I came across this post yesterday and thought that it would make a good article for today. But the truth is that I, and I expect many other readers, do not understand the article.
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Employees Heartbroken When They See Someone Tied To ‘Do Not Abandon Animals’ Sign
Outside the front door of the Harbor Humane Society sits a sign. “Do not abandon an animal here,” the sign reads. “Wait until business hours. No fee for bringing an animal to HHS. For the sake of the animal, please be humane.” An older, outdated version of the same sign sits at the back of the shelter, too, near some picnic tables where employees can take a break. When they arrived at work one morning recently, there were no animals waiting for them out front.
Harbor Humane Society
Sadly, the same could not be said for the sign in the back.
Tied to the base of the “do not abandon animals” sign was a tiny dog who had been abandoned there the night before. Security footage showed the dog, later named Trixie, had been tied to the sign around 9 p.m. and wasn’t found until 7:30 a.m. the next morning, meaning she’d waited there for 11 hours.
Harbor Humane Society
“Our team member was just about to unarm the building (had just arrived to start their morning shift) when she noticed the dog tied to the signpost near our intake door located toward the back side of the shelter,” Jen Nuernberg, director of marketing and strategic initiatives at Harbor Humane Society, told The Dodo. “Initially, she was nervous and scared, barking at her. But once she crouched down and gave her some time, she quickly warmed up and crawled right into her lap. She has been very friendly ever since!”
Harbor Humane Society
Trixie was terrified out there all alone, wondering why she’d ended up there. As soon as she met her rescuer, though, all was well. She was rushed inside and eventually met the rest of the staff members, who were just as heartbroken by the situation. Thankfully, Trixie seemed to be pretty healthy, just a little confused — as was everyone at the shelter.
“When someone abandons an animal without any information, we are just left to guess,” Jen Self Aulgur, executive director at Harbor Humane Society, told The Dodo. “So we can assume she is about 3 to 4 years old, but we don’t know her story, her name, her likes, her favorite treats or toys. This is all information we try to get on animals when they are surrendered to the shelter.”
Harbor Humane Society
The shelter employees are still hoping someone might come forward to give them some information about Trixie before she’s adopted, just to make sure she’s getting the best care possible.
“This pup deserves to have her story and history known,” Self Aulgur said. “We do not want to shame or get you in trouble — we just want to help this poor pup.”
Harbor Humane Society
Trixie is safe now and will be available for adoption in about a week or so. Until then, she’s getting as many kisses and cuddles as the staff can give her while she dreams of her loving forever family.
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Let me add my wishes to the Harbor Humane Society in hoping that very soon Trixie will be adopted by that loving family.
There were so many things that I could have written about for today but they were all swept aside by an email that came in from an old friend of mine, Chris Snuggs.
Chris and I go back many years to the time when I was a visiting teacher at Isuga in France.
But the point of this post is to share the video that Chris provided about Julie Christie. Here is the first part of a WikiPedia article:
A riveting history of counting and calculating from the time of the cave dwellers to the late twentieth century, The Universal History of Numbers is the first complete account of the invention and evolution of numbers the world over. As different cultures around the globe struggled with problems of harvests, constructing buildings, educating their citizens, and exploring the wonders of science, each civilization created its own unique and wonderful mathematical system.
Dubbed the “Indiana Jones of numbers,” Georges Ifrah traveled all over the world for ten years to uncover the little-known details of this amazing story. From India to China, and from Egypt to Chile, Ifrah talked to mathematicians, historians, archaeologists, and philosophers. He deciphered ancient writing on crumbling walls; scrutinized stones, tools, cylinders, and cones; and examined carved bones, elaborately knotted counting strings, and X-rays of the contents of never-opened ancient clay accounting balls. Conveying all the excitement and joy of the process of discovery, Ifrah writes in a delightful storytelling style, recounting a plethora of intriguing and amusing anecdotes along the way.
Now to that article on The Conversation.
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From thousands to millions to billions to trillions to quadrillions and beyond: Do numbers ever end?
Why don’t numbers end? – Reyhane, age 7, Tehran, Iran
Here’s a game: Ask a friend to give you any number and you’ll return one that’s bigger. Just add “1” to whatever number they come up with and you’re sure to win.
The reason is that numbers go on forever. There is no highest number. But why? As a professor of mathematics, I can help you find an answer.
First, you need to understand what numbers are and where they come from. You learned about numbers because they enabled you to count. Early humans had similar needs – whether to count animals killed in a hunt or keep track of how many days had passed. That’s why they invented numbers.
But back then, numbers were quite limited and had a very simple form. Often, the “numbers” were just notches on a bone, going up to a couple hundred at most.
How numbers evolved throughout the centuries.
When numbers got bigger
As time went on, people’s needs grew. Herds of livestock had to be counted, goods and services traded, and measurements made for buildings and navigation. This led to the invention of larger numbers and better ways of representing them.
About 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians began using symbols for various numbers, with a final symbol for one million. Since they didn’t usually encounter bigger quantities, they also used this same final symbol to depict “many.”
The Greeks, starting with Pythagoras, were the first to study numbers for their own sake, rather than viewing them as just counting tools. As someone who’s written a book on the importance of numbers, I can’t emphasize enough how crucial this step was for humanity.
But there was a problem. Although the Greeks could mentally think of very large numbers, they had difficulty writing them down. This was because they did not know about the number 0.
Think of how important zero is in expressing big numbers. You can start with 1, then add more and more zeroes at the end to quickly get numbers like a million – 1,000,000, or 1 followed by six zeros – or a billion, with nine zeros, or a trillion, 12 zeros.
This brief history makes clear that numbers were developed over thousands of years. And though the Egyptians didn’t have much use for a million, we certainly do. Economists will tell you that government expenditures are commonly measured in millions of dollars.
Also, science has taken us to a point where we need even larger numbers. For instance, there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy – or 100,000,000,000 – and the number of atoms in our universe may be as high as 1 followed by 82 zeros.
Don’t worry if you find it hard to picture such big numbers. It’s fine to just think of them as “many,” much like the Egyptians treated numbers over a million. These examples point to one reason why numbers must continue endlessly. If we had a maximum, some new use or discovery would surely make us exceed it.
The symbols of math include +, -, x and =.
Exceptions to the rule
But under certain circumstances, sometimes numbers do have a maximum because people design them that way for a practical purpose.
A good example is a clock – or clock arithmetic, where we use only the numbers 1 through 12. There is no 13 o’clock, because after 12 o’clock we just go back to 1 o’clock again. If you played the “bigger number” game with a friend in clock arithmetic, you’d lose if they chose the number 12.
Since numbers are a human invention, how do we construct them so they continue without end? Mathematicians started looking at this question starting in the early 1900s. What they came up with was based on two assumptions: that 0 is the starting number, and when you add 1 to any number you always get a new number.
These assumptions immediately give us the list of counting numbers: 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1 = 3, and so on, a progression that continues without end.
You might wonder why these two rules are assumptions. The reason for the first one is that we don’t really know how to define the number 0. For example: Is “0” the same as “nothing,” and if so, what exactly is meant by “nothing”?
The second might seem even more strange. After all, we can easily show that adding 1 to 2 gives us the new number 3, just like adding 1 to 2002 gives us the new number 2003.
But notice that we’re saying this has to hold for any number. We can’t very well verify this for every single case, since there are going to be an endless number of cases. As humans who can perform only a limited number of steps, we have to be careful anytime we make claims about an endless process. And mathematicians, in particular, refuse to take anything for granted.
Here, then, is the answer to why numbers don’t end: It’s because of the way in which we define them.
Now, the negative numbers
How do the negative numbers -1, -2, -3 and more fit into all this? Historically, people were very suspicious about such numbers, since it’s hard to picture a “minus one” apple or orange. As late as 1796, math textbooks warned against using negatives.
The negatives were created to address a calculation issue. The positive numbers are fine when you’re adding them together. But when you get to subtraction, they can’t handle differences like 1 minus 2, or 2 minus 4. If you want to be able to subtract numbers at will, you need negative numbers too.
A simple way to create negatives is to imagine all the numbers – 0, 1, 2, 3 and the rest – drawn equally spaced on a straight line. Now imagine a mirror placed at 0. Then define -1 to be the reflection of +1 on the line, -2 to be the reflection of +2, and so on. You’ll end up with all the negative numbers this way.
As a bonus, you’ll also know that since there are just as many negatives as there are positives, the negative numbers must also go on without end!
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
This article was written for those a great deal younger than I am. But, to be honest, it is a fascinating account of something so utterly basic to humans and human cognition.
I shall be 80 in November and I find myself thinking about death more often than I did a few years ago. As an example of how my mind has changed, yesterday I was contemplating renewing my subscription to the Free Inquiry magazine and wondering if I should renew it for two or three years? In other words will I still be alive in three years time? Silly but it is the truth. And that is not taking into account that I go to the Club Northwest two days a week and try and bike ride another two or three times a week.
Then let us not get into the topic of whether I will die before Jean or the reverse. That is an enormous subject and, thank goodness, where we live in Oregon one has the choice to die: “Two states, Oregon and Washington, currently have statutes providing a procedure for a terminally ill patient to request medication to end his or her life. These laws are sometimes referred to as “death with dignity” or “physician-assisted suicide” laws.“
All of which is an introduction to a recent article published in The Conversation that I republish below:
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Loneliness can kill, and new research shows middle-aged Americans are particularly vulnerable
Middle-aged Americans are lonelier than their European counterparts. That’s the key finding of my team’s recent study, published in American Psychologist.
Our study identified a trend that has been evolving for multiple generations, and affects both baby boomers and Gen Xers. Middle-aged adults in England and Mediterranean Europe are not that far behind the U.S. In contrast, middle-aged adults in continental and Nordic Europe reported the lowest levels of loneliness and stability over time.
We used survey data drawn from over 53,000 middle-aged adults from the U.S. and 13 European nations from 2002 to 2020. We tracked their reported changes in loneliness every two years across the midlife years of 45 to 65. This span provided us data from the so-called silent generation of people born between 1937 and 1945; baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964; and members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1974.
Our study makes clear that middle-aged Americans today are experiencing more loneliness than their peers in European nations. This coincides with existing evidence that mortality rates are rising for working-age adults in the U.S.
We focused on middle-aged adults for several reasons. Middle-aged adults form the backbone of society by constituting a majority of the workforce. But they also face increasing challenges today, notably greater demands for support from both their aging parents and their children.
Loneliness is considered a global public health issue. The U.S. surgeon general released an advisory report in 2023 documenting an epidemic of loneliness and a pressing need to increase social connection. Other nations, such as the U.K.and Japan, have appointed ministers of loneliness to ensure relationships and loneliness are considered in policymaking.
You can be lonely even when surrounded by people.
What still isn’t known
Why are middle-aged Americans exceptional when it comes to loneliness and poorer overall mental and physical health?
We did not directly test this in our study, but in the future we hope to zero in on the factors driving these trends. We think that the loneliness Americans are reporting compared to peer nations comes down to limited social safety nets and to cultural norms that prioritize individualism over community.
Individualization carries psychological costs, such as reductions in social connections and support structures, which are correlates of loneliness. Relative to the other nations in our study, Americans have a higher tendency to relocate, which is associated with weak social and community ties.
One of the reasons why we chose countries from across Europe is that they differ dramatically from the U.S. when it comes to social and economic opportunities and social safety nets. Social and economic inequalities likely increase one’s loneliness through undermining one’s ability to meet basic needs. Generous family and work policies likely lessen midlife loneliness through reducing financial pressures and work-family conflict, as well as addressing health and gender inequities.
Our findings on loneliness in conjunction with previous studies on life expectancy, health, well-being and cognition suggest that being middle-aged in America is a risk factor for poor mental and physical health outcomes.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
And on yesterday afternoon, the Sunday, I went for a bike ride of 22 miles. I loved the ride especially as I listened to music all the way; I have a portable speaker that clips near the front handlebars and plays tracks from my iPhone.
Then there was an article in March from the University of Bristol: “Happiness can be learnt, but we have to work at it – study finds.“
It reads:
Press release issued: 11 March 2024
We can learn to be happy, but only get lasting benefits if we keep practising, a first-of-its-kind study has revealed.
The team behind the University of Bristol’s ‘Science of Happiness’ course had already discovered that teaching students the latest scientific studies on happiness created a marked improvement in their wellbeing.
But their latest study found that these wellbeing boosts are short-lived unless the evidence-informed habits learnt on the course – such as gratitude, exercise, meditation or journaling – are kept up over the long-term.
Senior author Professor Bruce Hood said: “It’s like going to the gym – we can’t expect to do one class and be fit forever. Just as with physical health, we have to continuously work on our mental health, otherwise the improvements are temporary.”
Launched in 2018, the University of Bristol’s Science of Happiness course was the first of its kind in the UK. It involves no exams or coursework, and teaches students what the latest peer-reviewed studies in psychology and neuroscience say really makes us happy.
Students who took the course reported a 10 to 15% improvement in wellbeing. But only those who continued implementing the course learnings maintained that improved wellbeing when they were surveyed again two years on.
Published in the journal Higher Education, it is the first to track wellbeing of students on a happiness course long after they have left the course.
Professor Hood said: “This study shows that just doing a course – be that at the gym, a meditation retreat or on an evidence-based happiness course like ours – is just the start: you must commit to using what you learn on a regular basis.
“Much of what we teach revolves around positive psychology interventions that divert your attention away from yourself, by helping others, being with friends, gratitude or meditating.
“This is the opposite of the current ‘selfcare’ doctrine, but countless studies have shown that getting out of our own heads helps gets us away from negative ruminations which can be the basis of so many mental health problems.”
Professor Hood has distilled the Science of Happiness course into a new book, out on March 10. ‘The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well’ reveals an evidence-informed roadmap to better wellbeing.
The other paper authors are fellow University of Bristol academics Catherine Hobbs and Sarah Jelbert, and Laurie R Santos, a Yale academic whose course inspired Bristol’s Science of Happiness course.
The challenge in deciding what is best for our forests.
As a great many of you already know, we live in a rural area in Southern Oregon. It is a beautiful place and we look out to the East upon Mount Sexton. But locally a great many houses are built on rural sites with the local forest just yards away.
In the U.S., wildland firefighters are able to stop about 98% of all wildfires before the fires have burned even 100 acres. That may seem comforting, but decades of quickly suppressing fires has had unintended consequences.
However, fuel accumulation isn’t the only consequence of fire suppression.
Fire suppression also disproportionately reduces certain types of fire. In a new study, my colleagues and I show how this effect, known as the suppression bias, compounds the impacts of fuel accumulation and climate change.
What happened to all the low-intensity fires?
Most wildfires are low-intensity. They ignite when conditions aren’t too dry or windy, and they can often be quickly extinguished.
The 2% of fires that escape suppression are those that are more extreme and much harder to fight. They account for about 98% of the burned area in a typical year.
The author and colleagues discuss changing wildfire in Montana and Idaho’s Bitterroot Mountains. By Mark Kreider.
In our study, we used a fire modeling simulation to explore the effects of the fire suppression bias and see how they compared to the effects of global warming and fuel accumulation alone.
Fuel accumulation and global warming both inherently make fires more severe. But over thousands of simulated fires, we found that allowing forests to burn only under the very worst conditions increased fire severity by the same amount as more than a century’s worth of fuel accumulation or 21st-century climate change.
The suppression bias also changes the way plants and animals interact with fire.
By removing low-intensity fires, humans may be changing the course of evolution. Without exposure to low-intensity fires, species can lose traits crucial for surviving and recovering from such events.
In contrast, low-intensity fires free up space and resources for new growth, while still retaining living trees and other biological legacies that support seedlings in their vulnerable initial years.
By quickly putting out low-intensity fires and allowing only extreme fires to burn, conventional suppression reduces the opportunities for climate-adapted plants to establish and help ecosystems adjust to changes like global warming.
Firefighters keep watch for smoke from a fire tower in the Coeur d’Alene National Forest, Idaho, in 1932. Forest Service photo by K. D. Swan
Suppression makes burned area increase faster
As the climate becomes hotter and drier, more area is burning in wildfires. If suppression removes fire, it should help slow this increase, right?
In fact, we found it does just the opposite.
We found that while conventional suppression led to less total area burning, the yearly burned area increased more than three times faster under conventional suppression than under less aggressive suppression efforts. The amount of area burned doubled every 14 years with conventional fire suppression under simulated climate change, instead of every 44 years when low- and moderate-intensity fires were allowed to burn. That raises concerns for how quickly people and ecosystems will have to adapt to extreme fires in the future.
With conventional fire suppression, the average fire size will increase faster as the planet warms than it would under a less aggressive approach. Mark Kreider
The fact that the amount of area burned is increasing is undoubtedly driven by climate change. But our study shows that the rate of this increase may also be a result of conventional fire management.
The near total suppression of fires over the last century means that even a little additional fire in a more fire-prone future can create big changes. As climate change continues to fuel more fires, the relative increase in area burned will be much bigger.
To address the wildfire crisis, fire managers can be less aggressive in suppressing low- and moderate-intensity fires when it is safe to do so. They can also increase the use of prescribed fire and cultural burning to clear away brush and other fuel for fires.
These low-intensity fires will not only reduce the risk of future extreme fires, but they also will create conditions that favor the establishment of species better suited to the changing climate, thereby helping ecosystems adapt to global warming.
Coexisting with wildfire requires developing technologies and approaches that enable the safe management of wildfires under moderate burning conditions. Our study shows that this may be just as necessary as other interventions, such as reducing the number of fires unintentionally started by human activities and mitigating climate change.
The article makes a great deal of sense and presents a solution that may not be our first thought. But especially the message is fundamentally important, and please watch the video because it very clearly presents the benefits of the solution.
So we want more low-intensity fires! Please! Or to say it another way, we want more prescribed fires.
I was born in London in November, 1944. Exactly six months before the Second World War ended in April, 1945.
Thus it was of great interest to me that yesterday Jean and I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme about the letters that were exchanged between two great Jewish men: Einstein and Freud, in 1932. The programme was called Why War? The Einstein-Freud Letters.
The programme ends with offering the listener a fundamental choice, which I won’t spoil for you now. But to me it is an extension of my post (or Patrice’s post) that I published recently on March 19th.
I believe, and hope, you can listen to it by clicking on this link. Here also is the text that is at that link:
In 1932 the world-famous physicist Albert Einstein wrote a public letter to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Einstein, a keen advocate of the League of Nations and peace campaigner, asked Freud if he thought war and aggression was forever tied to human psychology and the course of international relations: could we ever secure a lasting world peace?
Einstein’s letter is deeply prescient, as is Freud’s extraordinary response. The exchange was titled ‘Why War?’. The two thinkers explore the nature of war and peace in politics and in all human life; they think about human nature, the history of warfare and human aggression and the hope represented by the foundation of the League of Nations (precursor to the UN) and its promise of global security and a new architecture of international law.
At the time of their exchange, Freud is in the last great phase of his career and has already introduced psychoanalysis into the field of politics and society. Einstein, the younger of the two, is using his huge international profile as a physicist for political and pacifist intervention.
For Einstein, future world security means a shared moral understanding across the global order – that humankind rise above the ‘state of nature’ never to devolve into total war again. He wrote to Freud, as ‘a citizen of the world…immune to nationalist bias…I greatly admire your passion to ascertain the truth. You have shown how the aggressive and destructive instincts are bound up in the human psyche with those of love and the lust for life. At the same time, you make manifest your devotion to the goal of liberation from the evils of war…’ Is it possible, Einstein asks Freud, to make us ‘proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?’. Freud’s answer is fascinating and quite unexpected.
The exchange of letters was sponsored by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, an organisation promoting global security by using prominent thinkers, drawing on multiple fields of knowledge (from science to psychology, politics and law) to achieve a new language for international peace, following the lessons learned from the Great War of 1914-18.
But even as Einstein wrote to Freud in the summer of 1932, the Nazi party became the largest political party in the German Reichstag. Both men felt a sense of apprehension about what was coming; both were pacifist, both Jewish, both would be driven into exile (both Einsteinian physics and Freudian psychoanalysis were denounced by the new regime). The letters were finally published in 1933 when Hitler came to power, suppressed in Germany, and as a result never achieved the circulation intended for them.
Featuring readings from the Einstein–Freud letters and contributions from historians of warfare and psychoanalysis, war journalism and global security, this feature showcases the little-known exchange between two of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers, ‘Why War?’ – a question just as relevant in today’s world.
Contributors include historian of war and peace Margaret MacMillan, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet, defence and security expert Mark Galeotti, historian of international relations Patrick O Cohrs, author Lisa Appignanesi, who has written on Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, and Faisal Devji, historian of conflict and political violence in India and the Middle East.
Readings are by Elliot Levey (Einstein) and Henry Goodman (Freud)
Jean and I live in an ideal part of America: Merlin in Southern Oregon. We did not plan to come here but in 2012 we wanted to move from Payson, Az. and fortune brought us here. However, I started this blog in 2009 when I had seen the integrity and happiness of dogs and wanted to write about them.
However the wider world is far, far from just the integrity and happiness of dogs.
On March 17th Patrice Ayme posted yet another post on his blog about war and I felt that it was important to be read by as many followers of Learning from Dogs as is possible. (The few small typographical changes are mine.)
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Want No War? A Symptom That Nazism Perdures
Do not whine that war is bad. Ask instead what it is for.
Friend of a friend Manfred Krieger: Will mankind ever learn that wars do no good to anyone?
Patrice Ayme: All over the world, the vermin helping Putin claim that war does not do any good. Similarly the Nazis, after claiming for years that they were the party of peace and minorities, accused big bad France of having launched WW2. France did, indeed, but that was after the Nazis had invaded a few countries, including two democracies, and officially killed a few hundred thousands of alleged mental retards and genetically defective (including a relative of Hitler).
Vermin helping Putin vermin has been crawling around the French and German leadership for a quarter of a century. That Putin was a war criminal was obvious as early as 1999.
The Putinists claim that war never helped anyone. So the war to stop Hitler did not do good to anyone? Only an obdurate Nazi would hold that opinion.
My family was hunted by the Gestapo: I am delighted that more than five million Nazis got exterminated like the vicious vermin they were. It would have been better if the French Republic had declared war on the Nazi gangrene earlier. Destroying the vermin when it was weaker would have saved the lives of in excess of 50 million thoroughly innocent people who got killed as a result of having let the Axis fly from victory to victory, gathering alliances with nearly as equally repulsive tyrannies in the process.
This may well be happening now: the Chinese dictatorship is sitting on a fence, not trying to help the Kremlin tyrant too much. The fascist Iranian theocracy retreated a bit when threatened recently by the West after attacks in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and Syria.
This hesitancy on the part of fascists also happened in World War Two; for a long time Mussolini did not dare to join Hitler, but then they militarily cooperated attacking Spain and three years later, attacking France. But ultimately, except for Franco who looked degenerate, but was smarter, fellow dictators, even Stalin, sided with the Axis.
In final analysis, WW2, and also WW1, happened because, primarily, not enough Germans fought the forces of fascist imperialistic plutocracy inside Germany.
So it is a lack of war, not an excess of it, which brought disaster.
That happened because not enough Morally Correct Germans realized in a timely manner that it would do some good to destroy the fascist imperialistic plutocratic mentality.
None of this deplorable meta-mentality is obsolete; France and Germany encouraged and empowered the Kremlin vermin in the last quarter of a century, by building its economy and financing it with advantageous trade. Now the Kremlin vermin is potentially the greatest threat against humanity and civilization, ever. And what does the German government do? Claim that one should not fight the Kremlin gangrene too much, to not aggravate matters too much.
But that appeasement in face of the unacceptable only encourages the latter. Germans still have to understand the biggest lessons of history.
‘An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile quality food, hoping
that the ferocious creature will die of indigestion.’
A dramatic article from George Monbiot about water!
I read the latest from George Monbiot yesterday morning and was startled. Startled because I hadn’t thought of it before. Startled because here in Merlin, Southern Oregon we have had so much rain since the beginning of November, 2023 that our acres are swimming in the wet. Startled since that time also our Bummer Creek, which flows across our land, has been at record depths.
But this report is incredibly important and I wanted to share it with you, as I have Geo. Monbiot’s permission for so doing.
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Dry Run
Posted on11th March 2024
The mega-droughts in Spain and the US are a portent of a gathering global water crisis.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th March 2024
There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to change.
Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s people from being fed. Water.
A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production to expected demand, water use for irrigation would have to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is already maxed out.
In general, the dry parts of the world are becoming drier, partly through reduced rainfall; partly through declining river flow as mountain ice and snow retreats; and partly through rising temperatures causing increased evaporation and increased transpiration by plants. Many of the world’s major growing regions are now threatened by “flash droughts”, in which hot and dry weather sucks moisture from the soil at frightening speed. Some places, such as the southwest of the US, now in its 24th year of drought, may have switched permanently to a drier state. Rivers fail to reach the sea, lakes and aquifers are shrinking, species living in freshwater are becoming extinct at roughly five times the rate of species that live on land and major cities are threatened by extreme water stress.
Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s freshwater use. We have pumped so much out of the ground that we’ve changed the Earth’s spin. The water required to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.
That 2017 paper should have sent everyone scrambling. But as usual, it was ignored by policymakers and the media. Only when the problem arrives in Europe do we acknowledge that there’s a crisis. But while there is understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia and Andalusia, there’s an almost total failure among powerful interests to acknowledge that this is just one instance of a global problem, a problem that should feature at the top of the political agenda.
Though drought measures have triggered protests in Spain, this is far from the most dangerous flashpoint. The catchment of the Indus river is shared by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several highly unstable and divided regions already afflicted by hunger and extreme poverty. Today, 95% of the river’s dry season flow is extracted, mostly for irrigation. But water demand in both Pakistan and India is growing rapidly. Supply – temporarily boosted by the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush – will, before long, peak and then go into decline.
Even under the most optimistic climate scenario, runoff from Asian glaciers is expected to peak before mid-century, and glacier mass will shrink by about 46% by 2100. Some analysts see water competition between India and Pakistan as a major cause of the repeated conflicts in Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is struck, taking falling supplies into account, this fighting could be a mere prelude for something much worse.
There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency paradox. As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more profitable plants, and expands across a wider area. This is what happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a €600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of irrigation has instead increased it.
You can overcome the paradox through regulation: laws to limit both total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn’t work.
Nor are other technofixes likely to solve the problem. Governments are planning massive engineering schemes to pipe water from one place to another. But climate breakdown and rising demand ensure that many of the donor regions are also likely to run dry. Water from desalination plants typically costs five or 10 times as much as water from the ground or the sky, while the process requires masses of energy and generates great volumes of toxic brine.
Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choice (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets. But, excessive as the watering of these crops is, more than twice as much irrigation water is used in California to grow forage plants to feed livestock, especially dairy cows. Dairy milk has much higher water demand even than the worst alternative (almond milk), and is astronomically higher than the best alternatives, such as oat or soya milk.
This is not to give all plant products a free pass: horticulture can make massive demands on water supplies. Even within a plant-based diet, we should be switching from some grains, vegetables and fruit to others. Governments and retailers should help us through a combination of stronger rules and informative labelling.
Instead, they do the opposite. Last month, at the behest of the EU’s agricultural commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commission deleted from its new climate plan the call to incentivise “diversified” (animal-free) protein sources. Regulatory capture is never stronger than in the food and farming sector.
I hate to pile yet more on to you, but some of us have to try to counter the endless bias against relevance in politics and most of the media. This is yet another of those massive neglected issues, any one of which could be fatal to peace and prosperity on a habitable planet. Somehow, we need to recover our focus.
We think that climate change is a relatively recent phenomenon. Wrong! And I am not going to say any more because this post from The Conversation covers it beautifully.
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What ancient farmers can really teach us about adapting to climate change – and how political power influences success or failure
A farmer paddles to his fields on an artificial island among canals, part of an ancient Aztec system known as chinampas, in 2021. AP Photo /Marco Ugarte
In dozens of archaeological discoveries around the world, from the once-successful reservoirs and canals of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the deserted Viking colonies of Greenland, new evidence paints pictures of civilizations struggling with unforeseen climate changes and the reality that their farming practices had become unsustainable.
Among these discoveries are also success stories, where ancient farming practices helped civilizations survive the hard times.
Zuni farmers in the southwestern United States made it through long stretches of extremely low rainfall between A.D. 1200 and 1400 by embracing small-scale, decentralized irrigation systems. Farmers in Ghana coped with severe droughts from 1450 to 1650 by planting indigenous African grains, like drought-tolerant pearl millet.
Ancient practices like these are gaining new interest today. As countries face unprecedented heat waves, storms and melting glaciers, some farmers and international development organizations are reaching deep into the agricultural archives to revive these ancient solutions.
Drought-stricken farmers in Spain have reclaimed medieval Moorish irrigation technology. International companies hungry for carbon offsets have paid big money for biochar made using pre-Columbian Amazonian production techniques. Texas ranchers have turned to ancient cover cropping methods to buffer against unpredictable weather patterns.
But grasping for ancient technologies and techniques without paying attention to historical context misses one of the most important lessons ancient farmers can reveal: Agricultural sustainability is as much about power and sovereignty as it is about soil, water and crops.
In the tropical lowlands of Mexico and Central America, Indigenous Maya farmers have been practicing milpa agriculture for thousands of years. Milpa farmers adapted to drought by gently steering forest ecology through controlled burns and careful woodland conservation.
The knowledge of milpa farming empowered many rural farmers to navigate climate changes during the notorious Maya Collapse – two centuries of political disintegration and urban depopulation between A.D. 800 to 1000. Importantly, later Maya political leaders worked with farmers to keep this flexibility. Their light-handed approach is still legible in the artifacts and settlement patterns of post-Collapse farming communities and preserved in the flexible tribute schedules for Maya farmers documented by 16th century Spanish monks.
Maya farmers and researchers explain milpa farming.
In my book, “Rooting in a Useless Land: Ancient Farmers, Celebrity Chefs, and Environmental Justice in Yucatán,” I trace the deep history of the Maya milpa. Using archaeology, I show how ancient farmers adapted milpa agriculture in response to centuries of drought and political upheaval.
However, these groups condemned the traditional milpa practice of burning new areas of forest as unsustainable. They instead promoted a “no-burn” version to grow certified organic maize for high-end restaurants. Their no-burn version of milpa relies on fertilizers to grow maize in a fixed location, rather than using controlled fire ecology to manage soil fertility across vast forests.
The result restricted the traditional practices Maya farmers have used for centuries. It also fed into a modern political threat to traditional Maya milpa farming: land grabs.
Traditional milpa agriculture requires a lot of forested land, since farmers need to relocate their fields every couple of years. But that need for forest is at odds with hotel companies, industrial cattle ranches and green energy developers who want cheap land and see Maya milpa forest management practices as inefficient. No-burn milpa eases this conflict by locking maize agriculture into one small space indefinitely, instead of spreading it out through the forest over generations. But it also changes tradition.
Maya milpa farmers are now fighting to practice their ancient agricultural techniques, not because they’ve forgotten or lost those techniques, but because neocolonial land privatization policies actively undermine farmers’ ability to manage woodlands as their ancestors did.
Milpa farmers are increasingly left to either adopt a rebranded version of their heritage or quit farming all together – as many have done.
Mexico’s fragile artificial islands: Threats from development
When I look to the work of other archaeologists investigating ancient agricultural practices, I see these same entanglements of power and sustainability.
In central Mexico, chinampas are ancient systems of artificial islands and canals. They have enabled farmers to cultivate food in wetlands for centuries.
The continuing existence of chinampas is a legacy of deep ecological knowledge and a resource enabling communities to feed themselves.
The chinampas of Xochimilco are a UNESCO world heritage site today, but development expanding from Mexico City has put their survival in danger. Sergei Saint via Flickr, CC BY-ND
But archaeology has revealed that generations of sustainable chinampa management could be overturned almost overnight. That happened when the expansionist Aztec Empire decided to re-engineer Lake Xaltocan for salt production in the 14th century and rendered its chinampas unusable.
Today, the future of chinampa agriculture hinges on a pocket of protected fields stewarded by local farmers in the marshy outskirts of Mexico City. These fields are now at risk as demand for housing drives informal settlements into the chinampa zone.
Andean raised fields: A story of labor exploitation
Traditional Andean agriculture in South America incorporates a diverse range of ancient cultivation techniques. One in particular has a complicated history of attracting revival efforts.
In the 1980s, government agencies, archaeologists and development organizations spent a fortune trying to persuade Andean farmers to revive raised field farming. Ancient raised fields had been found around Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia. These groups became convinced that this relic technology could curb hunger in the Andes by enabling back-to-back potato harvests with no need for fallowing.
But Andean farmers had no connection to the labor-intensive raised fields. The practice had been abandoned even before the rise of Inca civilization in the 13th century. The effort to revive ancient raised field agriculture collapsed.
Since then, more archaeological discoveries around Lake Titicaca have suggested that ancient farmers were forced to work the raised fields by the expansionist Tiwanaku empire during its peak between AD 500 and 1100. Far from the politically neutral narrative promoted by development organizations, the raised fields were not there to help farmers feed themselves. They were a technology for exploiting labor and extracting surplus crops from ancient Andean farmers.
Respecting ancient practices’ histories
Reclaiming ancestral farming techniques can be a step toward sustainable food systems, especially when descendant communities lead their reclamation. The world can, and I think should, reach back to recover agricultural practices from our collective past.
But we can’t pretend that those practices are apolitical.
The Maya milpa farmers who continue to practice controlled burns in defiance of land privatizers understand the value of ancient techniques and the threat posed by political power. So do the Mexican chinampa farmers working to restore local food to disenfranchised urban communities. And so do the Andean farmers refusing to participate in once-exploitive raised field rehabilitation projects.
Depending on how they are used, ancient agricultural practices can either reinforce social inequalities or create more equitable food systems. Ancient practices aren’t inherently good – it takes a deeper commitment to just and equitable food systems to make them sustainable.
We like to think that the changing climate is a modern phenomenon but this article shows it is not. That sentence by Chelsea Fisher offers a route out of the present situation: “The world can, and I think should, reach back to recover agricultural practices from our collective past.”
Learning from Dogs 
