Yesterday, I read the latest from TomDispatch, an essay entitled Eduardo Galeano, A Lost and Found History of Lives and Dreams (Some Broken).
I wasn’t sure if I had vaguely heard of Eduardo Galeano before but whatever, I had no idea of the power and beauty of his writings and was simply blown away when reading them. As Tom introduced the writings:
Who isn’t a fan of something — or someone? So consider this my fan’s note. To my mind, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano is among the greats of our time. His writing has “it” — that indefinable quality you can’t describe but know as soon as you read it. He’s created a style that combines the best of journalism, history, and fiction and a form for his books that, as far as I know, has no name but involves short bursts of almost lyrical reportage, often about events long past. As it turns out, he also carries “it” with him. I was his English-language book editor years ago and can testify to that, even though on meeting him you might not initially think so. He has nothing of the showboat about him. In person, he’s almost self-effacing and yet somehow he brings out in others the urge to tell stories as they’ve never told them before.
Despite Tom’s blanket permission to republish his essays, I’m not going to do so in this case, there’s a small niggle in the back of my mind that the copyright issues are rightfully protecting Mr. Galeano’s publishing rights.
So just going to offer this single extract and trust that you will go here and read Tom’s full essay: please do!
Century of Disaster
Riddles, Lies, and Lives — from Fidel Castro and Muhammad Ali to Albert Einstein and Barbie
By Eduardo Galeano
[The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s history of humanity, Mirrors (Nation Books).]
Walls
The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From morning till night we read, saw, heard: the Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain…
In the end, a wall which deserved to fall fell. But other walls sprouted and continue sprouting across the world. Though they are much larger than the one in Berlin, we rarely hear of them.
Little is said about the wall the United States is building along the Mexican border, and less is said about the barbed-wire barriers surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast.
Practically nothing is said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will be 15 times longer than the Berlin Wall. And nothing, nothing at all, is said about the Morocco Wall, which perpetuates the seizure of the Saharan homeland by the kingdom of Morocco, and is 60 times the length of the Berlin Wall.
Why are some walls so loud and others mute?
See what I mean!
There is much more about Eduardo Galeano on the web as these two following links prove.
Eduardo Galeano
Wikipedia have an entry here that is informative. Then there is an in-depth article about the man over on The Atlantic website, that starts thus:
Eduardo Galeano is regarded as one of Latin America’s fiercest voices of social conscience. Yet he insists that language — its secrets, mysteries, and masks — always comes first.
November 30, 2000
“The division of labor among nations,” Eduardo Galeano proclaimed in the opening sentence of Open Veins of Latin America, “is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.” A native of Uruguay who was forced into exile under the country’s military regime during the 1970s, Galeano has always identified with the losing side. Open Veins, originally published in Mexico in 1971, employed captivating, elegiac prose to chronicle five centuries of plunder and imperialism in Latin America. Radically different in style, though not in content, from Marxist-oriented “dependency theory” of the 1960s — which held that Latin America had been systematically marginalized by the world economy since the colonial era — Open Veins quickly became a canonical text in radical circles, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in the Southern Hemisphere. In a period of social upheaval, guerrilla warfare, and dictatorship, the book, composed in three months of intense labor, was routinely treated as samizdat: when Open Veins was banned by the Pinochet regime, a young woman fled Chile with the book stashed in her infant’s diapers.
Going to close by musing on the fact that in today’s visual, technological age, the sharing of words, in all ways, shapes and sizes, across so many parts of our global society, is a pure miracle. Such creativity out there!
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post The power of hope comes this wonderful story about the increasing population of wolves in Europe. I can’t recall what led me to the item in the UK’s Guardian newspaper but this is what I read:
Incredible journey: one wolf’s migration across Europe
Slavc is a wolf. In 2011, he began an epic 2,000 kilometre migration across Europe from Slovenia to Italy via the Austrian Alps. Several months earlier, he had been fitted with a collar that allowed his movements to be tracked in incredible detail. I talked to Hubert Potočnik, the biologist whose work made this possible.
It has been estimated that there are now around 10,000 wolves in Europe. Photograph: tbkmedia.de/Alamy
Every year, Hubert Potočnik and his colleagues at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia capture and collar a number of wolves in order to get a handle on the movements of these much-misunderstood creatures. In July 2011, he collared a young male that became known as Slavc. In June, I spoke to Potočnik for a feature that appears in New Scientist this week and he told me about Slavc’s extraordinary journey across Europe. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview …
HN: After you captured and collared Slavc in July 2011, he stayed with his pack for several months. Then, on 19 December 2011, he began to move. How did you know?
HP: We knew something was different because the GPS points showed that he had crossed two large motorways far outside of his natural territory.
Tell me about these collars. How do they work?
The collar is equipped with three types of different technology. It has a GPS receiver, a GSM modem to send SMS and also with a VHF radio transmitter as a back-up. We programme all our wolves to send a GPS signal every three hours, so we get about seven locations a day to give us continuous location sampling data.
Hubert Potočnik fits Slavc with the collar in July 2011, a device that will reveal the wolf’s incredible 2000-km migration from Slovenia to Italy. Photograph: Nina Ražen
To read the rest of this fascinating article then you will need to go here. Please do so as the article is breathtakingly interesting. It closes, thus:
HN: How would you sum up this experience?
There are lots of data about long-distance dispersal of wolves but there are very few cases where we have had the opportunity to follow an animal in such detail. Following Slavc across Europe offered a rare insight into the secret life of the wolf. It was one of the most amazing events in my life.
A quick web search came across this short but wonderful video; albeit without sound.
Published on Aug 26, 2013
Two wolf cubs were documented in Lessinia Regional Nature Park on August 7, 2013. At the end of the video it is possible to partially see an adult wolf, the mother of the cubs, that was recognized as Giulietta. Giulietta and Slavc became famous because they brought together two wolf populations that were separated for over 150 years. Wolf Slavc originates from the Dinaric-Balkan wolf population and was collared in Slovenia. He travelled over 1500km over Austria to Italy, where he met Giulietta, originating from the wolf population from the western Alps (Piemonte region).
Yesterday evening we had close friend Don Reeve staying with us. To put this into context, it was Don and his wife, Suzann, who in 2007 invited me to spend Christmas with them at their Winter home down in San Carlos, Mexico. That, in turn, led me to meeting Jean, Suzann’s best friend, and look where that got me! 🙂
(Can’t resist adding that Jean and I were born in London, some 23 miles from each other!)
Fr. Dan Tantimonaco with the newly weds! Payson, AZ. November 20th., 2010.
Thus you can understand the pleasure it was for Jean and me again to see Don; albeit for a brief overnight stay.
What was an extra, unanticipated pleasure was meeting a young, rescue dog that Don had adopted in recent weeks. Her name is Margarita and she was found and rescued by Suzann from the streets in San Carlos. What was so glorious was to see the love and hope for a better future that flowed between Don and the sweet, young Margarita. It resonated so perfectly well with Suzan’s post published here on Monday: Rescued dogs are life-savers.
By the time I sat down at my desk yesterday, I was conscious of a) not having a clue as to what to write, and b) inspired by the sense of hope that dogs offer us humans. Serendipitously, the theme of hope led me to a post written by Jennifer Broudy de Hernandez over on her Transition Times blog. It was called Warriors for the Planet and was the most beautiful essay.
I’m delighted to reblog that here with Jennifer’s approval.
ooOOoo
Warriors for the Planet
Another summer, another war. I wonder how many summers there have been in the last 5,000 years when human beings were not occupied with killing each other?
Correction: not “human beings,” “men.”
Let’s be frank: even though there may be women in the armed forces of many countries now, war still remains a masculine activity and preoccupation. The women who serve as soldiers must adhere to the masculine warrior code and become honorary “bros,” for whom the worst insult is still be called a “girl” or a “pussy.”
I have been reading Anne Baring’s magisterial book The Dream of the Cosmos, in which she gives a detailed account of the shift, around the time of Gilgamesh, from the ancient, goddess- and nature-worshipping “lunar cultures” to the contemporary era of solar, monotheistic, warrior-worshipping cultures.
In her elaboration of this shift, I read the tragedy of our time, enacted over and over again all over the planet, and not just by humans against humans, but also by humans against the other living beings with whom we share our world. I quote at length from Baring’s remarkable book:
“The archetype of the solar hero as warrior still exerts immense unconscious influence on the modern male psyche, in the battlefield of politics as well as that of corporate business and even the world of science and academia: the primary aim of the male is to achieve, to win and, if necessary, to defeat other males. The ideal of the warrior has become an unconscious part of every man’s identity from the time he is a small child.
“With the mythic theme of the cosmic battle between good and evil and the indoctrination of the warrior went the focus on war and territorial conquest. War has been endemic throughout the 4000 years of the solar era. The glorification of war and conquest and the exaltation of the warrior is a major theme of the solar era—still with us today in George W. Bush’s words in 2005: ‘We will accept no outcome except victory.’ This call to victory echoes down the centuries, ensuring that hecatombs of young warriors were sacrificed to the god of war, countless millions led into captivity and slavery, countless women raped and widows left destitute. It has sanctioned an ethos that strives for victory at no matter what cost in human lives and even today glorifies war and admires the warrior leader. This archaic model of tribal dominance and conquest has inflicted untold suffering on humanity and now threatens our very survival as a species.
“The cosmic battle between light and darkness was increasingly projected into the world and a fascination with territorial conquest gripped the imagination and led to the creation of vast empires. It is as if the heroic human ego, identified with the solar hero, had to seek out new territories to conquer, had to embody the myth in a literal sense and as it did so, channel the primitive territorial drives of the psyche into a Dionysian orgy of unbridled conquest, slaughter and destruction. We hear very little about the suffering generated by these conquests: the weeping widows, the mothers who lost sons, the orphaned children and the crops and patterns of sowing and harvesting devastated and disrupted by the foraging armies passing over them, the exquisite works of art pillaged and looted….The long chronicle of conquest and human sacrifice, of exultation in power and the subjugation of enemies might truly be named the dark shadow of the solar age” (118;124).
Like Baring, I see our time as a critical era in the long history of homo sapiens on the planet. There is still hope that enough of us will be able to detach ourselves from the pressures and busyness of our lives—will become conscious of what is happening to the planet and human civilization writ large—will understand that there are other ways to relate to each other and to the Earth, ways that will seem increasingly possible and obvious once we focus on them and begin to put our energies into manifesting our visions of a creative, collaborative, respectful mode of being.
Baring ends her disturbing chapter on the ascendancy of the solar warrior culture with a hopeful quote from The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas, from which she springs into her own positive vision of the potential of our time.
“’We stand at the threshold of a revelation of the nature of reality that could shatter our most established beliefs about ourselves and the world. The very constriction we are experiencing is part of the dynamic of our imminent release. For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West’s masculine consciousness has been its quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life; to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul. And that reunion can now occur on a new and profoundly different level from that of the primordial unconscious unity, for the long evolution of human consciousness has prepared it to be capable at last of embracing the ground and matrix of its own being freely and consciously.’
“As this deep soul-impulse gathers momentum, the ‘marriage’ of the re-emerging lunar consciousness with the dominant solar one is beginning to change our perception of reality. This gives us hope for the future. If we can recover the values intrinsic to the ancient participatory way of knowing without losing the priceless evolutionary attainment of a strong and focused ego, together with all the discoveries we have made and the skills we have developed, we could heal both the fissure in our soul and our raped and vandalized planet” (130-131).
My heart aches for the suffering of the innocent civilians trapped in the crossfire in Gaza this summer, and for the grieving families of the passenger plane heinously shot down by warriors who were either poorly trained or just plain evil.
I am heartsick when I think about the holocaust that is overtaking living beings on every quadrant of our planet as humans continue to ravage the forests and seas, to melt the poles with our greenhouse gases, and to poison the aquifers and soil with our chemicals.
This is where the solar cultures, with their “great” warrior kings, have led us. And yet, as Baring says, they have also presided over the most amazing advances in science and technology that humans have ever known in our long history on the planet.
We don’t need or want to go back to the simple innocence of ancient lunar societies. We don’t have to bomb ourselves back into the Stone Age.
What we need is to go forward, wisely and joyously, into a new phase of consciousness, in which the masculine warrior spirit is used for protection and stewardship rather than destruction, and the Earth is honored as the Mother of all that she is.
Never let anyone tell you it can’t be done. It is already happening.
ooOOoo
May I tempt you to go back and re-read that penultimate paragraph. A sentence that I cannot resist emphasising:
What we need is to go forward, wisely and joyously, into a new phase of consciousness, in which the masculine warrior spirit is used for protection and stewardship rather than destruction, and the Earth is honored as the Mother of all that she is.
In last week’s picture parade, I featured my mother swimming up at Secesh Reservoir near Wolf Creek. There were many lovely comments and it made my mother’s day to read all your kind words. I also mentioned that my mother was determined to take a swim in our nearby Rogue River and that it would be featured in today’s picture parade.
So here are those pictures.
The Rogue River at Matson County Park.
Matson Park is not far from Grants Pass here in Oregon and has the great advantage of offering a beach, albeit a stony beach, that makes entry into the water easier.
Gingerly wading in.
Jean had to lend my mother her shoes as the river bed was pretty stony.
Right out in mid-river!
Luckily the lack of recent rains meant that the river was flowing much more gently than would be usual.
Just keeping abreast of the current.
Yet even with the low volume of water flowing by, the current was a good three to four miles-per-hour and Mum was only able to stay local to us by vigorously swimming upstream.
Another swimming ‘tick in the box’.
Very soon it made sense to return to the beach. What a remarkable lady she is!
Last morning together.
Soon the day came round for Mum to return to London. This picture was taken just before we left for Medford Airport.
Little piece of nostalgia.
Finally, to close today’s post, here’s a photograph of Mum’s Great Uncle. Believed to have been taken around 1930, Uncle Foreman was the baker in the small village of West Malling in Kent, South-East England.
I’m preparing this post on Sunday; i.e. three days ago. Reason is that my sister, Elizabeth, and friend, Merle, are arriving on Monday afternoon (as in two days ago) bringing us up to three guests in the house. My mother leaves on tomorrow morning and then Elizabeth and Merle depart on Friday morning. So for all the right reasons, Learning from Dogs is taking a backstage. Hence me doing as much as I can ahead of time.
In Monday’s post, The tracks we leave, towards the end I wrote, “The utter madness of mankind’s group blindness is beyond comprehension.” Many know that there is something very badly wrong with the way politics is operating today. Yet, at the same time, many intuitively know the political changes that mankind has to see if there is to be any chance of a sustainable future for mankind on this planet.
Thus George Monbiot’s essay published on the 29th July makes encouraging reading in the context of the growing confidence of the UK Green Party. It is republished here with the kind permission of George Monbiot.
ooOOoo
Unmasked
July 29, 2014
The justifications for extreme inequality have collapsed. But only the Green Party is prepared to take the obvious step
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30th July 2014
When inequality reaches extreme and destructive levels, most governments seek not to confront it but to accommodate it. Wherever wealth is absurdly concentrated, new laws arise to protect it.
In Britain, for example, successive governments have privatised any public asset which excites corporate greed. They have cut taxes on capital and high incomes. They have legalised new forms of tax avoidance (1). They have delivered exotic gifts like subsidised shotgun licences and the doubling of state support for grouse moors (2). And they have dug a legal moat around the charmed circle, criminalising, for example, the squatting of empty buildings (3) and most forms of peaceful protest (4). However grotesque inequality becomes, however closely the accumulation of inordinate wealth resembles legalised theft, political norms shift to defend it.
None of this should surprise you. The richer the elite becomes, and the more it has to lose, the greater the effort it makes to capture public discourse and the political system. It scarcely bothers to disguise its wholesale purchase of political parties, by means of an utterly corrupt and corrupting funding system (5,6). You can feel its grip not only on policy but also on the choice of parliamentary candidates and appointments to the cabinet. The very rich want people like themselves in power, which is why we have a government of millionaires (7).
But that describes only one corner of their influence. They fund lobby groups, thinktanks and economists to devise ever more elaborate justifications for their seizure of the nation’s wealth (8). These justifications are then amplified by the newspapers and broadcasters owned by the same elite.
Among the many good points Thomas Piketty makes in Capital in the 21st Century – his world-changing but surprisingly mild book – is that extreme inequality can be sustained politically only through an “apparatus of justification.” (9) If voters can be persuaded that insane levels of inequality are sane, reasonable and even necessary, then the concentration of income can keep growing. If they can’t, then either states are forced to act, or revolutions happen.
For the notion that inequalities must be justified sits at the heart of democracy. It is possible to accept that some can have much more than others if one of two conditions are met: either that they reached this position through the exercise of their unique and remarkable talent; or that this inequality is good for everyone. So the network of think tanks, economists and tame journalists must make these justifications plausible.
It’s a tough job. If wages reflect merit, why do they seem so arbitrary? Are the richest executives 50 or 100 times better at their jobs than their predecessors were in 1980? Are they 20 times more skilled and educated than the people immediately below them, even though they went to the same business schools? Are US executives several times as creative and dynamic as those in Germany? If so, why are their results so unremarkable?
It is, of course, all rubbish. What we see is not meritocracy at work at all, but a wealth grab by a nepotistic executive class which sets its own salaries, tests credulity with its ridiculous demands and discovers that credulity is an amenable customer. They must marvel at how they get away with it.
Moreover, as education and even (in the age of the intern) work becomes more expensive, the opportunities to enter the grabbers’ class diminish. The nations which pay the highest top salaries, such as the US and Britain, are also among the least socially mobile (10). Here, you inherit not only wealth but opportunity.
Aha, they say, but extreme wealth is good for all of us. All will be uplifted by their god’s invisible hand. Their creed is based on the Kuznet’s curve, the graph which appears to show that inequality automatically declines as capitalism advances, spreading wealth from the elite to the rest.
When Piketty took the trouble to update the curve, which was first proposed in 1955, he discovered that the redistribution it documented was an artefact of the peculiar circumstances of its time. Since then the concentration of wealth has reasserted itself with a vengeance (11). The reduction in inequality by 1955 was not an automatic and inherent feature of capitalism, but the result of two world wars, a great depression and the fierce response of governments to these disruptions.
For example, the top federal income tax rate in the US rose from 25% in 1932 to 94% in 1944. The average top rate throughout the years 1932 to 1980 was 81%. In the 1940s, the British government imposed a top income tax of 98% (12). The invisible hand? Hahaha. As these taxes were slashed by Reagan and Thatcher and the rest, inequality boomed once more, and is exploding today. This is why the neoliberals hate Piketty with such passion and poison: he has destroyed with data the two great arguments with which the apparatus of justification seeks to excuse the inexcusable.
So here we have a perfect opportunity for progressive parties: the moral and ideological collapse of the system of thought to which they were previously in thrall. What do they do? Avoid the opportunity like diphtheria. Cowed by the infrastructure of purchased argument, Labour fiddles and dithers (13).
But there is another party, which seems to have discovered the fire and passion that moved Labour so long ago: the Greens. Last week they revealed that their manifesto for the general election will propose a living wage, the renationalisation of the railways, a maximum pay ratio (no executive should receive more than 10 times the salary of the lowest paid worker), and, at the heart of their reforms, a wealth tax of the kind Piketty recommends (14).
Yes, it raises plenty of questions, but none of them are unanswerable, especially if this is seen as one step towards the ideal position: a global wealth tax, that treats capital equally, wherever it might lodge. Rough as this proposal is, it will start to challenge the political consensus and draw people who thought they had nowhere to turn. Expect the billionaires’ boot boys to start screaming, once they absorb the implications. And take their boos and jeers as confirmation that it’s onto something. You wanted a progressive alternative? You’ve got it.
My draft book of the same name as this blog is slowly coming together and I’m at the 30,000-word mark. A while ago, John Hurlburt, a good friend of this blog, was chatting to me and he spoke about the “interconnectedness of all conscious life”. It immediately appealed to me as a chapter in the book.
But while it was obvious to me that all conscious life is connected, for some time I struggled to achieve any clarity about what I wanted to write. Seeing that proverb kicked off the journey towards clarity.
Thus, today, I wanted to share the steps of that journey so far.
Over on the Skeptical Science blogsite there is a post, dated 15th April, 2010, with the title of Earth’s five mass extinction events. The author, John Cook, opens:
As climate changes, a major question is whether nature can adapt to the changing conditions? The answer lies in the past. Throughout Earth’s history, there have been periods where climate changed dramatically. The response was mass extinction events, when many species went extinct followed by a very slow recovery. The history of coral reefs gives us an insight into the nature of these events as reefs are so enduring and the fossil record of corals is relatively well known (Veron 2008). What we find is reefs were particularly impacted in mass extinctions, taking many millions of years to recover. These intervals are known as “reef gaps”.
Figure 1: Timeline of mass extinction events. The five named vertical bars indicate mass extinction events. Black rectangles (drawn to scale) represent global reef gaps and brick-pattern shapes show times of prolific reef growth (Veron 2008).
So what, one might ask?
Well, forget about millions of years ago. Just 12 days ago, there was a news item released by Stanford University. It read in full:
July 24, 2014
Stanford biologist warns of early stages of Earth’s 6th mass extinction event
Stanford Biology Professor Rodolfo Dirzo and his colleagues warn that this “defaunation” could have harmful downstream effects on human health.
The planet’s current biodiversity, the product of 3.5 billion years of evolutionary trial and error, is the highest in the history of life. But it may be reaching a tipping point.
In a new review of scientific literature and analysis of data published in Science, an international team of scientists cautions that the loss and decline of animals is contributing to what
Elephants and other large animals face an increased risk of extinction in what Stanford Biology Professor Rodolfo Dirzo terms “defaunation.” (Claudia Paulussen/Shutterstock)
appears to be the early days of the planet’s sixth mass biological extinction event.
Since 1500, more than 320 terrestrial vertebrates have become extinct. Populations of the remaining species show a 25 percent average decline in abundance. The situation is similarly dire for invertebrate animal life.
And while previous extinctions have been driven by natural planetary transformations or catastrophic asteroid strikes, the current die-off can be associated to human activity, a situation that the lead author Rodolfo Dirzo, a professor of biology at Stanford, designates an era of “Anthropocene defaunation.”
Across vertebrates, 16 to 33 percent of all species are estimated to be globally threatened or endangered. Large animals – described as megafauna and including elephants, rhinoceroses, polar bears and countless other species worldwide – face the highest rate of decline, a trend that matches previous extinction events.
Larger animals tend to have lower population growth rates and produce fewer offspring. They need larger habitat areas to maintain viable populations. Their size and meat mass make them easier and more attractive hunting targets for humans.
Although these species represent a relatively low percentage of the animals at risk, their loss would have trickle-down effects that could shake the stability of other species and, in some cases, even human health.
For instance, previous experiments conducted in Kenya have isolated patches of land from megafauna such as zebras, giraffes and elephants, and observed how an ecosystem reacts to the removal of its largest species. Rather quickly, these areas become overwhelmed with rodents. Grass and shrubs increase and the rate of soil compaction decreases. Seeds and shelter become more easily available, and the risk of predation drops.
Consequently, the number of rodents doubles – and so does the abundance of the disease-carrying ectoparasites that they harbor.
“Where human density is high, you get high rates of defaunation, high incidence of rodents, and thus high levels of pathogens, which increases the risks of disease transmission,” said Dirzo, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Who would have thought that just defaunation would have all these dramatic consequences? But it can be a vicious circle.”
The scientists also detailed a troubling trend in invertebrate defaunation. Human population has doubled in the past 35 years; in the same period, the number of invertebrate animals – such as beetles, butterflies, spiders and worms – has decreased by 45 percent.
As with larger animals, the loss is driven primarily by loss of habitat and global climate disruption, and could have trickle-up effects in our everyday lives.
For instance, insects pollinate roughly 75 percent of the world’s food crops, an estimated 10 percent of the economic value of the world’s food supply. Insects also play a critical role in nutrient cycling and decomposing organic materials, which helps ensure ecosystem productivity. In the United States alone, the value of pest control by native predators is estimated at $4.5 billion annually.
Dirzo said that the solutions are complicated. Immediately reducing rates of habitat change and overexploitation would help, but these approaches need to be tailored to individual regions and situations. He said he hopes that raising awareness of the ongoing mass extinction – and not just of large, charismatic species – and its associated consequences will help spur change.
“We tend to think about extinction as loss of a species from the face of Earth, and that’s very important, but there’s a loss of critical ecosystem functioning in which animals play a central role that we need to pay attention to as well,” Dirzo said. “Ironically, we have long considered that defaunation is a cryptic phenomenon, but I think we will end up with a situation that is non-cryptic because of the increasingly obvious consequences to the planet and to human wellbeing.”
The coauthors on the report include Hillary S. Young, University of California, Santa Barbara; Mauro Galetti, Universidade Estadual Paulista in Brazil; Gerardo Ceballos, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico; Nick J.B. Isaac, of the Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in England; and Ben Collen, of University College London.
For more Stanford experts on ecology and other topics, visit Stanford Experts.
It hardly requires any imagination to realise that what we humans need in order to live, air, food, and clean water, is utterly dependant on us humans caring for the planet that sustains us. It’s all too easy just to take for granted that we will always have air, food and clean water. Now go back and read that last sentence from Professor Dirzo. [my emphasis]
We tend to think about extinction as loss of a species from the face of Earth, and that’s very important, but there’s a loss of critical ecosystem functioning in which animals play a central role that we need to pay attention to as well. Ironically, we have long considered that defaunation is a cryptic phenomenon, but I think we will end up with a situation that is non-cryptic because of the increasingly obvious consequences to the planet and to human wellbeing.
The tracks we leave! H’mmm.
Let me move on in my journey.
Over on the EarthSky blogsite there was an item about the mysterious giant crater that appeared suddenly in Siberia.
Mystery crater in Yamal peninsula probably caused by methane release
Thawing permafrost likely allowed methane gas to be released, creating the large hole in permafrost found in northern Russia, says the Russian team that investigated it.
UPDATE July 31, 2014.
Stories are popping up fast in various media this afternoon about a likely source of a reported, mysterious hole in permafrost in the Yamal region of northern Russia. This hole was
The first mysterious crater spotted by helicopter in the Yamal region of northern Russia. Image via Nature.
spotted by a helicopter pilot in mid-July; reindeer herders reported a second hole some days later. Eric Holthaus of Slate said that there is now:
… new (and definitive) evidence … that the Siberian holes were created via methane released from warming permafrost.
The evidence has come via the journal Nature, which published a story on its website today (July 31) featuring the findings of Andrei Plekhanov, a senior researcher at the Scientific Centre of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia, and his team. This is the team that was sent in to investigate the first hole shortly after it was found. Holthaus said:
That team measured methane concentrations up to 50,000 times standard levels inside the crater.
The story in Nature said:
Air near the bottom of the crater contained unusually high concentrations of methane — up to 9.6% — in tests conducted at the site on 16 July … Plekhanov, who led an expedition to the crater, says that air normally contains just 0.000179% methane …
Plekhanov and his team believe that it is linked to the abnormally hot Yamal summers of 2012 and 2013, which were warmer than usual by an average of about 5°C. As temperatures rose, the researchers suggest, permafrost thawed and collapsed, releasing methane that had been trapped in the icy ground.
Holthaus pointed out:
Last week, the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin interviewed a Russian scientist who had also visited the hole and came to similar conclusions.
This newly reported evidence, just coming to light today, seems particularly scary given the story earlier this week about what the University of Stockholm called “vast methane plumes” found by scientists aboard the icebreaker Oden, which is now exploring and measuring methane release from the floor of the Arctic Ocean.
Build-up and release of gas from thawing permafrost most probable explanation, says Russian team.
My last step in the journey about our interconnectedness involves water.
Water scarcity may be the most underrated resource issue the world is facing today.
Seventy percent of world water use is for irrigation.
Each day we drink nearly 4 liters of water, but it takes some 2,000 liters of water — 500 times as much — to produce the food we consume.
1,000 tons of water is used to produce 1 ton of grain.
Between 1950 and 2000, the world’s irrigated area tripled to roughly 700 million acres. After several decades of rapid increase, however, the growth has slowed dramatically, expanding only 9 percent from 2000 to 2009. Given that governments are much more likely to report increases than decreases, the recent net growth may be even smaller.
The dramatic loss of momentum in irrigation expansion coupled with the depletion of underground water resources suggests that peak water may now be on our doorstep.
Today some 18 countries, containing half the world’s people, are overpumping their aquifers. Among these are the big three grain producers — China, India, and the United States.
Saudi Arabia is the first country to publicly predict how aquifer depletion will reduce its grain harvest. It will soon be totally dependent on imports from the world market or overseas farming projects for its grain.
While falling water tables are largely hidden, rivers that run dry or are reduced to a trickle before reaching the sea are highly visible. Among this group that has limited outflow during at least part of the year are the Colorado, the major river in the southwestern United States; the Yellow, the largest river in northern China; the Nile, the lifeline of Egypt; the Indus, which supplies most of Pakistan’s irrigation water; and the Ganges in India’s densely populated Gangetic basin.
(The rest of this important article including the many useful links may be read here.)
Now, despite the despondent theme of the contents of this post, I am not beating a ‘doom and gloom’ drum. What I am trying to point out is that we are all interconnected. Not just all of mankind but all conscious life. Ergo, the destruction of natural habitats, the loss of every species, even the unwarranted killing of a wild animal is, in a very real and tangible way, the destruction of our habitat, the loss of our species and the unwarranted killing of future generations of homo sapiens.
It seems that whichever way we look the interconnectedness of all conscious life is staring us full in the face. The utter madness of mankind’s group blindness is beyond comprehension.
It takes an ancient proverb from a people that lived in harmony with the planet to speak the truth. We ignore it at our peril.
Undoubtedly, those of you that watched the George Monbiot speech in yesterday’s post will have been struck by at least two key aspects. The first being the utter absurdity in the way that we are being governed (UK and the USA) and the second that change can only come from people bonding at a local level. For it is within local communities that groups of people share their ideas and develop a vision for change that they can stand behind in an open and demonstrable manner.
The history of mankind is inseparable from the history of living in communities. It’s only in recent times that so many have chosen to live in cities and towns. Dogs, of course, offer a brilliant and wonderful example of the benefits of community life.
Back to George Monbiot. Here are some of Mr. Monbiot’s words towards the end of his speech. (My emphasis.)
As Lakoff has pointed out, these people are trying to do the right thing but they are completely failing to apply a frames analysis. A frame is a mental structure through which you understand an issue. Instead of framing the issue with our own values and describing and projecting our values – which is the only thing in the medium- to long-term that ever works – we are abandoning them and adopting instead the values of the people who are wrecking the environment. How could there be any long-term outcome other than more destruction?
There’s another way of looking at this, which says the same thing in different ways. All of us are somewhere along a spectrum between intrinsic values and extrinsic values. Extrinsic values are about reputation and image and money. They’re about driving down the street in your Ferrari and showing it to everyone. They are about requiring other people’s approbation for your own sense of well-being.
Intrinsic values are about being more comfortable with yourself and who you are. About being embedded in your family, your community, among your friends, and not needing to display to other people in order to demonstrate to yourself that you are worth something.
The desire for humans to belong to a community was highlighted in a recent article in Time Magazine under it’s Culture section (August 4th). The article was called Atheist “Churches” Gain Popularity—Even in the Bible Belt(again, my emphasis).
Jerry Dewitt (Left), A former Pentecostal minister, DeWitt now leads the secular Community Mission Chapel in Lake Charles, La. Mike Aus (Right), In September 2012, Aus began Houston Oasis, an atheist service that is considered a model for nonbelievers nationwide.
On a clear, Sunny July morning, as churchgoers all around Houston take to their pews, dozens of nonbelievers are finding seats inside a meeting room in a corporate conference center on the city’s west side to listen to a sermon about losing faith. But first there’s the weekly “community moment”–remarks on a chosen topic delivered by the group’s executive director, this time focused on how we’re hardwired to read sensationalized news–as well as announcements about an upcoming secular summer camp. In between, a musician sings softly of Albert Einstein.
The men speaking before the assembled gathering–executive director Mike Aus, who regularly leads the group, and Jerry DeWitt, a visitor who heads a similar gathering in Louisiana–are both deeply familiar with the idea of Sunday ritual.
Later in the article, Mike Aus (see picture above) goes on to say (once more, my emphasis):
There are a lot of people in the free-thought movement who say: Well, this is just mimicking church. But if we don’t offer regular human community and support for nonbelievers, it would be detrimental to the movement.
Whether we like it or not, change is being thrown at us by nature at an unprecedented scale; certainly unprecedented in the experience of homo sapiens. Our only hope is to turn away from the destructive agendas of our present governments all across the world and build change from the grassroots up.
I’m really showing my age and cultural upbringing through the choice of this title to today’s post.
For The Goon Show was an integral part of my ‘education’ during my formative years. Spike Milligan was an outstanding actor in The Goon Show, a comedy legend, along with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe; not forgetting the narratives from Wallace Greenslade.
The Goon Show ran from 1951 to 1960 (I was born in 1944) broadcast by the BBC Home Service.
Spike Milligan after receiving his Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1992.
What’s this all leading up to?
Simply that a recent speech by George Monbiot reveals such utter madness in the upper echelons of the United Kingdom that only reflecting on The Goon Show offers any meaning to this old Brit. Not that the USA escapes Mr. Monbiot’s analysis.
Here’s how the speech opens:
The Pricing of Everything
Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing the death of both the theory and the practice of neoliberal capitalism. This is the doctrine which holds that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. It holds that people are best served, and their prosperity is best advanced, by the minimum of intervention and spending by the state. It contends that we can maximise the general social interest through the pursuit of self-interest.
To illustrate the spectacular crashing and burning of that doctrine, let me tell you the sad tale of a man called Matt Ridley. He was a columnist on the Daily Telegraph until he became – and I think this tells us something about the meritocratic pretensions of neoliberalism – the hereditary Chair of Northern Rock: a building society that became a bank. His father had been Chair of Northern Rock before him, which appears to have been his sole qualification.
While he was a columnist on the Telegraph he wrote the following:
The government “is a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world. … governments do not run countries, they parasitize them.”(1) He argued that taxes, bail-outs, regulations, subsidies, interventions of any kind are an unwarranted restraint on market freedom. When he became Chairman of Northern Rock, Mr Ridley was able to put some of these ideas into practice. You can see the results today on your bank statements.
In 2007 Matt Ridley had to go cap in hand to the self-seeking flea and beg it for what became £27 billion. This was rapidly followed by the first run on a British bank since 1878. The government had to guarantee all the deposits of the investors in the bank. Eventually it had to nationalise the bank, being the kind of parasitic self-seeking flea that it is, in order to prevent more or less the complete collapse of the banking system. (2)
You can read the full transcript and look up the references over on the George Monbiot website.
However, a real bonus is that his speech (delivered without notes!), his SPERI Annual Lecture, hosted by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, was recorded on video.
Please set aside a quiet hour (and a tad) to listen to George Monbiot and wonder at the goon show that we are all acting out! In fact, watching his speech and his answers to a number of questions from the audience will give you something that the transcript just can’t convey. Watch it! You will be inspired!
(SPERI Annual Lecture by George Monbiot: “The Pricing of Everything” at the Octagon in Sheffield, UK, on 29th April 2014.)
Back to dear old Spike Milligan and to close with what seems like a very apt quote of his.
“All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.“
As I have been intimating previously, today is the start of my mother from London visiting us here in Oregon. Thus, as one would expect, time for blogging is going to be restricted. Then in a week’s time, we are also joined by my sister, Elizabeth, who lives in Tokyo. So, dear reader, you will understand if there is a deficit of creative writing, assuming you find some of it creative, why that is.
Thus today, I’m leaning heavily on a recent item I read on the EarthSky blogsite. It’s all about pronking! Yes, I hadn’t come across the word before.
ooOOoo
Does your dog pronk?
Among wild animals, pronking may be a way of avoiding predators. But when you see an animal pronk, you can’t but think it’s leaping for joy.
Alpacas, gazelles, some deer and baby lambs are all known to pronk. That is, they leap into the air as if leaping for joy, lifting all four feet off the ground at once. The fact that – in some species like sheep – young animals do it more than older ones does suggest playfulness. But, among wild animals, pronking may be a way of avoiding predators. It means something like, “Hey, I’m very fit so don’t bother chasing me.”
But how about dogs? I didn’t find much online discussion about true dog-pronking, although many of us, at one time or another, may have seen our dog leaping for joy. I recall my own dog Snoop (rest his soul) released from the car in a South Dakota meadow, leaping and running like crazy through the long grass for maybe 20 minutes, until we called him back. It was one of the most joyful things I’ve ever seen, and definitely one of my best memories of Snoop.
So enjoy the videos below. And, by the way, although it is a survival strategy for some, the very word pronk comes from an Afrikaans verb pronk-, which means show off or strut. It has the same linguistic derivation as our English verb prance.
“Pronking” seems to occur when an animal gets excited and jumps around his field, leaving the ground with all four feet simultaneousl, almost as though he had springs attached to his feet..Often these jumps can be high in the air.No-one really knows why llamas pronk. Certainly it is the response to some sort of excitement or disturbance. It is often infectious; sometimes my entire herd will take off. I am told that it isn’t only llamas but sheep and goats. Those of you old enough to remember BBC’s Magic Roundabout may well recall that Zebedee was a “pronker”. We never had a telly as kids, but I believe Zebedee was a dog (??).
Okay, well, maybe some sheep and wild animals like this young springbok – in Etosha National Park, Namibia – are the only true pronkers. Maybe true pronking has to have the downward-pointing head and stiff-leggedness. But if you ever see your dog do what the dogs in these videos do … you’ll feel happy. Image via Wikipedia.
Bottom line: Among wild animals, pronking seems to be a way of avoiding predators. But when you see an animal pronk, you can’t but think it’s leaping for joy.
ooOOoo
So there you go. Don’t say that Learning from Dogs doesn’t teach you some new words from time to time!
Delighted to introduce a guest picture parade for this week.
As you are aware, a great aspect of this world of blogging are the connections we make. Thus it was that as a result of Kristin signing up to follow Learning from Dogs I was made aware that she is the author of an Australian blog Fluidicthought and describes herself:
I became interested in Photography whilst creating a business site blog for Point Plaza Apartments.
I simply enjoy capturing a scene that moves me.
Photographs capture that moment in time. Here we have pieces of time that I have captured and can share with others.
Her photographs were delightful and Kristin readily agreed for me to use them for today’s picture parade. A picture parade with a story.
ooOOoo
My PLACE
WOODY POINT is a suburb on the western side of the Redcliffe Peninsula.
The first recorded English explorer to set foot on the Peninsula was Lt. Matthew Flinders, who landed near Woody Point on the 17th July 1799 while exploring Moreton Bay.
On 14th September 1824 the brig ‘Amity‘ brought a party of officials, soldiers, their wives and children, and 29 convicts. They landed on the beach near the mouth of Humpybong Creek to form a convict settlement.
Much of the peninsula was subdivided into farm lots in the early 1870s. The construction of the peninsula’s first significant jetty at Woody Point (1882) brought about some development. Visitors and holiday-makers came via a weekly ferry.
Woody Point Jetty.
The post office directory of 1901 recorded the Great Western Hotel (1883), three boarding houses, a school, a butcher and a store at Woody Point. In 1925 there were also the Belvedere and Woody Point Hotels.
The Hornibrook Bridge was opened by Queensland Premier Arthur Edward Moore on 14 October 1935, connecting the Redcliffe district at Clontarf and Brisbane City at Brighton. The bridge had a length of 2.684 kilometres. The toll for cars was one shilling per vehicle.
The Hornibrook Bridge was one of three bridges that crossed Bramble Bay. The second is the Houghton Highway, which was built to accommodate rising traffic levels in the 1970s. The third is the Ted Smout Memorial Bridge, which opened to traffic in July 2010.
The Ted Smout Memorial Bridge and its twin, the Houghton Highway, were Australia’s longest bridges, (as of 27 March 2013.) It is the first bridge in Australia designed to withstand Hurricane Katrina-type storm events. Ted Smout was born in 1898, joining the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps aged 17 (lied about his age to get in). He was awarded France’s highest honour, being made a Chevalier (Knight) of the Legion d’Honneur in 1998 and also received the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the community. He died 106 years old.
The Ted Smout Memorial Bridge.
Woody Point’s Apex Park & Bicentennial Park were constructed by reclaiming land along the foreshore in the 1970s. A $9.5 million Woody Point Jetty and foreshore upgrade was completed in January 2009.
View of Woody Point Jetty from Point Plaza.
Woody Point’s current renovations include the construction of high-rise apartment buildings overlooking Bramble Bay, Moreton Bay, The Port of Brisbane and the Ted Smout Highway.
Point Plaza Apartments.Bramble Bay.Brisbane City from Woody Point.
Learning from Dogs 