On the 5th January, I presented a piece, called Life and the Cosmos, that was based on a deeply interesting lecture given by Britain’s Lord Martin Rees at the University of Melbourne’s Medical School in 2010. I wrote that I was going to pick up on some of the points made by Lord Rees in that lecture and I do so starting today.
On the website Top Documentary Films there is a collection of three films, originally shown on Channel 4 television in the UK, under the broad banner of What We Still Don’t Know? They make deeply fascinating viewing. Luckily they appear to be available on YouTube as well, thus can be included directly in this Post. However, if you have any problems with the YouTube versions then click here.
So here is the first programme, Are We Alone?
Are we alone? Sir Martin explores the possibility that life exists on planets beyond our own. He unveils an unsettling scientific debate that has startling consequences for us Earthlings. Do you believe in aliens? Why are we here? Everything you thought you knew about the universe is wrong. It’s made of atoms, right? Wrong. Atoms only account for a measly 15% of everything that exists. The mass of the universe consists of something so mysterious and elusive that it has been dubbed ‘dark matter’. Are we real? There is a fundamental chasm in our understanding of ourselves, the universe, and everything. To solve this, Sir Martin takes us on a mind-boggling journey through multiple universes to post-biological life. On the way we learn of the disturbing possibility that we could be the product of someone else’s experiment.
The second programme Why Are We Here? will be presented on Learning from Dogs on Thursday.
Just a short note to say how very grateful I am for the number of readers who have signed up as subscribers over the last couple of weeks.
Many of you are already bloggers and very soon I’m going to find a way of linking Learning from Dogs to your blog. The obvious way would be to use the Blog Roll feature but methinks the list would be too long. I shall put my thinking cap on this aged head and see what would be an effective way of linking back to all those subscribers who also Blog. Feel free to add a comment if you have ideas.
Yesterday I received an email from 350.org as part of their mailing to all 350.org supporters. I have previously written a number of times, for example see here and here, about this proposed project and why it is so important to have it rejected.
Yesterday I published a lecture given in Melbourne by Britain’s eminent Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees. Lord Rees concluded his lecture with the call for us to take better care of our own planet. He, like many others, recognises the unique place in history that we occupy. For the first time a single species is capable of exerting profound changes on the Earth’s natural and physical environments.
Over and over again, scientists are reporting the rise in climate temperature of Planet Earth and the implications thereof if we do not wakeup soon to changing our ways. The Keystone pipeline is a huge potential mistake!
Bill McKibben of 350.org
Anyway, to the letter issued by 350.org – note the link to send a message to President Obama works – please use it!
Direct threats from Big Oil over Keystone XL
01/05/12, 11:43am
Here’s the email that Bill McKibben just sent to US 350.org supporters who have been working on Keystone XL:
Just in case you thought there was anything subtle about the Keystone battle, you need to hear what the president of the American Petroleum Institute — the oil industry’s #1 front group — said yesterday: if the President doesn’t approve the project there will “huge political consequences.”
That’s as direct a threat as you’re ever going to hear in DC, and it shows just how mad you made the oil industry last year by exposing Keystone for the climate-killing danger it is. And the oil industry can obviously make good on their threats — they’ve got all the money on earth, and thanks to Citizens United they can use it without restriction in our elections. They’re not used to ever losing.So far the Obama administration is standing firm in the face of Big Oil’s bullying — the White House made it completely clear last month that if the oil industry and its harem in Congress forced a speeded-up review, it would lead to an outright rejection of the permit for the pipeline. We expect they’ll keep their word.
Here’s what I think we need to do.
1- Let the president know you’ve got his back when he rejects the pipeline. Tell him that addressing climate change is the key to our future, and that you’re glad he’s not bending.
2- Take the offensive against the oil industry. If they’re going to try and ram Keystone down our throats we’re going to try and take away something they hold dear, the handouts that Congress gives them each and every year. They’re the richest industry on earth, they’re doing great damage to the planet — and they expect us to pay for it with our tax dollars.
Can you send a quick note to President Obama covering those two key points?
President Obama: Thank you for opposing the rushed Keystone XL pipeline permit. Responding to climate change is critical to preserving our collective future, and I hope this is a first step towards the dramatic changes we need to avoid catastrophe. PS: Please take handouts for the fossil fuel industry out of next year’s budget. There are people in America who need that money more.
There’s lots more to be done, of course. In the slightly longer run, we’ve got to take on the greatest subsidy of all: the special privilege that Congress gives the fossil fuel industry to use the atmosphere as an open sewer into which to dump its carbon for free.But today — right now, in the face of this kind of straight-up bullying — it’s time to punch back. We’re nonviolent, but we’re not wimps.
A powerful lecture by the eminent Lord Martin Rees
Martin Rees at Jodrell Bank, 2007
I came across this interview a few days ago in connection with some book research that I was undertaking. Please don’t be put off by the 56 minute length because Martin Rees is one of the most pre-eminent cosmologists around today, as well as being the UK’s Astronomer Royal since 1995.
Make a promise to yourself to settle down sometime soon and watch the lecture, given at the University of Melbourne’s Medical School in 2010. And a warning! I going to pick up on some of the important points made by Martin Rees in a couple of posts next week.
Here’s how the lecture was reported by the Australian science website, SixOne Science,
Lord Rees in Melbourne
In a packed Sunderland Lecture Theatre in the University of Melbourne’s Medical School, Lord Martin Rees gave the inaugural Derek Denton Lecture in Science and the Arts. Lord Rees, an eminent and accomplished astrophysicist and cosmologist, is coming to the end of his five year tenure as the president of The Royal Society. The event even managed to attract or Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who entered without a noticeable entourage and with no fanfare, and the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser, a scientist himself.
The lecture was entitled “Life and the Cosmos”, a grand and sweeping title if ever there was one. It seemed like an impossible amount of material to cover in the allotted hour. However, Rees delivered an entertaining, humorous account of life from the big bang, through the formation of stars and galaxies, to the origins of life and perhaps the biggest crowd pleaser, the search for extra-terrestrial life. Most in the lecture theatre would not have learnt anything new, but this lecture was aimed at a general audience and the material was interesting enough to keep everyone interested for the hour despite being squashed into an ageing undergraduate lecture theatre complete with squeaky desks and a slightly musty smell. Perhaps Mr. Rudd was sufficiently uncomfortable to increase university funding, we can hope.
Whist this was predominately an overview of the subject material, Rees expressed some opinions about space exploration. He seemed torn between his human curiosity and the cost of human exploration. Given the advances in robotic exploration vehicles, Rees has difficulty in justifying the cost of sending humans on planetary exploration missions. Perhaps the best case for robotic exploration was made by the amazing photos he showed from the surfaces of Mars (photos) and Titan (photos), a moon of Saturn. Interestingly, Rees believes that if human exploration does proceed in the future it will be led by the Chinese or groups of private individuals. He also raised the issue of exploitation of other planets, something not often mentioned in the debate over human space travel. We need to decide if other bodies in our solar system are open for exploitation or if they should be preserved as wilderness, in a similar way to Antarctica. Given the pressures faced by places like Antarctica and the Amazon this will be an important debate should human exploration resume.
Rees concluded his lecture with the almost obligatory call for us to take better care or our own planet. He, like many others, recognises the unique place in history that we occupy. For the first time a single species is capable of exerting profound changes on the Earth’s natural and physical environments (although it might be argued that the first photosynthesizing cyanobacteria had a similarly singular influence by increasing the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere). It is interesting to note that he does not see colonisation of other planets as a solution as the Earth is still the only known planet capable of sustaining us. Although he did discuss the likelihood of discovering Earth-like planets (pretty good given advances in technology). However, Rees did not paint an overly pessimistic picture and he generally came across as optimistic and enthusiastic about the future.
The organisers of the Derek Denton Lecture series should be commended for attracting such a high profile speaker for the first of the series. Hopefully the series will be successful, and if so may need to be moved to a bigger venue. If you want to see the lecture it will soon be available here. The next lecture of this series hasn’t been announced yet, it will be on the Arts, but you can check here for future public events at The University of Melbourne.
Over a week ago there was a fascinating and very thought-provoking BBC radio broadcast by Mr. John Gray, the political philosopher and author of the book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, .
Mr. John Gray
The BBC website then carried a further article by John Gray. But before quoting from that article, I do recommend that you put aside just 14 minutes to listen to that broadcast. If you click here you will be taken to the BBC podcast page for the Point of View series and then scroll down to the item that is headlined: The End, yet again? 26 Dec 2011.
There will see that a simple ‘right click & save target as’ allows you to download the audio file so you can listen at your pleasure.
Indeed, having listened to Point of View over the many years when living in England, I can thoroughly recommend them. Described on the website, “Weekly reflections on topical issues from a range of contributors including historian Lisa Jardine, novelist Sarah Dunant and writer Alain de Botton.”
Here are some extracts from the John Gray article that appeared on the BBC website.
A Point of View: The endless obsession with what might be
If we can stop thinking about what the future might bring and embrace the present for what it is, we would be a lot better off, writes John Gray.
It’s been some time now since history didn’t end. Twenty-odd years ago, when the Berlin Wall was coming down, there were many who believed that there would be no more serious conflicts.
The American writer Francis Fukuyama, who promoted the idea of the end of history in the autumn of 1989, declared that the chief threat in future would be boredom. A new era, different from any before, had arrived.
Of course it hadn’t. The end of the Soviet Union was followed by conflicts and upheavals of the sort that happen when empires fall apart – war in the Caucasus and economic collapse in Russia, for example.
In any realistic perspective the idea that a single event – however large – could mark the end of human conflict was absurd. But those who were seduced by the idea were not thinking in realistic terms.
They were swayed by a myth – a myth of progress in which humanity is converging on a universal set of institutions and values. The process might be slow and faltering and at times go into reverse, but eventually the whole of humankind would live under the same enlightened system of government.
When you’re inside a myth it looks like fact, and for those who were inside the myth of the end of history it seems to have given a kind of peace of mind. Actually history was on the move again. But since it was clearly moving into difficult territory, it was more comfortable to believe that the past no longer mattered.
Then later on in the article, John writes,
Life’s framework
The implication is that sudden shifts are relatively rare in history. But consider continental Europe over the past 70 years – until recently a normal human lifetime. Unless they were Swedish or Swiss, an ordinary European man or woman lived during that period under several quite different systems of government.
Nearly all of Europe, some of it democratic, succumbed for a time to Nazism or fascism. Half of Europe moved from Nazism to communism with only a brief interval of democracy. Most of that half, though not Russia, became functioning democracies after the end of the Cold War.
Not only have political forms changed during a normal lifetime, systems of law and banking have come and gone along with national currencies. The entire framework in which life was lived has changed not once, but several times. In any longer historical perspective discontinuities of these kinds are normal.
The article then concludes, thus,
We seem to be approaching one of those periods of discontinuity that have happened so often in the past. It may seem unthinkable that the European banking system could implode, or that a global currency like the euro could dissolve into nothing.
Yet something very much like that was the experience of citizens of the former Soviet Union when it suddenly melted down, and there is nothing to say something similar could not happen again.
For believers in progress it must be a dispiriting prospect. But if you can shake off this secular myth you will see there is no need to despair. The breakdown of a particular set of human arrangements is not after all the end of the world.
Surely we would be better off if we put an end to our obsession with endings. Humans are sturdy creatures built to withstand regular disruption. Conflict never ceases, but neither does human resourcefulness, adaptability or courage.
We tend to look forward to a future state of fulfilment in which all turmoil has ceased. Some such condition of equilibrium was envisioned by the American prophet of the end of history with whom I began.
As Fukuyama admitted, it’s not an altogether appealing vision. But living in fear of the end is as stultifying as living in hope of it. Either way our lives are spent in the shadow of a future that’s bound to be largely imaginary.
Without the faith that the future can be better than the past, many people say they could not go on. But when we look to the future to give meaning to our lives, we lose the meaning we can make for ourselves here and now.
The task that faces us is no different from the one that has always faced human beings – renewing our lives in the face of recurring evils. Happily, the end never comes. Looking to an end-time is a way of failing to cherish the present – the only time that is truly our own.
I have extracted more than perhaps I ought, and there was so much more to read than is presented here. So please go to the BBC website and read it in full; it’s a very powerful essay.
Finally, let me take you back to a piece that I wrote back in September about Transitions. I closed that piece thus,
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!
Last Friday, the 30th December, I published an hour-long video interview, introduced thus,
Toxic botulism in animals linked to RoundUp
Dr Mercola recently interviewed Dr Don Huber, whose letter to the USDA warning that Monsanto’s RoundUp, a broad-spectrum “herbicide” that has been linked with spontaneous abortion in animals, continues to be ignored by food and environmental safety authorities. In this important hour-long discussion, Huber, a plant pathologist for over 50 years, explains how RoundUp is destroying our healthy soils by killing needed microorganisms.
For those of you who watched that interview, you may like to watch the first few minutes of a documentary made by Journeyman Pictures that shows how right can overcome might!
Percy Schmeiser has his own website here and from there you can go to a section where Percy speaks about his experiences.
For reasons that I am not clear about, there is a mood of pessimism about my person. Whether it is the scale of global issues that I see ahead that drags me down, whether the year of an American Presidential election will remind me of the loss of reason that afflicts so many modern democracies, whether the messages in Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency still resonate in my mind well, who knows?
But when one does look at the broader picture of modern society, there is much that troubles.
So forgive me if I provide a couple of examples of these troubles. I do so on the grounds of communication – the more that understand the risks ahead of us, the more likely we, as in the peoples of this planet, will say to our leaders, “Enough of this! For the sake of my children, my grandchildren and all of humanity we have to change our priorities, and soon!”
Climate change increases the risk of record-breaking extreme weather events that threaten communities across the country. In 2011, there were at least 2,941 monthly weather records broken by extreme events that struck communities in the US.
That was backed up by an article on the Onearth website that opened,
By many measures, 2011 was the most extreme weather year for the United States since reliable record-keeping began in the 19th century — and the costs have been enormous. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2011 set a record for the most billion-dollar disasters in a single year. There were 12, breaking the old record of nine set in 2009. The aggregate damage from these 12 events totals at least $52 billion, NOAA found.
And that just for the USA. But will climate change be the Number One political issue in 2012? And if not in 2012, when will it be?
Let me move on to my second example, very different from the one above but, in a sense, just as scary. This is an interview that was in a recent article on the Food Freedom website ( brilliant website, by the way). Dr. Joseph Mercola, the leading natural health practitioner, interviews Dr. Don M. Huber, one of the senior scientists in the U.S about the area of science that relates to genetically modified organisms (GMO). Here’s an extract from the article on Food Freedom,
Toxic botulism in animals linked to RoundUp
Dr Mercola recently interviewed Dr Don Huber, whose letter to the USDA warning that Monsanto’s RoundUp, a broad-spectrum “herbicide” that has been linked with spontaneous abortion in animals, continues to be ignored by food and environmental safety authorities. In this important hour-long discussion, Huber, a plant pathologist for over 50 years, explains how RoundUp is destroying our healthy soils by killing needed microorganisms.
Not only did his team discover a new soil pathogen, but he reports that animals are coming down with over 40 new diseases, like toxic botulism. Huber explains that before the widespread use of herbicides, pesticides and genetically modified food and feed, natural probiota would have kept Clostridium botulinum in check
The video, below, of the interview is included in the article. Please don’t be put off by the length, the material covered is riveting and critical to our general knowledge about the threats to our society.
So that’s enough from me for one day! On Monday, I shall include another video relating to the RoundUp issue that reveals, both directly and metaphorically, how the only solution to pessimism is to embrace the need to make change happen. Be inspired by this poem by Sam Keen, included in the latest Sabbath Moment from Terry Hershey,
I Want to Surrender
God, I want to surrender
to the rhythm of music and sea,
to the seasons of ebb and flow,
to the tidal surge of love.
I am tired of being hard,
tight, controlled,
tensed against tenderness,
afraid of softness.
I am tired of directing my world,
making, doing, shaping.
Tension is ecstasy in chains.
The muscles are tightened to prevent trembling.
Nerves strain to prevent trust,
hope, relaxation….
Surrender is a risk no sane man may take.
Sanity never surrendered
is a burden no man may carry.
God give me madness
that does not destroy
wisdom,
responsibility,
love.
A series of 10 delightful short films, courtesy of Transition Culture – For the introduction and the first three films, click here, for the next three click here.
Film Seven – Transition Town Totnes’s Transition Streets Origin: Transition Town Totnes
In December 2009, Transition Town Totnes, the UK’s first Transition initiative, was chosen as one of 20 community groups in England and Wales to win the ‘Low Carbon Communities Challenge’. Its project, ‘Transition Streets’, was awarded £625,000. In the last 18 months, nearly 500 households have participated in Transition Streets, each, on average, cutting their carbon emissions by 1.5 tonnes.
About a third of those have gone on to install solar photovoltaic systems. However, the main benefits that people who have participated talk about are the social connections they have made and how they now feel so much more a part of their community. It has also acted as a platform for all kinds of other initiatives as neighbours start to get a taste for working together.
Film Eight – A Small Pennant Flag Origin: Transition Town Monteveglio (Bologna, Italy)
Transition Town Monteveglio (TTM) was the first Italian Transition initiative. In 2009 its local Comune (local Council) passed an amazing resolution that offers a stateof-the-art taste of what it looks like when a council really ‘gets’ peak oil and climate change, stating: “… a view of the future (the depletion of energy resources and the significance of a limit to economic development), methods (bottom-up community participation), objectives (to make our community more resilient, i.e. better prepared to face a low energy future) and the optimistic approach (although the times are hard, changes to come will include great opportunities to improve the whole community’s quality of life)”.
It has led to all kinds of initiatives and projects, including a local currency and renewable energy installations. Our object here is the Comune’s official pennant.
Film Nine – A Small Bag of Topsoil Origin: Transition Norwich’s food initiatives
It is one thing to start local food projects, but quite another to think strategically about how those projects sit in the larger context of the intentional relocalisation of the area. Transition Norwich, together with East Anglia Food Link, produced a study called ‘Can Norwich Feed Itself?’ which worked out that it could, albeit with a simpler diet, but that it would need certain new infrastructures put in place. This included a new mill to enable locally produced grains to be milled, two CSA farms (hence our object, a soil sample from their first CSA site), community gardens and research into varieties of beans and oats that will grow well in the area.
A successful application to the Local Food Fund enabled these to become a reality. It is a fascinating example of why we need to think strategically about the localisation of food. As Tully Wakeman, one of the co-ordinators, told me: “A trap a lot of NGOs fall into is over-thinking about vegetables (yet) only one tenth of what we consume, in calorific terms, comes from fruit and vegetables… where is the other 90% going to come from? Growing vegetables in gardens, allotments, community gardens and so on offers a degree of food security and can happen relatively rapidly.
However the other 90% requires the rebuilding of the infrastructure required for growing, processing, cleaning, storing, milling and distributing grains and cereals, and that takes longer and requires more planning”.
Film Ten – Beer, A Bottle of Sunshine Ale Origin: The Lewes Community Power Station
The Ouse Valley Energy Service Company (OVESCO) is one of the offshoots of Transition Lewes focused on the installation of renewables in and around the town as well as promoting energy conservation and local economic resilience. In 2011 it took on its most exciting and ambitious project to date installing a 98kW solar photovoltaic array on the roof of local brewery, Harveys. This will turn the building into one of the first community-owned solar power stations in the country.
The 544 photovoltaic (PV) panels will generate 93,000kWh of green electricity each year – enough to save more than 40 tonnes of CO2 annually.
A community share launch event took place in April 2011 attended by 300 people. Within five weeks the target of £307,000 had been reached. Money invested will be repaid in full at the end of the 25 year scheme, or earlier at the request of the investor and subject to conditions. While the investment is held a dividend will be paid after the first year which is expected to be around 4%.
Our object is a bottle of ‘Sunshine Ale’, a special commemorative beer brewed to celebrate the launch of the scheme. Very nice it is too.
A final few words from Rob Hopkins.
Whittling down to these 10 objects has been very difficult but I hope what you have gained is a sense of something infectious, reaching beyond the idea of small individual initiatives, and arguing that localisation is the best way for the places in which we live to return to health. Various learned writers and academics have tried to encapsulate what Transition is, but I still think the best description of its spirit comes from Tove Jansson in Comet in Moominland in 1946, who wrote: “It was a funny little path, winding here and there, dashing off in different directions, and sometimes even tying a knot in itself from sheer joy. (You don’t get tired of a path like that, and I’m not sure that it doesn’t get you home quicker in the end).”
Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network and blogs at www.transitionculture.org
Learning from Dogs 