Category: People

Well done HSUS!

Here’s what HSUS are doing for the poor dogs out in Puerto Rico.

From time to time we do donate a few cents to The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) because their size and huge support from so many people does allow them to step up to the really big needs.

And Hurricane Maria certainly left a big need in its wake for dogs.

So a recent item that was published over on Mother Nature Network just had to be shared with you all.

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Hundreds of dogs are being airlifted out of hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico

One beach famous for its stray dogs is now hauntingly empty.

Christian Cotroneo, October 3, 2017.

The HSUS Animal Rescue Team (ART) assists with animal rescue and response following Hurricane Maria on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. (Photo: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP Images for The HSUS)

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, hundreds of dogs, as well as cats, horses and even a few pigs, are getting off the island.

Several rescue groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, have waded into the breach to rescue some of the island’s most defenseless residents: its burgeoning population of stray dogs, as well as those currently in shelters.

HSUS has a history with the territory, helping with law enforcement training and horse care, and working closely with animal shelters across the island.

“Since the storm hit, we’ve been doing our best to stay in contact, given the communication challenges, with all of our shelter partners and other partners on the island,” Inga Fricke, director of pet retention programs for HSUS, tells MNN.

Puppies under a house in Vieques, Puerto Rico. (Photo: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP Images for The HSUS)

This week, the organization — with help from partners like Wings of Rescue and St. Hubert’s Animal Welfare Center — began airlifting dogs from stressed island shelters to a processing center in New Jersey.

“They get vetted there, get the care they need and then get parceled out to other partners around the country,” Fricke says.

Not every animal survived Maria’s onslaught. Notably, a southeast corner of the island once teeming with strays — nicknamed “Dead Dog Beach” — was found to be desolate when rescuers arrived.

“We’re hearing from our rescuers who have a feeding area where they go every day and we are hearing that most of those dogs have perished,” Twig Mowatt, co-founder of All Sato Rescue, tells MNN.

While the organization is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mowatt is just outside of Boston, coordinating with the Humane Society of Puerto Rico to get vulnerable dogs airlifted to the mainland.

“I’m kind of like an air traffic controller these days,” she says. “My group is largely rescue and transport but we partner with the humane society for those really badly affected.”

“We were able to get dogs out on Friday and then yesterday,” Mowatt adds.

John Peaveler, an inspector with HSUS, does a field inspection in Vieques. (Photo: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP Images for The HSUS)

Described as “apocalyptic,” the hurricane left much of the island in the dark, without electricity or communications. And while the humanitarian relief effort is ongoing — much of the island was still without power in early October — the search for animals in distress may be even more complicated.

With an estimated 150,000 dogs in Puerto Rico and not enough animal shelters, there’s no space for dogs found roaming at large. As a result, many of them are put down immediately.

A crated dog is prepared for transport to New Jersey. (Photo: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP Images for The HSUS)

“We have even done several transports, even just this year, to try and alleviate some of the overcrowding and the pressures on the shelters across the island,” Fricke explains.

“But certainly our focus now, after the hurricane, is to try and remove as many of the sheltered animals as possible so we can allow them to make room for animals that unfortunately have been affected by the storm and can’t be kept by their families any more for any reason.”

If you would like to help HSUS in its efforts to to save Puerto Rico’s displaced animals, consider making a donation here.

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That’s a great way to end the week. See you all on Sunday!

Return to the movies!

Another movie, another dog! Correction: another world-famous dog!

Monday’s post Hail the Hero was about Max.

Max, a feature film by the producers of the doggie classic Marley and Me, intends to explore a soldier dog’s journey that doesn’t end with this heartbreaking image of a pup chasing down his fallen brother, but rather begins with it.

So it’s rather nice to welcome a guest post from Emily Ridgewell that features a dog that became known far and wide thanks to television and the cinema.

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An Incredible Rescue: An Often Forgotten “Tail” From The Golden Age Of Hollywood

By Emily Ridgewell

In the shadow of recent world tragedies, and long before cute puppies and kittens graced the internet, there were former movie legends in the form of incredible canines that found their way onto the big screen in the golden age of Hollywood. Think of adorable dogs like Toto from The Wizard of Oz or Lassie from many different types of these movies and television shows.

But there’s another “tail” (pardon the pun) about a German Shepherd named Rin Tin Tin who stole America’s heart and eventually had millions of fans all around the world long before the advent of the internet. Few of us today know the real-life story of this precious little puppy who was rescued from a war zone long before Toto or Lassie gained their fame and fortune as canine celebrities.

According to a historically-related biography published long-after this rag-tag dog shot to fame in the late twenties and early thirties, there was a young American soldier stationed in Europe shortly before the end of World War I. Corporal Lee Duncan was traipsing through the aftermath of formerly German-occupied farming village in France when he came across a single building, actually it was a kennel, that remained somewhat intact after a devastating bombing had leveled the entire town.

After cautiously entering the building, the young trooper painfully walked over more than a dozen dead German Shepherd dogs. These canine soldiers were trained for combat and left behind by the Third Reich. Corporal Duncan heard whimpering coming from deeper inside this solitary structure and continued on with his mission. To his amazement, Lee discovered some unlikely survivors of this terrible tragedy.

AFTER THE UNTHINKABLE – LIVING & LOVABLE

Lying in the rubble, there Lee saw a female shepard with five young puppies who were just a few days old. Corporal Duncan was no stranger to abandonment since his own father had left him and his mother to fend for themselves back in 1898. Just a year later, his Mom took him and a younger sibling to an orphanage. Perhaps this tugged on his heartstrings and he couldn’t leave behind this young family so he took them all underneath his wing.

He took the entire brood back to his barracks in a living and loving rescue effort. The young Corporal quickly realized he couldn’t care for all of them and found loving homes for all but two of the pups. He kept a little boy and girl, named them Nanette and Rin Tin Tin, both titles given to good luck charms found in France.

THE CANINES AFTER CHAOS

Lee continued to care for his beloved best buddies as the chaos of the war continued. After the conflict had concluded, Corporal Duncan was bound and determined to take his little war refugees home with him. Imagine the red-tape he was faced with and, long story short, he lost Nanette to pneumonia after bringing them both home to the states.

The WWI veteran got a job in his home state of California and began training Rin Tin Tin to perform some tricks in their spare time. After some filming occurred, the former Corporal wrote a screenplay and the rest (as they say) is history.

There’s an old saying (later turned into a Beatles song – also from many days gone by) that rings true in this case, you “Can’t Buy Me Love.” And that’s the whole point.

You can’t purchase the love and affection of an animal, but if you rescue one, you’ll find unconditional love that lasts forever. You might not become rich and famous after rescuing an animal, but you’ll never find a deeper love and connection with your four-legged best friend.

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Emily Ridgewell is an arts professional and a pet enthusiast from sunny LA. Emily has a creative energy and an aesthetic sense of living, where everything beautiful is worth sharing. She loves her yorkie Olivia and writes original and fun articles on ways to learn and improve your pet-best friend’s life. She finds exciting new things to explore and experience! Don’t forget to connect with her on Twitter: @ridgewell_j

Picking up on that ‘old saying’ with regard to The Beatles makes it easy to close today’s post. (And sorry if this makes some of you feel old!)

Here’s a little bit of music history:

Written by: Lennon-McCartney
Recorded: 29 January; 25 February; 10 March 1964
Producer: George Martin
Engineers: Norman Smith, Geoff Emerick

Released: 20 March 1964 (UK), 16 March 1964 (US)

Can’t Buy Me Love was The Beatles’ sixth British single, released with the b-side You Can’t Do That. It was written while the group were in Paris for a 19-date residency at the city’s Olympia Theatre.

Ah! Nostalgia!

Book Two – Clarity at last!

This is where you all come in!!

From time to time I have let it be known that I had a second book stewing on the back burner. The title that had first come to me was: ‘Of Pets … And Of People’. The book idea and initial title had come to me from visits to our local Lincoln Road Vet Clinic where I had sat in on both Dr. Jim Goodbrod and Dr. Russel Codd as they saw pet patients. As I described it in my original post when I introduced the idea in June:

Some time ago, when we were visiting Lincoln Road, it struck me that the detail of what takes place ‘behind the counter’ of a busy vet clinic is most likely not commonly appreciated by those that visit said clinic.

I asked Russel one day if I might be allowed to spend time watching and listening to what goes on behind the scenes; so to speak. Russel said that he would be delighted for me to do that.

Dr. Jim at work

 

 

I subsequently started publishing posts under the general title of Visiting the Vet.

Back to the book.

Recently it came to me that the title was wrong. Because it didn’t speak directly to the potential reader about dogs.

So I came up with a different name: An Insight into Dogs and Owners.

Here is the Vision for this next book:

An examination of the world of the veterinary clinic including those who care professionally for our dogs and an insight into those people, from many varied backgrounds and circumstances, who have dogs in their own lives.

The first section, dipping into the extraordinary work that goes on in a modern vet’s clinic, is inspired by my belief that the majority of dog owners have very little idea of such work and the skills displayed by DVMs.

But let me move on by sharing with you the Introduction to the book. Firstly, these paragraphs:

There’s a tiny amount of domesticated wolf in all of us. The relationship between canids and humans goes back nearly 40,000 years, when dogs split away from wolves. With our dogs, we have traveled the ancient track from hunter-gatherers to modern humans. That track that in this 21st century sees us having untold numbers of dogs in our lives. In the USA alone there are: “In 2017, a total of about 89.7 million dogs lived in households in the United States as pets. In comparison, some 68 million dogs were owned in the United States in 2000.” 1

Yet a surprising number of those who have dogs as pets and are lovers of those same dogs admit to not really understanding what goes on behind the scenes in a busy veterinarian clinic. Yes, they know what happens when they take their dog to their vet but that view is almost certainly from the perspective of that dog and the specific reason why that animal had to to be seen by a vet.

An Insight into Dogs and Owners seeks to broaden the understanding of the reader to the range of treatments and procedures that are undertaken in a modern veterinarian clinic.

OK! More or less what I explained earlier on in this post.

But!!

But here’s where I do believe (fingers tightly crossed) many of you dear readers can help.

Back to the remaining part of that introduction:

But just as dogs do not live in isolation then nor do we humans. So the book sets out to explore the range of relationships that humans have with dogs. Perhaps better put as the book exploring the range of human circumstances that have led to people having a dog in their life. The homeless, those disabled persons who care for their dog, the service dogs that are, for example, the eyes and ears of the partially sighted and the hard-of-hearing. But not excluding exploring the relationship between police dogs and their handlers, those who work with cancer-sniffing dogs, and all the way through to Mr. and Mrs. Joe Public having a pet dog or two.

1The Statistics Portal

“.. explore the range of relationships that humans have with dogs.”

If, dear reader, you fancy working with me and can comfortably reply to the following questions, then I want to hear from you!

  1. Where were you born?
  2. Were there dogs in your family home from an early age?
  3. When did you first have a direct relationship with a dog?
  4. Describe that relationship.
  5. Do you presently have a dog in your life?
  6. And if so, what is the name of your dog and how did this dog come into your life?
  7. Finally, can you articulate more or less in a single sentence just what having a dog in your life means to you?

These questions can apply equally to persons who have a dog in their life as part of the family and to those who work with dogs in their professional lives, those who train dogs, hunt with dogs, and those who care for dogs.

If all of this hasn’t put you off then email me at paulhandover (…at…) gmail (…dot…) com putting ‘Book Two’ in the email title. I will then contact you directly looking at the best way to listen and record your answers to those questions.

THANK YOU!!

And we save dogs!

Only right that we save dogs as well.

(I couldn’t have asked for a better post to follow yesterday’s post on dogs saving us.)

As seen on the Lady Freethinker’s site.

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Tiny Dog Rescued from Mexico Rubble 6 Days After Quake

Posted by Nina Jackel | September 26, 2017

Six days after Mexico City was ravaged by an earthquake, there seemed little hope of finding anyone alive among the rubble.

But a Japanese rescue team was thrilled to find one more tiny survivor — a schnauzer, who they managed to pull from the ruins of a collapsed apartment building.

The lucky dog was checked out by vets, and had somehow managed to remain in good health. Authorities now hope to reunite the schnauzer with her family as soon as possible.

Thank you to rescuers who travelled from around the world to save lives — both human and animal — in the wake of this tragic disaster.

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The video and news item was carried by the New York Post and for reasons I am unsure about I couldn’t include the video in this post. But you can view that video by going here. Luckily other newspapers carried the wonderful event and the following photograph appeared in The Independent newspaper two days ago.

A schnauzer dog who survived the quake is pulled out of the rubble from a flattened building by rescuers in Mexico City 24 September. ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images

My guess is that dogs and humans have been saving each other for thousands of years and long may it continue.

Dogs save us in many ways.

With the recent earthquakes in Mexico being a glorious example of that!

Nobody would have missed out on the news of the terrible catastrophe of the  recent earthquakes in Mexico.

As seen on the NBC news site.

Mexico Earthquake Death Toll Climbs as Dozens Sleep on Streets

by The Associated Press

JUCHITAN, Mexico — The death toll from one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Mexico rose to at least 61 early Saturday as workers scrambled to respond to the destruction just as Hurricane Katia struck its coastline.

The 8.1 quake off the southern Pacific coast just before midnight Thursday toppled hundreds of buildings in several states. Hardest-hit was Juchitan, Oaxaca, where 36 people died and a third of the city’s homes collapsed or were otherwise rendered uninhabitable, President Enrique Pena Nieto said late Friday in an interview with the Televisa news network.

It’s impossible to truly appreciate the terror of such an event unless one has had the misfortune of already living through such an earthquake. Likewise, almost as difficult to appreciate the terror of being trapped.

But thank goodness for dogs that are trained to sniff out those trapped persons. Such as Frida who saved so many lives down in Mexico. Here’s the account of Frida’s special deeds as carried on the Care2 site.

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Frida, the Heroic Rescue Dog, Saves Lives After Mexico’s Earthquake

By: Laura Goldman,   September 25, 2017

About Laura   Follow Laura at @lauragoldman

Photos and videos of a rescue dog named Frida have gone viral — complete with her cute-yet-necessary work uniform: doggie goggles, vest and four protective, Velco-strapped booties. She has become a four-legged symbol of hope during these dark times in Mexico.

Although, contrary to some early news reports, Frida didn’t really rescue 52 people after the devastating 7.1 earthquake struck Mexico Sept. 19, the 7-year-old yellow Labrador retriever has nonetheless become a media sensation.

What’s true is that prior to the earthquake, Frida (she’s named after the artist Frida Kahlo) had helped rescue 12 people and recover the bodies of 40 people during her career as a disaster rescue dog with the Mexican Navy’s (SEMAR) Canine Unit.

Working with 14 other dogs in the unit, she has located 12 victims of the Sept. 19 quake so far.

Frida’s first mission after the earthquake struck was to find survivors at the Enrique Rebsamen School in Mexico City. Eleven children were found alive by other emergency workers. Tragically, 19 children and six adults did not survive.

Frida suffered from exhaustion after searching the school Sept. 20, her handler, Israel Arauz Salinas, told the Los Angeles Times. After napping and drinking plenty of water with electrolytes, she was in better spirits the following day and ready to go back to work.

Frida has two colleagues in the Canine Unit, Evil and Echo, who are both one-year-old Belgian Malinois dogs. Because Frida is getting on in years, Evil and Echo enter collapsed buildings before she does. If they find someone, Frida enters and spends no longer than 20 minutes inside the building.

The disaster rescue dogs can reach areas that are inaccessible to human responders, including spaces that are less than 20 inches high. When they find a victim who’s alive, the dogs bark. Otherwise they stop and slowly approach the body. “They act afraid,” Salinas told the L.A. Times. “That indicates to us that there is a cadaver.”

Like the other dogs in the Canine Unit, Frida began training when she was just two months old. The skills the dogs show in training determine whether they will go on to detect people, narcotics or explosives.

To train dogs to find people, they are first taught to fetch toys and balls. Once they learn how to do that, their trainers run with the toy or ball in their hands. The dogs learn to associate the smell of the person with the reward of the ball, Salinas told the L.A. Times. Before they’re ready to be dispatched to disaster areas, the dogs train for about three hours a day for a year.

Just two weeks before the Sept. 19 earthquake, Frida helped locate the body of a policeman after a massive 8.1 quake struck Juchitan. She also worked in Ecuador after an earthquake there in April last year.

Before Frida won the hearts of the rest of the world, even the president of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto, was a fan of hers (or at least the person in charge of his official Twitter account was).

“She is @Frida, belongs to the #SEMAR_mx and has helped save 52 lives in various natural disasters at the national and international levels,” says a @PresidenciaMX tweet on Sept. 13.

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I’m going to finish off today’s post with a recent video aired by Quebec News. (Actually, a series of still photographs.)

Quebec NEWS Published on Sep 21, 2017

Thousands of emergency services, military, and civilians are currently searching through rubble across the country for survivors. Among them are Frida, a rescue dog who has saved 52 people throughout her career, according to the office of Mexico’s President. Frida’s adorable outfit has a purpose. The goggles are to protect her eyes from smoke and debris, while the boots protect her feet from rough terrain. A massive 7.1 earthquake rocked Mexico earlier this week,It was the second major earthquake to hit Mexico in two weeks

 

Picture Parade Two Hundred and Twelve

Yes, it’s photos from Tanja Brandt again!

(As per last week, all republished from here.)

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Just supremely beautiful!

Letting go of the glass.

Another vital lesson from our dogs.

I saw the following video on Facebook from a dear friend back in my days of living and working in Colchester, Essex, England.

There’s nothing mind-blowing about the message but nevertheless it’s a good reminder to learn to chill out as our dogs do.

Or as Jeannie and Pedy were doing last Thursday evening!

(Oh, and this will be the first time that Jeannie knew of me taking this picture!)

Thanks Roger.

Love and caring.

“It is a time for kindness, love, community and human spirit to connect with nature.”

This sentence was written by Colette who blogs over at Stargazing Futures. Colette offered that thought in a response to a post last week in this place.

The reason I used it as the sub-heading for today’s share is that it is perfect.

Read this from Mother Nature News and you will understand.

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Watch an excavator gently rescue a deer

Russell McLendon   September 5, 2017

When two young black-tailed deer wandered onto a construction site in 2016, they probably didn’t realize how dangerously muddy the ground had become. They both got stuck in the mud, a predicament that could have easily been fatal — if an observant worker at the site hadn’t noticed them and swung into action.

“I wouldn’t have seen them if they hadn’t moved and caught my eye!” wrote Bill Davis, a native of Tacoma, Washington, who was checking on the property for his employer.

When he realized the two yearling deer were stuck, he “orchestrated a rescue operation with his cellphone,” his son-in-law told GrindTV, by contacting a skilled excavator operator who might be able to pluck the helpless deer out of the mud.

Using an uncannily light touch for such a powerful piece of machinery, the operator managed to rescue both deer from the mud. Davis posted one of the rescues in the video above; the actual scooping up of the deer starts at about the 2:30 point.

Of course, it might have been even better for these deer if the property was still forest, not a muddy construction site, and it’s worth noting that habitat loss is one of the main problems facing wildlife around the world. But that was a moot point by the time these deer got stuck, and since Davis couldn’t return their lost patch of habitat, he did the next best thing by making sure they survived this ordeal.

Plus, as Earth Touch News points out, these deer were thought to be yearlings at the time, so they may have already been old enough to rebound afterward.

Davis wasn’t taking any chances, though. “Didn’t sleep much last night [after the rescue],” he wrote on Facebook. “[A]ll I could think about was those little guys getting stuck again, and not finding mama! I’m out there looking to make sure the babies didn’t come back to the mud! No sign of them.”

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“It is a time for kindness, love, community and human spirit to connect with nature.”

Exactly!

Picture Parade Two Hundred and Eleven

Returning to the wonderful photographs by Tanja Brandt

(All republished from here: Ingo and Friends.)

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Another six gorgeous photographs for you in a week’s time.

Foreboding times?

Something brooding in the air!

The smoke from the forest fires in Oregon and California has been thick in the air here in Merlin for days.

As can be seen in the photograph below. The photograph is as it was captured by the camera at 7:15 am yesterday morning. No changes by me made at all. The middle tree line is at the Eastern end of our property about a 1/4 mile away.

We are fed up with the smoke and the terrible air conditions.

But what drew me to grab the camera and take the photograph was that the image had some sort of, Oh, I don’t know, some sort of end of the world feeling about it.

It also seemed a most apt image to be an introduction to the latest essay from George Monbiot. It is republished here with Mr. Monbiot’s kind permission.

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Don’t Look Now

2nd September 2017

The media avoids the subject of climate breakdown – to do otherwise is to bring the entire infrastructure of thought crashing down

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 29 August 2017

It is not only Donald Trump’s government that censors the discussion of climate change; it is the entire body of polite opinion. This is why, though the links are clear and obvious, the majority of news reports on Hurricane Harvey have made no mention of the human contribution.

In 2016, the United States elected a president who believes that human-driven global warming is a hoax. It was the hottest year on record, in which the US was hammered by a series of climate-related disasters. Yet the total combined coverage for the entire year on the evening and Sunday news programmes on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News amounted to 50 minutes. Our greatest predicament, the issue that will define our lives, has been blotted from our minds.

This is not an accident. But nor (with the exception of Fox News) is it likely to be a matter of policy. It reflects a deeply ingrained and scarcely conscious self-censorship. Reporters and editors ignore the subject because they have an instinct for avoiding trouble. To talk about climate breakdown (which in my view is a better term than the curiously bland labels we attach to this crisis) is to question not only Donald Trump, not only current environmental policy, not only current economic policy, but the entire political and economic system.

It is to expose a programme that relies on robbing the future to fuel the present, that demands perpetual growth on a finite planet. It is to challenge the very basis of capitalism; to inform us that our lives are dominated by a system that cannot be sustained, a system that is destined, if it is not replaced, to destroy everything.

To claim that there is no link between climate breakdown and the severity of Hurricane Harvey is like claiming that there is no link between the warm summer we have experienced and the end of the last ice age. Every aspect of our weather is affected by the fact that global temperatures rose by around 4° between the ice age and the 19th Century. And every aspect of our weather is affected by the 1° of global warming caused by human activities. While no weather event can be blamed solely on human-driven warming, no weather event is unaffected by it.

We know that the severity and impact of hurricanes on coastal cities are exacerbated by at least two factors: higher sea levels, caused primarily by the thermal expansion of seawater, and greater storm intensity, caused by higher sea temperatures and the ability of warm air to hold more water than cold air.

Before it reached the Gulf of Mexico, Harvey had been demoted from a tropical storm to a tropical wave. But as it reached the Gulf, whose temperatures this month have been far above average, it was upgraded first to a tropical depression, then to a category 1 hurricane. It might have been expected to weaken as it approached the coast, as hurricanes churn the sea, bringing cooler waters to the surface. But the water it brought up from 100 metres and more was also unusually warm. By the time it reached land, Harvey had intensified to a category 4 hurricane.

We were warned about this. In June, for example, Robert Kopp, a professor of earth sciences, predicted that “In the absence of major efforts to reduce emissions and strengthen resilience, the Gulf Coast will take a massive hit. Its exposure to sea-level rise – made worse by potentially stronger hurricanes – poses a major risk to its communities.”

To raise this issue, I’ve been told on social media, is to politicise Hurricane Harvey. It is an insult to the victims and a distraction from their urgent need. The proper time to discuss it is when people have rebuilt their homes, and scientists have been able to conduct an analysis of just how great the contribution from climate breakdown might have been. In other words, talk about it only when it’s out of the news. When researchers determined, 9 years on, that human activity had made a significant contribution to Hurricane Katrina, the information scarcely registered.

I believe it is the silence that’s political. To report the storm as if it were a entirely natural phenomenon, like last week’s eclipse of the sun, is to take a position. By failing to make the obvious link and talk about climate breakdown, media organisations ensure that our greatest challenge goes unanswered. They help push the world towards catastrophe.

Hurricane Harvey offers a glimpse of a likely global future; a future whose average temperatures are as different from ours as ours are from those of the last ice age. It is a future in which emergency becomes the norm and no state has the capacity to respond. It is a future in which, as a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters notes, disasters like Houston’s occur in some cities several times a year. It is a future that, for people in countries such as Bangladesh, has already arrived, almost unremarked by the rich world’s media. It is the act of not talking that makes this nightmare likely to materialise.

In Texas, the connection could scarcely be more apparent. The storm ripped through the oil fields, forcing rigs and refineries to shut down, including those owned by some of the 25 companies that have produced over half the greenhouse gas emissions humans have released since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Hurricane Harvey has devastated a place in which climate breakdown is generated, and in which the policies that prevent it from being addressed are formulated.

Like Donald Trump, who denies human-driven global warming, but who wants to build a wall around his golf resort in Ireland to protect it from the rising seas, these companies, some of which have spent millions sponsoring climate deniers, have progressively raised the height of their platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, in response to warnings about higher seas and stronger storms. They have grown from 40 feet above sea level in 1940, to 70ft in the 1990s, to 91ft today.

This is not, however, a story of mortal justice. In Houston, as everywhere else, it is generally the poorer communities, that are least responsible for the problem, who are hit first and hit worst. But the connection between cause and effect should appeal to even the slowest minds.

The problem is not confined to the United States. Across the world, the issue that hangs over every aspect of our lives is marginalised, except on the rare occasions on which world leaders gather to discuss it in sombre tones (then sombrely agree to do almost nothing), whereupon the instinct to follow the machinations of power overrides the instinct to avoid a troubling subject. When they do cover the issue, they tend to mangle it. In the UK, the BBC distinguished itself in customary fashion this month, by yet again inviting the climate change denier Lord Lawson onto the Today programme, in the mistaken belief that impartiality requires a balance between correct facts and false ones. They seldom make such a mess of other topics, because they take them more seriously.

When Trump’s enforcers instruct officials and scientists to purge any mention of climate change from their publications, we are scandalised. But when the media does it, without the need for a memo, we let it pass. This censorship is invisible even to the perpetrators, woven into the fabric of organisations that are constitutionally destined to leave the major questions of our times unasked. To acknowledge this issue is to challenge everything. To challenge everything is to become an outcast.

www.monbiot.com

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Dear people, I sat staring at the screen for 10 minutes and then went off when Jeannie called lunchtime. Returned to the screen a little after 2pm yesterday and still couldn’t come up with a closing thought that merited being shared with you all.

See you tomorrow!