Reflections on these present times, concluding part.
I closed yesterday with, So maybe there’s a blindness with humans, and then set out the characteristics of that blindness. One of those characteristics being,
Our obsession with how things are now prevents us from reflecting on those signs that indicate changes are under way, even when the likely conclusions are unmistakeable. The ecological and climatic changes being the most obvious example of this strange blindness that mankind possesses.
Let’s move this on a little. The arguments from a wide range of scientists are overwhelmingly in favour of the proposition that mankind is using vastly more resources from the planet than the planet can provide. Take oil. This graph show past and projected oil production for the whole Earth out to 2050, less than 40 years away.
Here’s an extract from that website which I encourage you to read in full,
The part before 2007 is historical fact. The part that comes afterward is an ASPO extrapolation.
This graph is worth careful attention as a lot of world history is written into it. Note the steep rise in oil production after World War II. Note that 1971 was the peak in oil production in the United States lower 48. There is a sliver of white labled Arctic oil. That is mostly Alaskan Prudhoe Bay oil, which peaked in 1990. Prudhoe Bay was almost big enough to counteract the lower 48 peak of 1971. The sliver is very narrow now. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 is very visible. The oil produced by non-OPEC countries stayed nearly constant while OPEC production nearly halved. The embargo caused the world economy to slow. But the high cost of energy spurred the development of energy efficient automobiles and refrigerators and a lot of other things. Note the effect of the collapse of the Russian economy in 1990 on Russian oil production. Note the rapid increase in oil production when the world economy boomed near the end of the twentieth century. Oil was $12 a barrel at that time. Note that European (North Sea) oil peaked in 2000. Note especially what would have happened if the 1973 embargo had not occurred. It is possible that the world would now be on the steep part of the right side of the Hubbert curve.
Take population growth. Here’s a graph that shows that going through seven billion, which is due shortly, is likely to be way short of the eventual peak. Likely peak might be in the range of eight to ten billion! Just take a look at that graph,
Take global warming. Here’s a graph from NASA, from which I quote,
The five warmest years since the late 1880s, according to NASA scientists, are in descending order 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2006. (reported in the year 2007!)
No apologies for bashing you around the head with these graphs and figures – most people have a good sense about these aspects of our life on this planet. But, in a very real sense, that’s the point.
The point that despite powerful and obvious evidence, mankind has great difficulty accepting obvious trends and understanding that whatever ‘today’ feels like, ‘tomorrow’ is almost certainly not going to be more of the same.
At the risk of hammering this point to death, here are two pictures and some text to show how quickly ‘today’ changes and becomes ‘tomorrow’.
Scientist left speechless as vast glacier turns to water
THESE images show the astonishing rate of break-up of an enormous glacier in north Greenland – from ice to water in just two years.
The before and after photographs, which left a Welsh scientist who led the 24-month project “speechless”, reveal the worrying effects of climate change in an area previously thought too cold to be much affected.
The Petermann glacier pictured August, 5th, 2009Petermann glacier, pictured from same position, July 24th, 2011
Dr Alun Hubbard, a reader at Aberystwyth University’s Centre for Glaciology, returned from the Petermann Glacier in north-west Greenland a month ago, but did not see the stark images documenting the changes until this week.
He said: “Although I knew what to expect in terms of ice loss from satellite imagery, I was still completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the break-up, which rendered me speechless. It was just incredible to see. This glacier is huge, 20km across, 1,000m high.”
“It’s like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it’s full of water.”
“It’s quite hard to get your head around the scale of the change. To be able to see that, everything changed in such a short period of time, I was speechless.”
Do read the full article on the Wales Online website here.
Stay with me a little longer, if you will.
Yves Smith in her wonderfully broad and addictive Blog, Naked Capitalism, had the first part of a powerful interview with Satyajit Das published on the 7th. Here are a couple of extracts,
It’s amazing how much money you can make just shuffling paper backwards and forwards. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece praising John Paulson who made a killing from the subprime disaster as an entrepreneur. But what did he make? What did he leave behind? Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued: “I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence. US financial services increased its share of value added from 2% to 6.5% but is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”
Just let that quote from Paul Volcker stay with you for a while. Satyajit goes on to say,
Management and directors of financial institutions cannot really understand what is going on – it’s simply not practical. They cannot be across all the products. For example, Robert Rubin, the former head of Goldman Sachs and Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, encouraged increased risk taking at CitiGroup. He was guided by a consultant’s report and famously stated that risk was the only underpriced asset. He encouraged investment in AAA securities assuming that they were ‘money good’. He seemed not to be aware of the liquidity puts that Citi had written which meant that toxic off-balance sheet assets would come back to the mother ship in the case of a crisis. Now, if he didn’t understand, others would find it near impossible. And I’m talking about executive management.
Non executives are even further removed. Upon joining the Salomon Brothers Board, Henry Kaufman, the original Dr. Doom found that most non-executive directors had little experience or understanding of banking. They relied on board reports that were, “neither comprehensive … nor detailed enough … about the diversity and complexity of our operations.” Non-executive directors were reliant “on the veracity and competency of senior managers, who in turn … are beholden to the veracity of middle managers, who are themselves motivated to take risks through a variety of profit compensation formulas.”
Kaufman later joined the board of Lehman Brothers. Nine out of ten members of the Lehman board were retired, four were 75 years or more in age, only two had banking experience, but in a different era. The octogenarian Kaufman sat on the Lehman Risk Committee with a Broadway producer, a former Navy admiral, a former CEO of a Spanish-language TV station and the former chairman of IBM. The Committee only had two meetings in 2006 and 2007. AIG’s board included several heavyweight diplomats and admirals; even though Richard Breeden, former head of the SEC told a reporter, “AIG, as far as I know, didn’t own any aircraft carriers and didn’t have a seat in the United Nations.”
In other words, there is no shortage of information from all corners of the world to show, with very little doubt, that the last few decades have seen unprecedented mistakes by national governments, mistakes in corporate governance, a lack of understanding of economic fundamentals, poor financial and social management, and on and on and on.
But practically all of us, and I mean all of us, didn’t see it at the time, didn’t see where it was heading and only now, when it is full in our faces, do we get it and see it for what it has really been, a long period of over two decades where the ‘me‘ has been more important than the ‘us‘.
That me versus us even being promoted, if that’s the right word, by a British Prime Minister twenty-five years ago. That quote from Margaret Thatcher back in 1987, “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” (Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987)
Let me draw this all together, yesterday’s part and this concluding part.
There is significant evidence, real hard evidence, that the patterns of mankind’s behaviours of the last few decades cannot continue. Simply because mankind will go over the edge of self-extinction. Darwin’s evidence and all that! We have to accept that humans will see the bleedin’ obvious before it is too late. We have to keep the faith that our species homo sapiens is capable of huge and rapid change when that tipping point is reached, so eloquently written by Paul Gilding in his book, The Great Disruption, reviewed by me here. We have to embrace the fact that just because the world and his wife appears to be living in total denial, the seedlings of change, powerful change, are already sprouting, everywhere, all over the world.
So let’s welcome those changes. Let’s nurture those seedlings, encourage them to grow and engulf our society with a new richness, a new fertile landscape.
Let’s embrace the power of now, the beauty of making today much better and letting go of tomorrow.
For today, I am in charge of my life,
Today, I choose my thoughts,
Today, I choose my attitudes,
Today, I choose my actions and behaviours.
With these, I create my life and my destiny.
It’s very difficult to make predictions, especially when they involve the future!
Want a brilliant idea for tomorrow? Stay in the present!
Dogs do this wonderfully. I am told that followers of Zen Buddhism discover peace and grace from embracing the present. But is there more to this? Is there some deeper psychology involved? Does our species have an intrinsic challenge in terms of staying in the present?
My musings on this arise from a couple of recent conversations.
The first was with Peter McCarthy from the Bristol area of West England. Peter and I go back a few years (at my age, everything goes back a few years!) and at one stage I did some work for Peter’s company, Telecom Potential. Just a quick aside, Peter’s company was based in the magnificent Clevedon Hall, a mansion built in 1853 as a family home for Conrad William Finzel, a German-born businessman. Here’s a picture of one of the rooms,
A room at Clevedon Hall
Peter, like me, is sure that the period in which the world now appears to be, is not some cyclical downturn, not some temporary departure from the national growth and employment ambitions promoted by so many countries. No! This one is different.
Peter is sure that a major transition is under way, as big as any of the great societal upheavals of the past. And, for me, a fascinating comment from Peter was his belief that the key attitude required for the next years would be innovation. Peter reminded me that we tend to think of innovation as applying to things physical, scientific and technical. But Peter sensed that it would be in the area of social innovation where key changes would arise and, from which, these large societal changes would flow.
Then a day later I was chatting with one of the founders of a brilliant new authentication process, Pin Plus. It is a very smart solution to a major global problem, the weaknesses of traditional password user-authentication systems.
On the face of it, Pin Plus is obviously a better and more secure way of authenticating users, and a number of key test customers have borne this out. Jonathan C was speaking of the challenges of convincing companies to have faith in this new process. This is what he said,
More than once, indeed many times, I am told by prospects something along the lines that the IT world has been looking so hard and so long for a password solution that a solution can’t possibly exist.
Let’s ponder that for a moment. Are we saying that a far-sighted approach to the potential for change is not an easy place for some, probably many, human brains?
Indeed, Jonathan and I mused that here we were, both speaking via Skype, an internet telephony service, both of us looking at different web sites in support of many of the points that we were discussing and totally dependent, in terms of our mentoring relationship, on the technology of the internet, a multi-node packet-switched communications system that was a direct result of the American shock of seeing the Russians launch the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into low earth orbit on the 4th October, 1957.
Launch of Sputnik 1
At that time, it would have seemed impossible for anyone on the planet to see that the American response to Sputnik 1 would eventually lead to the vast packet-switched network that is now the modern Internet.
But why do we regard the ability to look into the future so utterly out of reach of the common man? Look at this, the Internet Timeline here. Look how quickly the response to Sputnik1 gathered pace. See how Leonard Kleinrock of MIT way back in May, 1961, presented a paper on the theory of packet-switching in large communications networks.
So maybe there’s a blindness with humans. A blindess that creates the following bizarre characteristics,
Whatever is going on in our lives at present we assume will go on forever. I.e. the boom times will never end, or the period of doom and gloom is endless.
Our obsession with how things are now prevents us from reflecting on those signs that indicate changes are under way, even when the likely conclusions are unmistakeable. The ecological and climatic changes being the most obvious example of this strange blindness that mankind possesses.
Yet, unlike animals and some spiritual groups of humans, truly living in the present appears incredibly difficult for man.
However, the history of mankind shows that our species is capable of huge change, practically living in constant change for the last few millennia, and that a very small proportion of a society, see yesterday’s article, is all that is required to create a ‘tipping point’.
I want to continue with this theme but conscious that there is still much to be written. So, dear reader, I shall pause and pick this up tomorrow.
We must never lose sight of the greater power of positive thoughts.
Indeed, who cannot look at a dog’s wagging tail and not feel better about life. There is so much doom and gloom around that we need constantly to remind ourselves that there is a brighter future ahead, there always is.
And to understand how little it takes for a positive difference to sweep through, take a look at this article from Science Daily,
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.
The implications of this are profound. Be sure that we are living through a transition period, a period necessary to find a better future. Find another nine people who agree with you, and there’s a hundred on their way! Back to the article,
“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”
Today, delighted to offer a guest post from author Garth Stein
Garth Stein and dog!
But first to how this came about. Way back in June, I was contacted by Wiley Saichek who signed off his email, Marketing Director, Authors On The Web. To be frank, I hadn’t heard of the organisation before. Wiley invited me to participate in something he called a Blog Tour on behalf of Garth Stein. It was connected with Garth’s latest book, The Art of Racing in the Rain.
Jeannie had read it some time ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. The book had been next to my side of the bed for weeks but, ironically, the demands of my own writing had just got in the way of me reading it.
Anyway, back to the Blog Tour!
Apparently, the ideal was to have the guest post published on Learning from Dogs during the period July 18th to August 1st but I dragged my heels waiting and hoping that the story from Garth could include a picture of Comet. The picture has not been forthcoming so here it is anyway. I shall be reviewing Garth’s book The Art of Racing in the Rain as soon as I can get around to reading it.
A Game Called Fetch, by Garth Stein
People often ask me about my dog, Comet. They want to know if she was the inspiration for Enzo, the dog narrator in my book, The Art of Racing in the Rain (and the young reader version, Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog). And the answer is, flatly, no. Enzo is a singular character, I tell them, and has no predecessor. Comet is goofy and silly, and is very much not Enzo. But she’s still very smart–in her own Comet way–and has taught me much about the world.
When Comet was just a pup, she hated being left at home; she didn’t like the responsibility of having the house to herself. She would always get into some mischief: eat an entire bunch of bananas, for instance (having peeled them first!). Or claw her way into the pantry looking for cookies. But one day, she communicated her anxiety in a way that was so clear, so unmistakable, there was no doubt at all as to her feelings. We went out for a couple of hours, confining her to the kitchen/dining area of our house. And when we came home, there was a perfectly round, undisturbed puddle of urine on the dining room table.
Now that is a statement. Message received. Since that day, whenever we get ready to leave her alone in the house, she willingly–one might saygratefully–finds her crate, curls up, and waits for us to secure the door.
While Comet may not be able to wax eloquently about philosophy and popular culture as Enzo does, she did teach me an important lesson this summer.
Comet loves playing fetch with a tennis ball. She always has. And she will run herself into the ground chasing balls, so that my arm gets sore throwing a ball for her with my Chuck-It, and I find myself neglecting my cooking duties, my lawn mowing, my reading, my writing, and even my children…all to throw a tennis ball for Comet.
This summer I purchased a GoDogGo. It’s a ball launcher with a bucket of tennis balls and a delayed feed, so one can teach one’s dog to play fetch with herself. A brilliant idea! The machine spits the ball, the dog fetches it, drops it in the bucket, the machine spits it again. Ad infinitum.
And so one weekend this summer, I decided to teach Comet how to use this machine so I could do other things that needed doing, like cleaning gutters and grilling chickens.
Well, she got the idea right away. Launch, fetch, drop. She was really quite good. And then I taught her launch, fetch, drop-in-the-bucket, prepare for re-launch. And she got that, too.
“I have the smartest tennis-ball-dog on the planet,” I thought. “She picked this up in ten minutes! Now I can go have an iced tea while she plays fetch with a ball throwing machine.”
But it didn’t work. As soon as I stepped away, she lost the thread. Ball launch, ball fetch, ball dropped in the bucket. Instead, she dropped it next to the bucket and stared at it while the machine ground its ball-throwing wheels in anticipation.
“Come on, Comet,” I said. “Drop it in the bucket!”
I dropped the ball in the bucket, the launcher launched, Comet fetched, and dropped the ball at my feet.
“In the bucket,” I said. She wagged, sat and barked and waited for me to drop the ball in the bucket.
I spent two days teaching her how to drop the ball in the bucket by herself. Sometimes she’d do it for me–so I knew it was possible!–but the moment I stepped away to attend to some other business, she lost her ability to drop the ball in the bucket. She’d stand over the ball and bark until I came to help her. It was a miserable time.
As Sunday evening arrived, my wife came outside to see how our training was going. I expressed to her my frustration. “She knows what to do,” I said. “She just won’t do it.”
My wife watched as I put the ball in the bucket and the launcher clicked, ratcheting up its gears. Comet had gotten to recognize the clicks that meant the ball would soon be launched, and she sunk to her haunches, tail wagging, staring at the launch tube. And then with a thwack! the ball sailed across the yard and she took off after it, recovered it, dropped it at my feet and barked happily.
“She won’t drop it in the bucket,” I said, bewildered. “She wants me to drop it in the bucket.”
My wife smiled at me my sympathetically. “Comet doesn’t want to play fetch with a machine,” she said. “She wants to play fetch withyou.”
And I realized, in my effort to make my life more efficient, in order to multi-task one more thing during a busy day, that playing fetch is not about economy and efficiency. It’s about playing fetch.
The ball launcher sits in the shed gathering dust these days, but the Chuck-It is always in use. And while Comet might like to spend every waking hour of every day playing fetch, she realizes that I have to put the ball down at some point to cook dinner or play with my family or write a book. But she’s okay with that. Because when we do play fetch together, that’s the only thing we’re doing–we are focused on each other, and that’s what the game is all about.
Yesterday, I published a soft little item showing some reflective pictures and rather appropriate words of attachment. Little did I know that some very powerful word forces were planning same day to really thump me around the head. Here’s what happened.
The church that Jean and I go to on a regular basis is very inspiring. Two reasons come to mind. The first is the love and friendship that the congregation offer, both to regulars and visitors alike. The second is the spiritual inspiration gifted to the priest and, boy oh boy, does that come out through his sermons. Indeed, the rest of this article was motivated by yesterday’s sermon.
Take a look at the American railway ticket above. Turn your head and look at the right-hand part. What do you read? ‘This check is not good if detached‘. Now let me quote a little from the sermon,
It is difficult to care for people in the world when we are not a caring community. It is totally absurd to speak of peace in a world when we do not have peace in our community. It is impossible to be an instrument of love in the world if we are not a community of love.
What is true in the Church is of course true in the world as a whole. We do need to learn to live together. Railway tickets used to carry the words, “Not good if detached.” That is true of life in general. Our survival and progress as people on this planet are dependent on our interrelatedness.
See the beautiful spiritual inspiration that comes from those gifted to draw such powerful word pictures. Take that last word ‘interrelatedness’. Jean and I are studying at the local college for a Master Gardener’s Certificate. For the simple reason that we have to find a way to tame our wild garden, comprised mainly of decomposed granite granules, so that we can grown our own vegetables, have some chickens, that sort of thing.
The last session was about botany. To a complete non-gardener like me it was, nonetheless, fascinating. What moved me beyond measure was the detail and complexity of all things botanical; grasses, trees, shrubs, flowering plants, you name it. It was the interconnectedness of it all. Here’s an example.
Not a female wasp, just an orchid.
Certain orchids dupe male wasps into trying to mate with them. Here are a few extracts from a piece in the New Scientist website,
Few can resist the allure of a beautiful rose, but some wasps outdo even the most ardent flower lover. Presented with the right specimen, a male orchid dupe wasp ejaculates right on the petals.
Many insects mistake flowers for femmes, but few go as far as these wasps, says Anne Gaskett, a biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who led a study of the insects’ amorous intentions toward two species of Australian tongue orchids. “It’s just so hard [for the wasps] to resist,” she says.
Now have a quick watch of this video extract from the BBC,
OK, let me get back to that botany class. As our teacher pointed out, lose that particular species of wasp and the planet probably loses that species of orchid. Think about the interconnectedness of that, and much more in the beautiful planet all around us. It is such a marvellous, beautiful, complex and interconnected world. We need constant reminding of that fact. Which is where yesterday’s sermon hit the mark again.
Inspired by the pictures from a flight to the moon in 1968, American poet Archibald MacLeish spoke these beautiful words:
“To see the earth as it truly is, small, blue, beautiful in the eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together …“
That is a wonderful image, riders on the earth together. It speaks of our togetherness as a human race, brothers and sisters on this fragile island within the vastness of the universe. Brothers and sisters … that really need to know … that we are brothers and sisters.
We need to do all that we can to build bridges, to mend bridges, to stay together as a true community… because we are:
Not good if detached. Amen.
What a powerful sermon. What inspired power in those words. Real words.
Earthrise, from Apollo 8, 1968
Forgive me for holding your attention just a tad longer. This is the full Archibald MacLeish’s quotation, referred to in the sermon above.
To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.
— Archibald MacLeish, American poet, ‘Riders on earth together, Brothers in eternal cold,’ front page of the New York Times, Christmas Day, 25 December 1968
This is what Frank Borman, who was on Apollo 8, had published in Newsweek, 23 December 1968,
When you’re finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.
This is what Frank Borman was reported as saying in the press in early 1969,
I think the one overwhelming emotion that we had was when we saw the earth rising in the distance over the lunar landscape . . . . It makes us realize that we all do exist on one small globe. For from 230,000 miles away it really is a small planet.
and this,
The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me—a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don’t show from that distance.
The power in those words. The power of the truth about our interconnectedness and the power of Not good if detached.
Let me leave you with a fragment from another Blogsite that I came across quite by chance while researching for this piece.
A blog is a voice, the inner voice, telling, in this case, what is going on, inside and out. And in me, that means it should also be about my spiritual path. My spiritual life is as important to me as breathing. Without connection with the One, what is life? What is it for?
A recent item on the BBC website provides a welcome reminder of the power of the relationship between dogs and mankind.
Practically no-one is unaware of the role that dogs provide, for example, as guides for humans with sight impairment. But there’s much more to the ‘service’ dog than that.
A service dog might be described as,
“any guide dog, signal dog, or other animal individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability, including, but not limited to, guiding individuals with impaired vision, alerting individuals with impaired hearing to intruders or sounds, providing minimal protection or rescue work, pulling a wheelchair, or fetching dropped items.”
That definition is taken from the United States Code of Federal Regulations for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990!
Carrie and Lilly
But then cast your eye over this, as I mentioned, from the BBC on the 26th May, 2011.
Dogs can help reduce stress in parents of children with lifelong developmental disability autism, a study suggests.
The University of Lincoln compared 20 families with dogs with 20 without.
Daniel Mills told a Royal Society of Medicine conference early results suggested any breed could improve communication and relationships.
The veterinary behavioural medicine professor hopes to use video footage to show how dogs can improve child eating, sleeping and tantrum behaviour.
At a three-day Parents’ Autism Workshops and Support course, the families listed more than a thousand ways their dog had helped – from developing language and establishing a routine to using the pet to request action in a non-confrontational way.
Full story is here in which is included Professor Mills saying: “While there is no shortage of opinion on how dogs can help, there has been little money given to scientifically look into this.”
Autism is a challenging condition and anything that can establish a scientific underpinning for the role that dogs can have is to be welcomed whole-heartedly.
Finally, there are quite a few videos online that provide more information about the special, almost magical relationship between dogs and autistic people. Here’s one that is the first part of a series of five.
The powerful anti-democratic forces that will threaten civilisation.
In one sense this post today carries an underlying political message – and in another sense, it does not. It does in the sense that if every American voter truly understood the risks of a continued relationship with oil then the tar-sands projects wouldn’t have a prayer of a chance of being allowed.
In the other sense, it does not. Because the influence and power of ‘behind-the-scenes’ oil and money is beyond imagination and, just possibly, outside the reach of democracy.
So what’s got me so agitated?
Well first is that I have been quietly reading The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins, he of Transition Totnes fame. Most readers will be aware that Totnes was the first Transition Town in the world and started what is becoming the greatest social movement of the 21st century.
In Rob’s book, on page 51, there is a diagram showing the relative energy returns from the energy invested to produce that energy – hope that makes sense! Let me explain further. For example, for every unit of energy invested in building tidal-range generators, there are eighty-seven units of energy returned. I.e. this is a great investment for mankind in terms of the net benefit.
If we look at the generation of electricity from solar photo-voltaic (PV) panels then the return is about eight units from every unit invested.
The worst return of them all is from Tar sands: just one unit returned from every unit invested. Investment and humanitarian madness!
Then next I came across this item about Tar sands on The Ecologist magazine website,
Emissions from tar sands seriously underestimated
Governments and companies making no effort to quantify the real climate impacts
Greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands operations are being significantly under-reported according to new research by Global Forest Watch Canada.
The report, ‘Bitumen and Biocarbon‘, says oil companies and governments are not accounting for emissions from deforestation. It says that when boreal forest is destroyed for tar sands development, significant amounts of greenhouse gases are emitted.
‘Governments and companies are working hard to downplay the impacts of tar sands operations, but it turns out that they don’t even know the full extent of the problem,’ said Christy Ferguson, Greenpeace climate and energy coordinator.
‘What’s worse, they’re doing nothing to find out. Denial is not a climate strategy.’
In addition, the report shows that biological carbon stored in living and decaying plants is lost when natural ecosystems are disturbed or destroyed through mining of bitumen and construction of roads, pipelines or facilities.
‘Peatlands are one of the world’s most important storehouses of soil carbon. Industrial activity in the tar sands is destroying peatlands, releasing carbon and eliminating a crucial natural mechanism.
‘Even if peatlands are reclaimed, the carbon released through industrialisation won’t be replaced for thousands of years,’ said Ferguson.
Finally, today (25th) I received in my in-box the latest TomDispatch offering. (I am indebted to Tom Engelhardt for, once again, giving me permission to reproduce in full this TomGram.)
Tom’s latest piece is written by Bill McKibben (with an introduction by Tom) and I strongly urge you to read it – the implications are global. If you read an earlier TomDispatch article by Bill re-published on Learning from Dogs on the 18th July, The Great American Carbon Bomb, today’s piece will surely make you sit up and fume; as it did me! Here it is in full.
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Jailed Over Big Oil’s Attempt to Wreck the Planet
What might have happened if John McCain had won the presidency in 2008? One thing is certain: there would have been a lot more protest from Democrats, progressives, and the left. Take it as an irony of his election, but Barack Obama has proved remarkably effective in disarming the antiwar movement, even as the use of war in American policy in the Greater Middle East has only grown. That Obama, the supposed anti-warrior of the 2008 campaign, has paid less than no attention to his antiwar critics is no news at all. It’s now practically a cliché as well that he seems to feel no need to feed his political “base” and that, generally speaking (and explain it as you will), his base has not yet pushed back.
This has been particularly true of Obama’s wars, especially the disastrous, never-ending one in Afghanistan. Had Afghanistan been “McCain’s war,” you would surely have seen growing waves of protest, despite the way 9/11 ensured that the Afghan War, unlike the Iraq one, would long be the unassailable “good war.” Still, as American treasure surged into the ill-starred enterprise in Afghanistan, while funds for so much that mattered disappeared at home, I think the streets of Washington would have been filling. What protest there has been, as John Hanrahan of the Nieman Watchdog website reported recently, tends to be remarkably ill-covered in the mainstream media.
Obama, only two points ahead of Ron Paul in the latest Gallup Poll in the race for 2012, is a beyond-vulnerable candidate. (Somewhere there must be some Democratic pol doing the obvious math and considering a challenge, mustn’t there?) Fortunately, in another area at least as crucial as our wars, demonstrators against a Big Oil tar-sands pipeline from Canada that will help despoil the planet are now out in front of the White House — you can follow them here — and they haven’t been shy about aiming their nonviolent protests directly at Obama. Will he or won’t he act like the climate-change president that, on coming into office, he swore he would be? Time will tell. Meanwhile, let Bill McKibben, TomDispatch regular, an organizer of the protests, and just out of a jail cell, fill you in. Tom
Arrested at the White House
Acting as a Living Tribute to Martin Luther King
By Bill McKibben
I didn’t think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., grew even stronger these past days.
As I headed to jail as part of the first wave of what is turning into the biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years, I had the vague idea that I would write something. Not an epic like King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” but at least, you know, a blog post. Or a tweet.
Heros
But frankly, I wasn’t up to it. The police, surprised by how many people turned out on the first day of two weeks of protests at the White House, decided to teach us a lesson. As they told our legal team, they wanted to deter anyone else from coming — and so with our first crew they were… kind of harsh.
We spent three days in D.C.’s Central Cell Block, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds like it might be. You lie on a metal rack with no mattress or bedding and sweat in the high heat; the din is incessant; there’s one baloney sandwich with a cup of water every 12 hours.
I didn’t have a pencil — they wouldn’t even let me keep my wedding ring — but more important, I didn’t have the peace of mind to write something. It’s only now, out 12 hours and with a good night’s sleep under my belt, that I’m able to think straight. And so, as I said, I’ll go to this weekend’s big celebrations for the openingof the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial on the Washington Mall with even more respect for his calm power.
Preacher, speaker, writer under fire, but also tactician. He really understood the power of nonviolence, a power we’ve experienced in the last few days. When the police cracked down on us, the publicity it produced cemented two of the main purposes of our protest:
Eaarth
First, it made Keystone XL — the new, 1,700-mile-long pipeline we’re trying to block that will vastly increase the flow of “dirty” tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico — into a national issue. A few months ago, it was mainly people along the route of the prospective pipeline who were organizing against it. (And with good reason: tar sands mining has already wrecked huge swaths of native land in Alberta, and endangers farms, wild areas, and aquifers all along its prospective route.)
Now, however, people are coming to understand — as we hoped our demonstrations would highlight — that it poses a danger to the whole planet as well. After all, it’s the Earth’s second largest pool of carbon, and hence the second-largest potential source of global warming gases after the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. We’ve already plumbed those Saudi deserts. Now the question is: Will we do the same to the boreal forests of Canada. As NASA climatologist James Hansen has made all too clear, if we do so it’s “essentially game over for the climate.” That message is getting through. Witness the incredibly strong New York Times editorial opposing the building of the pipeline that I was handed on our release from jail.
Second, being arrested in front of the White House helped make it clearer that President Obama should be the focus of anti-pipeline activism. For once Congress isn’t in the picture. The situation couldn’t be simpler: the president, and the president alone, has the power either to sign the permit that would take the pipeline through the Midwest and down to Texas (with the usual set of disastrous oil spills to come) or block it.
Barack Obama has the power to stop it and no one in Congress or elsewhere can prevent him from doing so. That means — and again, it couldn’t be simpler — that the Keystone XL decision is the biggest environmental test for him between now and the next election. If he decides to stand up to the power of big oil, it will send a jolt through his political base, reminding the presently discouraged exactly why they were so enthused in 2008.
That’s why many of us were wearing our old campaign buttons when we went into the paddy wagon. We’d like to remember — and like the White House to remember, too — just why we knocked on all those doors.
But as Dr. King might have predicted, the message went deeper. As people gather in Washington for this weekend’s dedication of his monument, most will be talking about him as a great orator, a great moral leader. And of course he was that, but it’s easily forgotten what a great strategist he was as well, because he understood just how powerful a weapon nonviolence can be.
The police, who trust the logic of force, never quite seem to get this. When they arrested our group of 70 or so on the first day of our demonstrations, they decided to teach us a lesson by keeping us locked up extra long — strong treatment for a group of people peacefully standing on a sidewalk.
No surprise, it didn’t work. The next day an even bigger crowd showed up — and now, there are throngs of people who have signed up to be arrested every day until the protests end on September 3rd. Not only that, a judge threw out the charges against our first group, and so the police have backed off. For the moment, anyway, they’re not actually sending more protesters to jail, just booking and fining them.
And so the busload of ranchers coming from Nebraska, and the bio-fueled RV with the giant logo heading in from East Texas, and the flight of grandmothers arriving from Montana, and the tribal chiefs, and union leaders, and everyone else will keep pouring into D.C. We’ll all, I imagine, stop and pay tribute to Dr. King before or after we get arrested; it’s his lead, after all, that we’re following.
Our part in the weekend’s celebration is to act as a kind of living tribute. While people are up on the mall at the monument, we’ll be in the front of the White House, wearing handcuffs, making clear that civil disobedience is not just history in America.
We may not be facing the same dangers Dr. King did, but we’re getting some small sense of the kind of courage he and the rest of the civil rights movement had to display in their day — the courage to put your body where your beliefs are. It feels good.
So perhaps you understand why every American reading this should make sure your voice is heard. And in the last few minutes – 1.30pm MT 25th August – Reuters have just put out this news release,
Nation’s Leading Environmental NGOs Unified Against Tar Sands Pipeline
Update on Day 5 of Tar Sand Pipeline Protest at the White House
See past update and background.
275 people have been arrested so far and many have been released. Today, the largest environmental groups in the US joined to send a letter to President Obama voicing their unified opposition to the Keystone pipeline and asking him to block it.
Why is this important? “For those of us out there in front of the White House, the best thing about this ringing statement is that the administration won’t be able to play one group off against another by making small concessions here and there”; says protest organizer Bill McKibben.
“There’s only one way to demonstrate to the environmental base the rhetoric of Obama’s 2008 campaign is still meaningful – and that’s to veto this pipeline. Since he can do it without even consulting Congress, this is one case where we’ll be able to see exactly how willing he is to match the rhetoric of his 2008 campaign.”
The letter says:
Dear President Obama,
Many of the organizations we head do not engage in civil disobedience; some do. Regardless, speaking as individuals, we want to let you know that there is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone Pipeline and those of the very civil protesters being arrested daily outside the White House.
This is a terrible project – many of the country’s leading climate scientists have explained why in their letter last month to you. It risks many of our national treasures to leaks and spills. And it reduces incentives to make the transition to job-creating clean fuels.
You have a clear shot to deny the permit, without any interference from Congress. It’s perhaps the biggest climate test you face between now and the election.
If you block it, you will trigger a surge of enthusiasm from the green base that supported you so strongly in the last election. We expect nothing less.
Sincerely,
Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund
Michael Brune, Sierra Club
Frances Beinecke, Natural Resources Defense Council
Phil Radford, Greenpeace
Larry Schweiger, National Wildlife Federation Erich Pica, Friends of the Earth
Rebecca Tarbotton, Rainforest Action Network
May Boeve, 350.org
Gene Karpinski, League of Conservation Voters
Margie Alt, Environment America
New York Times Also Opposes Pipeline
In an August 21 editorial, the NY Times took a opposition against the pipeline, citing two main concerns: the risk of oil spills along the pipeline, which would traverse highly sensitive terrain, and the fact that the extraction of petroleum from tar sands creates far more greenhouse emissions than conventional production does.
Building the pipeline would clear the way for Canada to double tar sands production over the next decade to more than 1.8 million barrels a day. To do that, some 740,000 acres of boreal forest – a natural carbon reservoir – would be destroyed.
In addition to the emissions produced by tar sands extraction, would be emissions from the loss of this vast, crucial carbon sink, [editor’s note: not to mention the biodiversity it harbors.] Read the editorial:
Website: here with permission from Sustainable Business
A chance email from Dan G. opens up a whole treasure trove.
Here’s what Dan sent to me,
True Friends
After losing his parents, this 3 year old orangutan was so depressed he wouldn’t eat and didn’t respond to any medical treatments. The veterinarians thought he would surely die from sadness. The zoo keepers found an old sick dog on the grounds in the park at the zoo where the orangutan lived and took the dog to the animal treatment center. The dog arrived at the same time the orangutan was there being treated. The 2 lost souls met and have been inseparable ever since.
The orangutan found a new reason to live and each always tries his best to be a good companion to his new found friend. They are together 24 hours a day in all their activities.
Roscoe and Surya
They live in Northern California where swimming is their favorite past time, although Roscoe (the orangutan) is a little afraid of the water and needs his friend’s help to swim.
Roscoe and SuryaRoscoe and Surya
Together they have discovered the joy and laughter in life and the value of friendship.
Roscoe and SuryaRoscoe and Surya
They have found more than a friendly shoulder to lean on.
Roscoe and SuryaLove across the species boundary
Long Live Friendship!!!!!!!
I don’t know……some say life is too short, others say it is too long, but I know that nothing that we do makes sense if we don’t touch the hearts of others…….while it lasts!
So after I had seen the pictures above, it was pretty easy to find this YouTube video.
Then if that wasn’t amazing and wonderful, try this,
Well that’s enough for today. But tomorrow, I will continue with Part Two which recounts the amazing year that Joe Hutto spent in the Florida wildlands with ….. (you’ll have to wait for tomorrow!)
Yesterday, I wrote about the fabulous success of the British otter having gone from the crumbling edge of extinction to now being found in every English county.
For something completely different, and I do mean completely, have a read of this item that appeared in the British Guardian newspaper of the 18th August.
Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists
Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report
It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.
Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.
This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity “prepare for actual contact”.
Beneficial encounters ranged from the mere detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for example through the interception of alien broadcasts, to contact with cooperative organisms that help us advance our knowledge and solve global problems such as hunger, poverty and disease.
Another beneficial outcome the authors entertain sees humanity triumph over a more powerful alien aggressor, or even being saved by a second group of ETs. “In these scenarios, humanity benefits not only from the major moral victory of having defeated a daunting rival, but also from the opportunity to reverse-engineer ETI technology,” the authors write.
Other kinds of close encounter may be less rewarding and leave much of human society feeling indifferent towards alien life. The extraterrestrials may be too different from us to communicate with usefully. They might invite humanity to join the “Galactic Club” only for the entry requirements to be too bureaucratic and tedious for humans to bother with. They could even become a nuisance, like the stranded, prawn-like creatures that are kept in a refugee camp in the 2009 South African movie, District 9, the report explains.
The most unappealing outcomes would arise if extraterrestrials caused harm to humanity, even if by accident. While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us, the report adds that people might also suffer from being physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents, humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy uninhabitable.
To bolster humanity’s chances of survival, the researchers call for caution in sending signals into space, and in particular warn against broadcasting information about our biological make-up, which could be used to manufacture weapons that target humans. Instead, any contact with ETs should be limited to mathematical discourse “until we have a better idea of the type of ETI we are dealing with.”
The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.
“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.
“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.
Even if we never make contact with extraterrestrials, the report argues that considering the potential scenarios may help to plot the future path of human civilisation, avoid collapse and achieve long-term survival.
I am bound to say that if Mr Domagal-Goldman and his colleagues believe that spending time and money on the possible outcomes of contact with extraterrestrials is a good idea in these present times then I am minded about those other visitors from outer space who passed Planet Earth by because there were no signs of intelligent life!
Stray dogs demonstrate remarkable skills at staying alive.
Before I start, a big word of thanks to Paul Gilding who passed this story to me. Apart from reading Paul’s powerful book, The Great Disruption, and exchanging a couple of emails, he doesn’t know me from Adam. But the fact that this undoubtedly busy man (his book has been a great success) not only responded to an earlier email from me and then dropped me a note to say that I might enjoy the following article, says a great deal about the integrity of the person.
The article, from the website The Dog Files, is about Moscow’s stray dogs. I’m taking the liberty of reproducing it in full.
Each morning, like clockwork, they board the subway, off to begin their daily routine amidst the hustle and bustle of the city.
But these aren’t just any daily commuters. These are stray dogs who live in the outskirts of Moscow Russia and commute on the underground trains to and from the city centre in search of food scraps.
Then after a hard day scavenging and begging on the streets, they hop back on the train and return to the suburbs where they spend the night.
Experts studying the dogs, who usually choose the quietest carriages at the front and back of the train, say they even work together to make sure they get off at the right stop – after learning to judge the length of time they need to spend on the train.
Scientists believe this phenomenon began after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, and Russia’s new capitalists moved industrial complexes from the city centre to the suburbs.
Dr Andrei Poiarkov, of the Moscow Ecology and Evolution Institute, said: “These complexes were used by homeless dogs as shelters, so the dogs had to move together with their houses. Because the best scavenging for food is in the city centre, the dogs had to learn how to travel on the subway – to get to the centre in the morning, then back home in the evening, just like people.”
Dr Poiarkov told how the dogs like to play during their daily commute. He said: “They jump on the train seconds before the doors shut, risking their tails getting jammed. They do it for fun. And sometimes they fall asleep and get off at the wrong stop.”
The dogs have also amazingly learned to use traffic lights to cross the road safely, said Dr Poiarkov. And they use cunning tactics to obtain tasty morsels of shawarma, a kebab-like snack popular in Moscow.
With children the dogs “play cute” by putting their heads on youngsters’ knees and staring pleadingly into their eyes to win sympathy – and scraps.
Dr Poiarkov added: “Dogs are surprisingly good psychologists.”
Now had this been a normal day then I would have had the time to complete this story about the tenacity of dogs. But a failed wireless modem earlier today (Thursday) meant the loss of too many hours fighting technology. It was all sorted just a little before 5pm. It is now 6.15 pm and dinner is ready and, frankly, my brain is too tired to continue.
So stay with this fascinating story about stray dogs as I continue it tomorrow (Saturday, 20th.).
Here’s an extract from that website which I encourage you to read in full,
Learning from Dogs 