Category: People

You couldn’t make it up!

However hard one tried to!

In Chapter Eight, Behaviours and Relationships, I speak of how the development of humans has been, unsurprisingly, the result of our human behaviours. Adding that it is likely that our behaviours have been damaging, in varying degrees, to the survival of our species and countless others for a very long time. Continuing:

But 2,000 years ago, the global population of man was only 300 million persons[1]. It took 1,200 years for that global population to become 1 billion persons; in 1800. Now track the intervals as we come forward in time.

In 1927, just 127 years later, the two-billionth baby was born. In 1960, only 33 years on, came the birth of the three-billionth baby. Just 16 years later, in 1974, the four-billionth baby was born. In 1987, now only 13 years later, we have a population of five billion persons. Around October 1999, the sixth-billionth baby was born.
The growth rate of global population is slowing[2] but nevertheless it is trending to a billion additional persons every decade. In other words, a 100-million population growth every year, or about 270,000 more persons every single day.

Combine man’s behaviours rooted in times way back with this growth in population and we have the present situation. A totally unsustainable situation for one basic and fundamental reason. We all live on a finite planet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
[2] According to UN’s 2010 revision to its population projections, world population will peak at 10.1bn in 2100 compared to 7bn in 2011. A 2014 paper by demographers from several universities and the United Nations Population Division forecast that the world’s population will reach about 10.9 billion in 2100 and continue growing thereafter. However, some experts dispute the UN’s forecast and have argued that birthrates will fall below replacement rate in the 2020s. According to these forecasters, population growth will be only sustained till the 2040s by rising longevity but will peak below 9bn by 2050.

A growth of about 270,000 more persons every single day!

I am sure that I am not alone in seeing this growth in our population as something that is both unsustainable and a critical component of long-term damage to our planet.

But George Monbiot in a recent essay, in true Monbiot style, highlights an aspect of our human population and the damage resulting that would have never previously occurred to me.

Read it and see if you don’t agree likewise. (Again, there are just too many links in George’s essay to reconstruct in this republishing and, as the other day, I have highlighted those phrases that are a link to other material in red. Go here if you wish to further investigate those links.)

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Pregnant Silence

19th November 2015

It’s about time we discussed the real population crisis.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 18th November 2015

This column is about the population crisis. About the breeding that’s laying waste to the world’s living systems. But it’s probably not the population crisis you’re thinking of. This is about another one, that we seem to find almost impossible to discuss.

You’ll hear a lot about population in the next three weeks, as the Paris climate summit approaches. Across the airwaves and on the comment threads it will invariably be described as “the elephant in the room”. When people are not using their own words, it means they are not thinking their own thoughts. Ten thousand voices each ask why no one is talking about it. The growth in human numbers, they say, is our foremost environmental threat.

At their best, population campaigners seek to extend women’s reproductive choices. Some 225 million women have an unmet need for contraception. If this need were answered, the impact on population growth would be significant, though not decisive: the annual growth rate of 83 million would be reduced to 62m (1). But contraception is rarely limited only by the physical availability of contraceptives. In most cases, it’s about power: women are denied control of their wombs. The social transformations they need are wider and deeper than donations from the other side of the world are likely to achieve.

At their worst, they seek to shift the blame from their own environmental impacts. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that so many post-reproductive white men are obsessed with human population growth, as it’s about the only environmental problem of which they can wash their hands. Nor, I believe, is it a coincidence that of all such topics this is the least tractable. When there is almost nothing to be done, there is no requirement to act.

Such is the momentum behind population growth, an analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discovered, that were every government to adopt the one-child policy China has just abandoned, there would still be as many people on Earth at the end of this century as there are today. If two billion people were wiped out by a catastrophe in mid-century, the planet would still hold a billion more by 2100 than it does now.

If we want to reduce our impacts this century, the paper concludes, it’s consumption we must address. Population growth is outpaced by the growth in our consumption of almost all resources. There is enough to meet everyone’s need, even in a world of 10 billion people. There is not enough to meet everyone’s greed, even in a world of 2 billion people.

So let’s turn to a population crisis over which we do have some influence. I’m talking about the growth in livestock numbers. Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year. Livestock numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050, the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra human, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals(2).

Raising them already uses three quarters of the world’s agricultural land. One third of our cereal crops are used to feed them. This may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price. Now the grain that farm animals eat is being supplemented by oil crops, particularly soya, for which the forests and savannahs of South America are being cleared at shocking rates.

This might seem counter-intuitive, but were we to eat soya, rather than meat, the clearance of natural vegetation required to supply us with the same amount of protein would decline by 94%. Producing protein from chickens requires three times as much land as protein from soybeans. Pork needs nine times, beef 32 times.

A recent paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment suggests that our consumption of meat is likely to be “the leading cause of modern species extinctions”. Not only is livestock farming the major reason for habitat destruction and the killing of predators, but its waste products are overwhelming the world’s capacity to absorb them. Factory farms in the US generate 13 times as much sewage as the human population. The dairy farms in Tulare county, California produce five times as much as New York City.

Freshwater life is being wiped out across the world by farm manure. In England, as I reported last week, the system designed to protect us from the tide of crap has comprehensively broken down. Dead zones now extend from many coasts, as farm sewage erases ocean life across thousands of square kilometres.

Livestock farming causes around 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: slightly more than the output of the world’s cars, lorries, buses, trains, ships and planes. If you eat soya, your emissions per unit of protein are 20 times lower than eating pork or chicken, and 150 times lower than eating beef.

So why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room? Why are there no government campaigns to reduce the consumption of animal products, just as they sometimes discourage our excessive use of electricity? A survey by the Royal Institute of International Affairs found that people are not unwilling to change their diets, once they become aware of the problem, but that many have no idea that livestock farming damages the living world.

It’s not as if eating less meat and dairy will harm us. If we did as our doctors advise, our environmental impacts would decline in step with heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer. British people eat, on average, slightly more than their bodyweight in meat every year, while Americans consume another 50%: wildly more, in both cases, than is good for us or the rest of life on Earth.

But while plenty in the rich world are happy to discuss the dangers of brown people reproducing, the other population crisis scarcely crosses the threshold of perception. Livestock numbers present a direct moral challenge, as in this case we have agency. Hence the pregnant silence.

www.monbiot.com

Footnotes:

While the number of unintended pregnancies would fall by 52m (or 70%), this does not mean that the number of babies would fall by the same amount. The Guttmacher/UNFPA report breaks down the outcome thus: “21 million fewer unplanned births; 24 million fewer abortions; six million fewer miscarriages; and 0.6 million fewer stillbirths.”
Additional global meat consumption by this date is estimated to be roughly 200 million tonnes. Boned meat comprises roughly half the weight of a living animal. So total additional livestock biomass will be in the order of 400 million tonnes, or 400 billion kg. The average human weight is 52 kg and the anticipated rise in population by 2050 is 2.3 billion (the median estimate is 9.7 billion by that date). So the additional human weight is likely to be somewhere around 120 billion kg.

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Powerful reasons to turn vegetarian or vegan. And well done if you are already there. Well done, indeed!

Picture parade one hundred and twenty-three.

Couldn’t resist these!

When putting together yesterday’s post, based heavily on a recent article over on Mother Nature Network, I couldn’t help noticing a link on that MNN item to this: 13 photos of dogs that got invited to the wedding. Wanted to share some of the photographs with you for today’s picture parade.

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Sources for all the pictures may be looked up here.

Final picture for today is the one of Jean and me at our anniversary lunch taken at The Twisted Cork in Grants Pass on Friday. Not quite newly-weds but still not that long ago!

Best wishes to everyone!

Feelings – of both humans and animals.

Five years ago Jean and I were married!

So if we are discussing feelings, as we are today, there is no better place to start than by me expressing my feelings of joy and love that I feel for, and still receive from, my gorgeous Jean. I know five years at our stage of life is far fewer than for many married couples but, nevertheless, they have been beautiful years and I wish for many more.

wedding — Diane Jackson, Bridesmaid, Jean and me, my mother and Dan Gomez, Best Man. November 20th, 2010

I had been pondering these last few days as to what I would write for today. For I wanted to celebrate our anniversary yet wanted a broader theme; so to speak.

There couldn’t have been a better answer to that ponder than a recent video that was presented by TED Talks. It was a talk by Carl Safina about what is going on inside the brains of animals: What are animals thinking and feeling? Or in the fuller words of that TED Talk page:

What’s going on inside the brains of animals? Can we know what, or if, they’re thinking and feeling? Carl Safina thinks we can. Using discoveries and anecdotes that span ecology, biology and behavioral science, he weaves together stories of whales, wolves, elephants and albatrosses to argue that just as we think, feel, use tools and express emotions, so too do the other creatures – and minds – that share the Earth with us.

Safina is very qualified to speak on the subject as his bio on that TED Talk page reveals. However, I couldn’t find a YouTube link for that TED Talk but could find two videos that are very good alternatives.

The first is a short video of Safina promoting his book Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.

The second is a much longer video that is Safina’s presentation at the recent Ransom A. Myers Lecture. If you can spare the time, then do watch it. You will not be disappointed.

Published on Oct 9, 2015
8th Annual Ransom A. Myers Lecture in Science and Society. Thursday, October 1st 2015.

Title: Beyond Words: What animals think and feel
Presented by: Dr. Carl Safina, Marine Ecologist/Author, The Safina Centre

Finally, and please forgive my indulgences, I want to close today’s post with some photographs that for me have “feelings” stamped all over them!

Jeannie, Hazel and cat feeling trust for each other.

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One of our local deer trusting Jeannie. — One of our local wild deer trusting Jeannie.

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Last but not least! Photograph taken two days ago by yours truly reflecting my feelings of wonder at being alive in this world! — Last but not least! A photograph taken two days ago by yours truly reflecting my feelings of wonder at being alive in this world!

Onwards and upwards!

Our changing climate – what is the truth?

A video on YouTube raises some fundamental questions about our changing climate.

Let me say straight away that my belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is based on instinct, and not on me understanding the science, simply because I am not a scientist; far from it! As I share on this blog:

Paul Handover is a child of the post-war era in Great Britain having been born in London a few months before the end of WWII. After a rather shaky attempt at being educated, including 2 years studying for a Diploma in Electrical Engineering, Paul’s first job was as a commercial apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation. He then joined the sales desk of British Visqueen, a polythene film and products manufacturer located in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and part of ICI Plastics Division. In 1968, he travelled out to Sydney, Australia and became part of the sales team at ICIANZ’s Inorganic Chemicals Division.

I am a fundamentally a retired salesman/entrepreneur with a very out-of-date knowledge of electrical engineering and radio communications (G3PUK), and now struggling to be an author. 😉

Plus, my generally sceptical view of how countries are governed, my awareness of a terrible lack of integrity in politicians, plays to those instincts of mine that humanity is, indeed, responsible primarily for our changing climate. And there is no shortage of supporting evidence!

A very quick web search found this NASA site that included the following graph and text (in part):

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.)

The Earth’s climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

Scientific Consensus
Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

Click here for a partial list of these public statements and related resources.

However, a dear and close friend of nearly 40 years, Dan Gomez, is sceptical and simply says to me: “Paul, follow the money!” Dan is a very widely-read person and a great thinker.

Plus, among our wonderful neighbours there is a couple, Dordie and Bill, that we get on with extremely well. Bill is a sceptic of AGW and recently sent me the link to the following video.

Please watch it. If you have evidence that all or many of the facts on this video are incorrect then I would love to hear from you.

For this is way too important for the truth not to be widely promoted.

Having fun with history.

Nothing to do with dogs but, nonetheless, a neat way to finish the week.

I was looking at a recent George Monbiot essay and getting myself all wound up about it, thinking that it should be today’s post. Then I thought, “Come on, Paul, end the week on a gentle tone.”

So with that in mind, let me offer you an item on British history that Su sent me a week ago. I can’t authenticate the details but my instinct is that everything mentioned is correct.

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There is an old Pub in Marble Arch, London, which used to have a gallows adjacent to it. Prisoners were taken to the gallows (after a “fair” trial of course) to be hanged. The horse-drawn dray, carting the prisoner, was accompanied by an armed guard, who would stop the dray outside the pub and ask the prisoner if he would like ”ONE LAST DRINK.” If he said YES, it was referred to as ONE FOR THE ROAD. If he declined, that prisoner was ON THE WAGON.

So there you go … On with some more history.

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot and then once a day the pot was taken and sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were “piss poor”, but worse than that were the really poor folk, who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot, they “didn’t have a pot to piss in” and were the lowest of the low. The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be.

Here are some more facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June, because they took their yearly bath in May and they still smelled pretty good by June. However, since they were starting to smell, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bridal bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all came the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!”

Houses had thatched roofs, thick straw piled high on the rafters, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying “It’s raining cats and dogs.” There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house.

This posed a real problem in the bedroom, where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with four big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than a dirt floor. Hence the saying, “dirt poor.” The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance. Hence: a threshold.

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight, then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: ”Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, nine days old.” Sometimes they could get pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over they would hang up their bacon, to show off.

It was a sign of wealth that a man could, “Bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with their guests and would all sit around talking and ”chew the fat.”

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or ”The Upper Crust.”

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of ”Holding a Wake.”

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people, so they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house and reuse the grave site. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realised they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, thread it out through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift) to listen for the a bell; thus someone could be, ”Saved by the Bell ”or was considered a ”Dead Ringer.” And that’s the truth.

Now, whoever said history was boring ! ! !
So ….. get out there and educate someone!

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Just out of curiosity, I did a web search on that Pub in Marble Arch. Quickly came across this, from which I quote, in part:

The site of the Tyburn Tree is said to be at what is now Marble Arch, at the north-east corner of Hyde Park. Some historians give a more precise location as slightly to the north-west at Connaught Square. In fact, many bodies were found there when the square was being built in the 1820s, so it’s possible that some Tyburn victims were buried right where they died.

Mass executions took place on Mondays, when prisoners were transported from Newgate Prison to Tyburn in an open wagon, often in their finest clothes. The procession, which was watched by a large and enthusiastic crowd, wound down Snow Hill, across Holborn Bridge into Holborn, down Broad St Giles into Oxford Street and on to Tyburn.

And it was but a moment to find a photograph of the place.

You all have a wonderful, relaxing week-end and don’t lose your head over anything!

Rebooting an inmate’s life

This is no conundrum: a direct contrast to yesterday.

The benefits of having a dog or two (or nine) are boundless and have been documented for thousands of years. Indeed, a quick web search revealed that Alexander Pope, the 18th-century English poet, is the attributed author of the quote, “Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”

Nevertheless, it was still a joy to come across the documentary film Dogs On The Inside.

Filmed in a Massachusetts prison, DOGS ON THE INSIDE follows the birth of a relationship between abandoned rescue dogs and prison inmates as they work together toward a second chance at a better life. Giving a voice to a forgotten dog and a forgotten man, the film is a life-affirming testament to the power of second chances.

The film was released in February 2014, and here is the trailer.

In general, it seems to have gathered good reviews with this one from Amazon being typical of what I have seen.

I had tears in my eyes during several segments of this film. Such a lovely connection between the rescue workers and the dogs. Then, the inmates and the dogs. And, finally, the photos of their forever homes and families. Bravo to all at Don’t Throw Us Away. People like you, who work to save and rehab these animals, are amazing.

You are also recommended to read the review that is on the Ecorazzi website. Here’s a flavour of that review:

Two parties neglected and forgotten become the powerful emotional center of an uplifting new documentary, Dogs on the Inside.

We’re taken to Massachusetts, where there exists a unique, mutually-beneficial rehabilitation program that finds rescue dogs paired with prison inmates.

This documentary, from directors Brean Cunningham and Douglas Seirup, follows a handful of inmates at a correctional facility involved in Don’t Throw Us Away, a program that partners them with neglected dogs. For the animal, benefits include exercise, attention, and care while shelters remain crowded. For the prisoners, they have a chance to form connections and work towards parole.

It’s fascinating throughout watching both sides – scared dogs and (emotionally) guarded inmates – warm to one another, seemingly leaving their past behind.

That’s at the heart of this illuminating, heartwarming film: second chances. Early on, it’s easy to see the parallels between these two groups – with the comparisons handled tactfully throughout a film that never strays from its simple, honest goal. Dogs never preaches or calls for political or social change; it more so asks the viewer to be willing to forgive and welcome in those which have been cast aside. When an inmate says, ‘they come from a bad life, they haven’t seen love in while,’ he isn’t necessarily talking just about the dog.

Let me close with this heart-stirring photograph that was included in the above review.

So much to learn from our precious, gorgeous dogs!

Rebooting the program of life!

Interesting conundrum!

Some of you may have noticed a reply left by Marg (aka MargfromTassie) to my post yesterday. In part, this is what Marg wrote:

By the way Paul, you’re 71 now. If you reverse it, and were 17 again – what is the major thing, if any, that you would do differently with your life – knowing what you know now? ( or is this just too difficult?)

In turn, I replied:

What would I do differently? What a fascinating question. Rather than dump the first thing that comes to mind, let me reflect on the question for a while. Who knows? Maybe make it tomorrow’s post?

At first it was very clear what I would have done differently. Namely, had I had the awareness at a much earlier age of the psychological and emotional impact of my father’s death back in December 1956, just six weeks after I had had my twelfth birthday, I would have been a much more emotionally settled person and, in time, a better father to my son and daughter.

Then almost immediately I recognised the conundrum in what I was thinking.

For that subconscious fear of rejection that I carried all the way through my life until 2007, when a local Devon psychotherapist exposed that fear (thank you, J), had both strong positive and negative consequences. The positive consequences far outweighed the negative ones, that were mainly to do with uncertainty over relationships with women.

Because if my previous wife hadn’t announced in December 2006, fifty years to the day after my father died, that she had been unfaithful, I wouldn’t have sought J’s help, wouldn’t have gained the self-awareness that is so vital for all of us, and wouldn’t have met Jean in December 2007. And that has been a positive consequence of unimaginably beautiful measure.

So dear Marg, thank you for your fascinating question but, in the end, if I had the chance I would repeat my life exactly the same way again.

With apologies to any readers who have regarded the above as excessive navel-gazing! But my justification for writing this is to underline the supreme importance of knowing oneself!

There’s another year gone!

Yesterday was my 71st birthday.

Consequently, writing a blog post for today wasn’t high on my list of things to do.

So this is to offer my thanks to everyone who sent me greetings; it was wonderful to hear from so many friends, old and new.

Thus my post today is to share three items that came from family back in England.

First, my mother, who is still teaching piano and oboe at the age of 95, sent me this:

Secondly, my son, Alex, and his long-term partner, Lisa, sent me this in an card chosen from the Friends of the Earth selection:

dog cake — (All dog owners know, I’m sure, that dogs must never eat chocolate.)

Lastly, my grandson, Morten, who despite being just five-years-old, is already a dab hand with an iPhone and sent me the following picture of himself with Dad in the background:

Finally, my love and gratitude to Jeannie for making me feel special yesterday, as she has done every day since we first met.

Indonesia – another example of kakistocracy?

What is happening in beautiful Indonesia is beyond imagination.

I am indebted to John Zande for introducing me to the word kakistocracy, that he explained means: “government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.”

For what is happening in Indonesia could well be an awful example of kakistocracy in action.

Like numerous others I knew that there were fires burning in Indonesia and that it was all somehow caught up in illegal logging, but knew little over and above that. And that is the crux of the title of a recent essay from George Monbiot: Nothing to See Here. It really is a “must read” essay and is republished below with Mr. Monbiot’s very kind permission. As with most of his essays, they are published in the Guardian newspaper. In this case, the Guardian version includes photographs that vividly underline the terrible situation out there. I agonised about copying them from the Guardian article, without explicit permission to so do, but have nevertheless done so on the basis of this story needing to make the maximum impact on readers. The photographs are inserted in Monbiot’s essay very closely to the format that is presented in the Guardian article.

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Nothing to See Here

30th October 2015

'Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate.’ Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images — ‘Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate.’ Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images

In the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century (so far), Indonesia has been blotted out by smoke. And the media.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30th October 2015.

I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work.

What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.

A great tract of the Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century – so far.

[NB: The video that is embedded in the Guardian version is without sound. I have added one that is also a Greenpeace video, with sound, further on in the post.]

And the media? It’s talking about the dress the Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?

What I’m discussing is a barbeque on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page.

It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. In three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.

‘The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?’ Photograph: Abdul Qodir/AFP/Getty

But that doesn’t really capture it. This catastrophe cannot be measured only in parts per million. The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orang utans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames. But there are thousands, perhaps millions, more.

One of the burning islands is West Papua, a nation that has been illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1963. I spent six months there when I was 24, investigating some of the factors that have led to the current disaster. At the time, it was a wonderland, rich with endemic species in every swamp and valley. Who knows how many of those have vanished in the past few weeks? This week I have pored and wept over photos of places I loved, that have now been reduced to ash.

Nor do the greenhouse gas emissions capture the impact on the people of these lands. After the last great conflagration, in 1997, there was a missing cohort in Indonesia of 15,000 children under the age of three, attributed to air pollution. This, it seems, is worse. The surgical masks being distributed across the nation will do almost nothing to protect those living in a sunless smog. Members of parliament in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have had to wear face masks during debates. The chamber is so foggy that they must have difficulty recognising each other.

It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases like ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for hundreds of miles, causing diplomatic conflicts with neighbouring countries.

Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.

The current president, Joko Widodo, is – or wants to be – a democrat. But he presides over a nation in which fascism and corruption flourish. As Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing shows, leaders of the death squads that helped murder around a million people during Suharto’s terror in the 1960s, with the approval of the West, have since prospered through other forms of organised crime, including illegal deforestation.

They are supported by a paramilitary organisation with three million members, called Pancasila Youth. With its orange camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG Ballard. There has been no truth, no reconciliation; the mass killers are still greeted as heroes and feted on television. In some places, especially West Papua, the political murders continue.

Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature. Though Joko Widodo seems to want to stop the burning, his reach is limited. His government’s policies are contradictory: among them are new subsidies for palm oil production that make further burning almost inevitable. Some plantation companies, prompted by their customers, have promised to stop destroying the rainforest. Government officials have responded angrily, arguing that such restraint impedes the country’s development. That smoke blotting out the nation, which has already cost it some $30 billion? That, apparently, is development.

Our leverage is weak, but there are some things we can do. Some companies using palm oil have made visible efforts to reform their supply chains; but others seem to move slowly and opaquely. Starbucks, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever are examples. Don’t buy their products until they change.

On Monday, Widodo was in Washington, meeting Barack Obama. Obama, the official communiqué recorded, “welcomed President Widodo’s recent policy actions to combat and prevent forest fires”. The ecopalypse taking place as they conferred, that makes a mockery of these commitments, wasn’t mentioned.

Governments ignore issues when the media ignores them. And the media ignores them because … well there’s a question with a thousand answers, many of which involve power. But one reason is the complete failure of perspective in a deskilled industry dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots, where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead. The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.

At the climate summit in Paris in December, the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?

www.monbiot.com

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Here is that Greenpeace video I referred to above.

Published on Oct 30, 2015
URGENT: Forest fires are raging through Indonesia, putting endangered orangutans and human health at risk.

Join the call to stop the fires and prevent them from ever happening again – http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/forestfires

A quick web search will offer endless pictures of this great tragedy but I will leave you with three; two showing the extent of the smoke and one that is much more an intimate photograph of the suffering animals.

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In this Thursday, March 1, 2012, Indonesian veterinarian Yenni Saraswati, top center, of Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) examines the condition of an injured Sumatran orangutan found by environmental activists at a palm oil plantation in Rimba Sawang village, Aceh province, Indonesia. Conservationists say fires in an Indonesian swamp forest may have killed a third of the rare Sumatran orangutans living there and all of them may be lost this year. Binsar Bakkara, Associated Press. — In this Thursday, March 1, 2012, Indonesian veterinarian Yenni Saraswati, top center, of Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) examines the condition of an injured Sumatran orangutan found by environmental activists at a palm oil plantation in Rimba Sawang village, Aceh province, Indonesia. Conservationists say fires in an Indonesian swamp forest may have killed a third of the rare Sumatran orangutans living there and all of them may be lost this year.
Binsar Bakkara, Associated Press.

Monbiot wrote: “Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature.”

One cannot avoid reflecting that this would not have happened if there hadn’t been, “government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.”

Welcome to kakistocracy.

Keeping up with yesterday!

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

Can’t claim credit for the sub-heading; it was taken from BrainyQuote.

However, the reason I went looking for a quotation on procrastinating was that I’m doing research for a fairly “heavy” post for tomorrow, and was looking for something quick and easy for today.

My blog folder came up with an essay from The Conversation website that is rather fun. It is republished here on Learning from Dogs within the terms of The Conversation.

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The psychological origins of procrastination – and how we can stop putting things off

October 7, 2015

Authors: Elliot Berkman, Assistant Professor, Psychology, University of Oregon, and Jordan Miller-Ziegler, PhD Candidate in Psychology, University of Oregon.

“I love deadlines,” English author Douglas Adams once wrote. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

We’ve all had the experience of wanting to get a project done but putting it off for later. Sometimes we wait because we just don’t care enough about the project, but other times we care a lot – and still end up doing something else. I, for one, end up cleaning my house when I have a lot of papers to grade, even though I know I need to grade them.

So why do we procrastinate? Are we built to operate this way at some times? Or is there something wrong with the way we’re approaching work?

These questions are central to my research on goal pursuit, which could offer some clues from neuroscience about why we procrastinate – and how to overcome this tendency.

To do, or not to do

It all starts with a simple choice between working now on a given project and doing anything else: working on a different project, doing something fun or doing nothing at all.

The decision to work on something is driven by how much we value accomplishing the project in that moment – what psychologists call its subjective value. And procrastination, in psychological terms, is what happens when the value of doing something else outweighs the value of working now.

This way of thinking suggests a simple trick to defeat procrastination: find a way to boost the subjective value of working now, relative to the value of other things. You could increase the value of the project, decrease the value of the distraction, or some combination of the two.

For example, instead of cleaning my house, I might try to focus on why grading is personally important to me. Or I could think about how unpleasant cleaning can actually be – especially when sharing a house with a toddler.

It’s simple advice, but adhering to this strategy can be quite difficult, mainly because there are so many forces that diminish the value of working in the present.

The distant deadline

People are not entirely rational in the way they value things. For example, a dollar bill is worth exactly the same today as it is a week from now, but its subjective value – roughly how good it would feel to own a dollar – depends on other factors besides its face value, such as when we receive it.

The tendency for people to devalue money and other goods based on time is called delay discounting. For example, one study showed that, on average, receiving $100 three months from now is worth the same to people as receiving $83 right now. People would rather lose $17 than wait a few months to get a larger reward.

Other factors also influence subjective value, such as how much money someone has recently gained or lost. The key point is that there is not a perfect match between objective value and subjective value.

Delay discounting is a factor in procrastination because the completion of the project happens in the future. Getting something done is a delayed reward, so its value in the present is reduced: the further away the deadline is, the less attractive it seems to work on the project right now.

Studies have repeatedly shown that the tendency to procrastinate closely follows economic models of delay discounting. Furthermore, people who characterize themselves as procrastinators show an exaggerated effect. They discount the value of getting something done ahead of time even more than other people.

One way to increase the value of completing a task is to make the finish line seem closer. For example, vividly imagining a future reward reduces delay discounting.

No work is ‘effortless’

Not only can completing a project be devalued because it happens in the future, but working on a project can also be unattractive due to the simple fact that work takes effort.

New research supports the idea that mental effort is intrinsically costly; for this reason, people generally choose to work on an easier task rather than a harder task. Furthermore, there are greater subjective costs for work that feels harder (though these costs can be offset by experience with the task at hand).

This leads to the interesting prediction that people would procrastinate more the harder they expect the work to be. That’s because the more effort a task requires, the more someone stands to gain by putting the same amount of effort into something else (a phenomenon economists call opportunity costs). Opportunity costs make working on something that seems hard feels like a loss.

Sure enough, a group of studies shows that people procrastinate more on unpleasant tasks. These results suggest that reducing the pain of working on a project, for example by breaking it down into more familiar and manageable pieces, would be an effective way to reduce procrastination.

Your work, your identity

When we write that procrastination is a side effect of the way we value things, it frames task completion as a product of motivation, rather than ability.

In other words, you can be really good at something, whether it’s cooking a gourmet meal or writing a story, but if you don’t possess the motivation, or sense of importance, to complete the task, it’ll likely be put off.

It was for this reason that the writer Robert Hanks, in a recent essay for the London Review of Books, described procrastination as “a failure of appetites.”

The source of this “appetite” can be a bit tricky. But one could argue that, like our (real) appetite for food, it’s something that’s closely intertwined with our daily lives, our culture and our sense of who we are.

So how does one increase the subjective value of a project? A powerful way – one that my graduate students and I have written about in detail – is to connect the project to your self-concept. Our hypothesis is that projects seen as important to a person’s self-concept will hold more subjective value for that person.

It’s for this reason that Hanks also wrote that procrastination seems to stem from a failure to “identify sufficiently with your future self” – in other words, the self for whom the goal is most relevant.

Because people are motivated to maintain a positive self-concept, goals connected closely to one’s sense of self or identity take on much more value.

Connecting the project to more immediate sources of value, such as life goals or core values, can fill the deficit in subjective value that underlies procrastination.

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So there; glad that’s clear for us all.

Mustn’t delay – I need to write down a list of all the things I’m not doing today!

Pregnant Silence

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The psychological origins of procrastination – and how we can stop putting things off

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