explain. On the home page of this Blog is written,
But 10,000 years of farming the planet’s plant and mineral resources have brought mankind to the edge of extinction, literally as well as metaphorically.
Dogs know better! Time again for man to learn from dogs!
Here’s a recent comment I made to an article on Naked Capitalism,
In a much broader sense, it feels to me as though we have been partying on the edge of a global volcano for years and years. Greece is surely a metaphor for the craziness of so many countries.
Continuing that broader sense, the period that we are in, from political, economical, societal, environmental and ethical perspectives, seems bust. Good will eventually come out of this transition, of that I have no doubt, but what a fascinating period in which to be alive!
I firmly believe that the period we are presently living through is a transition between the last, say 30 years (in a sense, many more decades than that) and a more aware, sensitive period where mankind embraces a deeper, sustainable, relationship with the planet that is home and life to all of us. Frankly, there is no choice!
Thus the nature of consciousness, our awareness of self, is a crucial element of the future. The greater our self-awareness, the greater our self-understanding and from that better self-understanding comes all hope of recognising our attitudes and knowing that it is our attitudes that drive our behaviours.
So here follow two videos. Settle back and be entranced!
The first is the last episode in a brilliant BBC series broadcast in 2007, probably one of the best TV series on psychology and neuroscience ever produced. The full series is on Top Documentary Films but the last episode called The Final Mystery is all about consciousness. Beware you are going to never see the world in quite the same way!
Here it is, The Final Mystery presented by neuroscientist Susan Greenfield.
The second video is from Season Two of the Through the Wormhole series. It is called Is there Life after Death? and also explores the deeper aspects of consciousness. As the introduction to the video says,
In the premiere episode of the second season of Through the Wormhole, Morgan Freeman dives deep into this provocative question that has mystified humans since the beginning of time.
Modern physics and neuroscience are venturing into this once hallowed ground, and radically changing our ideas of life after death.
Freeman serves as host to this polarized debate, where scientists and spiritualist attempt to define what is consciousness, while cutting edge quantum mechanics could provide the answer to what happens when we die.
Here’s the film; same health warning applies! You are going to see the world differently after watching this!
Finally, do you have a dog at home? If you do, ponder on how their conscious world engages them. If science can’t explain human consciousness then all we have is our own intuition with regard to animals. Not sure about you but when one is feeling a little low and a dog comes up and lays a head across you I feel a very strong conscious connection.
Learning from Dogs 