Category: Photography

The meaning of wildness?

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

So said Albert Einstein.

The reason I went searching for a quotation on reality was that our, as in humans, ability to see the world in grossly distorted ways jumped ‘off the page’ at me when I was reading a recent essay from George Monbiot. Followers of Learning from Dogs will know that Mr. Monbiot has featured before; most recently just under a month ago in a post Returning to Nature. Before then in April when George gave permission for the full republishing of his essay The Great Unmentionable.

“Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.”

Why the notion of humans seeing reality in grossly distorted ways? Simply because in George Monbiot‘s following essay he challenges what we mean by the word ‘wildness’ and I immediately realised that my own idea of wildness was badly corrupted.

See if you react the same way as you read The Naturalists Who Are Terrified of Nature by George Monbiot, republished in full with the kind permission of George.

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The Naturalists Who Are Terrified of Nature

July 16, 2013

A radical challenge to British conservation and its bizarre priorities.

By George Monbiot, published on the RSPB’s website, 15th July 2013

I’m writing this on the train home, after visiting two places in the north of England celebrated for their “wildness”. One of them is Ennerdale in the Lake District, now officially known as Wild Ennerdale, a valley in which the river has been allowed to move freely once more, and in which native trees are succeeding naturally up the hillsides(1).

The other is the Sheffield Moors (in the Peak District), from which most of the sheep have been removed and where the structure of the vegetation has been allowed to change a little. I found both visits fascinating, not least because of the eruditon and enthusiasm of the people who walked me through these places.

But sitting on the train, watching the chemical deserts of the English lowlands flash past, I’m struck by how pathetically grateful I feel. For what? For the fact that, in two small conservation areas, located in national parks, a few natural processes have been allowed to resume.

Were I to explain to a foreigner that these places are now celebrated by conservationists in Britain for their radical approach, he or she would think I had gone mad. “What?,” they would say, “you are telling me that this is the cutting edge of nature conservation in your country? Where have you been for the past 50 years?”

I don’t know if there is any other country in which people – including conservationists – are as afraid of nature as they are in Britain. I don’t know if there is anywhere else in which conservationists are so convinced that if they relax their intensive management of the natural world, something dreadful will happen.

Nowhere else do conservationists subscribe more enthusiastically to the biblical doctrine of dominion: that we have a holy duty to control and corral nature, in case it gets out of hand. Nowhere else does conservation look more like a slightly modified version of the farming which trashed the land in the first place.

In my view most of our conservation areas aren’t nature reserves at all. They are museums of former farming practices, weeded and tended to prevent the wilds from encroaching. The ecosystem’s dynamic interactions are banned. Animals and plants are preserved as if they were a jar of pickles, kept in a state of arrested development, in which little is allowed to change.

But nature is not just a fixed assemblage of species, maintained as if it were a collection in a museum. It is also the ever-changing relationships between them, the successional processes, the shifting communities: all of which, in many of our reserves, are prohibited.

The problem begins with designation. The “interest features” of a site of special scientific interest – its species and habitats – must be kept in “favourable condition”. Often this means the condition in which they happened to be when the reserve was created. In most cases that’s a condition of dire impoverishment and depletion: ecosystems missing almost their entire trophic structure, most of their large herbivores, all their large predators, in many cases even the trees. They have to be kept like this by extreme and intrusive management, in order to sustain the impacts which reduced them to this woeful state.

In Wild-ish Ennerdale and on the Sheffield Moors, there has been a partial relaxation of this draconian regime. But even in these places, there is much that I question.

On the Sheffield Moors, for example, cattle are kept: at much higher densities and for far longer periods than large herbivores would exist in a self-willed ecosystem. In many parts of the moors, trees, if they have the temerity to return, are cleared. The effort, even here, is to ensure that the landscape remains farmed, open and bare.

This is done partly to favour breeding populations of wading birds(2). It’s likely that these species are being maintained at artificially high populations(3). A tendency I’ve noticed among some groups is to try to make all their target species common, even if they were naturally rare. Perhaps some species ought to be rare. Those which lived in open habitats – which would have been small and occasional before people started cutting and burning the forests – are likely to have been rarest of all.

Think of the varying fortunes of grouse populations in Britain. The palaeontological evidence is extremely sparse, so this is guesswork, but during the Boreal and Atlantic phases, 9,000-5,000 years ago, when closed-canopy forest covered most of Britain, the commonent grouse species in this country might have been hazel hen. Perhaps the second commonest would have been capercaillie, followed by black grouse, followed by red grouse, which are likely to have been very scarce.

That likely sequence has now been reversed. Hazel hen is extinct, capercaillie extremely rare, black grouse are sparse and in severe decline and red grouse are bloody everywhere. The red grouse is the magpie of the uplands: it benefits from human intervention, which in this case means the clearing of land.

Arbitrarily, conservation groups in the uplands of England and Wales have decided that their priorities are, for example, dunlin and curlew, rather than capercaillie and pine martens. I’m not insisting that this is always the wrong decision. But it’s a decision that should be rigorously questioned, especially if this intensive management means the destruction of habitats which would have sheltered a much wider range of species.

Spend a couple of hours in an open upland nature reserve, and count the diversity and abundance of the birds you see. Then spend a couple of hours in a bushy suburban garden and do the same thing. In my experience you’re likely to see more birds of more species in the garden. That’s hardly surprising: most birds – indeed most wildlife – require cover to survive. Am I the only one who thinks that something has gone badly wrong here?

It’s not just common species I’m talking about. Many of those excluded by our brutal upland management are not just rare in Britain; they are extinct.

Whenever I meet a conservation manager, I find myself acting like a 3-year old: I keep asking “why?”. Why are you preserving this and not that? Why is this site designated for moorland flea beetle and pearl-bordered fritillary, rather than blue stag beetle and lynx? Why are you protecting the wretched scrapings of life that remain here, rather than reintroducing the species which would once have lived here, but have been excluded by the kind of interventions that you – the conservationists – have sustained?

When I worked in the Amazon, the conservationists I met were fighting to defend the rainforest against cattle ranching. In Britain the conservationists are – literally – defending cattle ranching against the rainforest. Britain was once covered by rainforest: woodland wet enough for epiphytes to grow. (Epiphytes are plants which root in the bark of trees). Our closed-canopy rainforest was likely to have been richer in species than any of our remaining habitats. Given half a chance, it would return. But it isn’t given half a chance, even in conservation sites, because conservationists keep clearing the land and running cattle on it, in case the wayward and irresponsible ecosystem does something that isn’t listed in the rules. In doing so, they preserve a burnt, blasted and largely empty land with the delightful ambience of a nuclear winter.

Conservation groups in this country are obsessed by heather. Heather is typical of the vegetation that colonises land which has been repeatedly deforested. You can see similar vegetation – low, scrubby, tough, thriving on burnt ground and depleted soils – covering deforested land all over the tropics. There, the dominance of these plants is lamented by ecologists, for it is rightly seen as a symptom of ecological destruction. Here it is fetishised and preserved.

Even in the Eastern Sheffield Moors management plan, published by the RSPB and the National Trust, “cutting and burning” are listed as the requisite tasks for managing heather(4). Imagine what a tropical ecologist would say if she saw that. “You people have been telling us for decades that we should stop cutting and burning. You’ve been sending us money and lobbying our governments to discourage us from doing it. And all the while you’ve been telling yourselves that cutting and burning are necessary for the protection of wildlife.” If she concluded that we are hypocrites, that we are unambitious, irrational, anally retentive and ecologically illiterate, she would not be far wrong.

The same plan reveals that these two august conservation bodies will maintain cattle on the moors at their current level, but keep them there for longer. “Their grazing and trampling will manage the vegetation in a way which should improve the condition of the habitats and benefit wildlife.”(5) What does this mean? Yes, it might benefit some wildlife, but only at the expense of other species. Yes, it might “improve the condition” of a habitat, if by improvement you mean a better representation of the state of arrested development you’ve chosen. It sounds uncomfortably close to the 19th Century agricultural meaning of “improvement”: which means draining and clearing land to make it more suitable for farming.

It astonishes me to see statements like this left unpacked. Asserted without qualification, they create the impression that all wildlife benefits from management of this kind. Of course, all interventions (including a complete cessation of management), are better for some species than for others. But in my view, the losses inflicted by cattle ranching – here, as in the Amazon – outweigh any gains.

An even starker example is provided by a report commissioned by the RSPB on changing livestock numbers. It contends that “undergrazing and loss of vegetation structure is now occurring in some areas, with adverse impacts for some species such as golden plover and other waders.”(6)

“Undergrazing” is an interesting concept. The report seems to be referring to “undergrazing” by sheep. How can a native ecosystem be undergrazed by an invasive ruminant from Mesopotamia? Is our wildlife underhunted by American mink? Are our verges underinfested by Japanese knotweed?

I would question what undergrazing by any domestic animal means. “Not farmed enough” is what the term appears to signify, “or not sufficiently damaged”. Sure, the golden plover is among a small group of species that benefit from scorched-earth policies, but a far greater number are harmed by them. So why is the golden plover the priority? And how can a report for a conservation organisation blithely use the term undergrazing without qualification or explanation?

Another RSPB report advocates “the eradication of invasive tree species” from the bare uplands of Wales and claims, without citing any evidence or explaining what this means, that “extensive grazing, ideally mixed grazing, is important in maintaining upland pastures in a state that benefits upland birds and other wildlife.”(7)

A document published by the Welsh government revealed something I have never seen in the RSPB’s literature: that the society advises farmers “to cut down trees to discourage buzzards which kill other birds.”(8)

I checked with the RSPB in Wales and it confirmed that it does “at times provide advice to landowners on the management of trees to reduce available vantage points and nest sites for some avian predators.”(9)

Isn’t that more or less what the British government wanted to do to protect pheasant shoots? And didn’t the society contest those efforts?(10)

I wonder whether, in their arbitrary choice of target species and target habitats, British conservationists are influenced by the legacy of hunting. Many of the birds on behalf of which this extreme and brutal simplification of the ecosystem takes place are those which, in the 19th Century, were pursued by gentlemen with guns. Perhaps we should see conservation efforts in Britain as a form of gamekeeping, which regards some of our native species as good and worthy of preservation, and others (such as trees and buzzards) as bad and in need of control.

Sometimes I receive coherent answers from the conservation managers I speak to, which are debatable but at least consistent. Sometimes the only answer I receive is “that’s what the rules say.” But isn’t it time we began to challenge the rules? Isn’t it time we began to question the way sites are designated, and to challenge the ecological blitzkreig required to maintain them in what is laughably called “favourable condition”? Isn’t it time we began asking why we have decided to privilege certain species over others? Isn’t it time we started wondering whether the collateral damage required to support them is worth it?

After all, how did nature cope before we came along? To judge by the actions of British conservation groups, it must have been in a pretty dismal state for the three billion years before humans arrived to look after it.

George Monbiot’s book Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding is published by Allen Lane.

References:

1. http://www.wildennerdale.co.uk/

2. National Trust and RSPB, 2012. The Eastern Moors Management Plan summary, page 15. Eastern Moors Partnership, Curbar.

3. This, of course, is speculative, as palaeontology gives us few indications of numbers. But the circumstantial evidence seems powerful: the habitat required for breeding populations of these birds, many of which need to nest several hundred metres from the nearest woodland edge to avoid predation, was in short supply. See for example:

NJ Whitehouse and D Smith, 2010. How fragmented was the British Holocene wildwood? Perspectives on the ‘‘Vera’’ grazing debate from the fossil beetle record. Quaternary Science Reviews Vol. 29, nos. 3-4, pp539–553. doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.10.010

FJG Mitchell, 2005. How open were European primeval forests? Hypothesis testing using palaeoecological data. Journal of Ecology Vol. 93, 168–177

JHB Birks, 2005. Mind the gap: how open were European primeval forests? Trends in Ecology & Evolution Vol. 20, pp154-156.

R Fyfe, 2007. The importance of local-scale openness within regions dominated by closed woodland. Journal of Quaternary Science, Vol.22, no. 6, pp571–578. doi: 10.1002/jqs.1078

JC Svenning, 2002. A review of natural vegetation openness in northwestern Europe. Biological Conservation Vol 104: 133-148.

RHW Bradshaw, GE Hannon, AM Lister, 2003. A long-term perspective on ungulate-vegetation interactions. Forest Ecology and Management, Vol. 181: 267–280.

4. National Trust and RSPB, 2012, as above, p16.

5. National Trust and RSPB, 2012, as above, p11.

6. http://www.rspb.org.uk/Images/Final_Report_tcm9-340975.pdf

7. http://www.assemblywales.org/6_rspb_formatted.pdf

8. Welsh Government, 2010. Glastir: frequently asked questions, Section 13. This document is no longer available on the government site, but you can read it here: http://www.fuw.org.uk/glastir-faq-miscellaneous.html

9. Emma Roberts, RSPB Wales, 10th August 2011. By email.

10. http://www.rspb.org.uk/media/releases/316283-back-off-our-birds-of-prey

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Will leave you with the following picture.

Perfect timing, set four.

Another Sunday; another set of photographs.

Thanks to so many of you for your positive feedback.

Here are another few wonderful pictures.

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Feb. 09, 2012 - Birmingham, England, United Kingdom - This is the incredible photo of an otter seeking guidance by praying. This once in a lifetime snap was taken by Hertfordshire based photographer Marac Andrev Kolodzinski. Marac had to wait over two hours in the freezing cold before he captured the divine moment. .(Credit Image: © Marac Kolodzinski/Caters News/ZUMAPRESS.com) — From Birmingham, February 2012

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Hopefully, more wonderful pictures in a week’s time. (But please do say when you have had enough!)

The King of dogs.

A reflection on the history of the German Shepherd dog.

Yesterday’s account of getting to know GSD Duke a little better caused me to find a post that had been sitting in my Drafts folder for a couple of years. It was about a piece published in The New York Times, Sunday Review, October 8th, 2011 under the heading of Why German Shepherds Have Had Their Day.

Why German Shepherds Have Had Their Day

By SUSAN ORLEAN

SUCCESS can be a drag. You yearn for it, strive for it, and then, when it finally arrives, it sets off repercussions you never anticipated that sometimes undo that success.

Take the German shepherd. Originally bred to the exacting standards of a German cavalry officer, it became one of the 20th century’s most popular working breeds. But in recent years that popularity, and the overbreeding that came with it, has driven the German shepherd into eclipse: even the police in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, who had relied on the dogs for years, recently announced they were replacing them with Belgian Malinois, because the less-popular Malinois were hardier and more reliable.

But there is good news about this bad news, if you are a lover of the breed, because less visibility, especially in inspiring roles as public servants, is likely to mean less demand for the dogs. That means less reason to produce too many puppies, which is the best thing that can happen to any purebred dogs.

The article continued with the history of the breed. But rather than stay with the NYT piece, for more about the breed history I’m going to cross over to the website of the British charity, German Shepherd Dog Rescue (GSDR). They have a comprehensive account of the History and Origins of the Breed.

History and Origins of the German Shepherd Dog

A brief insight into the development of the breed

The German Shepherd breed appeared late at the end of the 19th century in Germany and they were first exhibited at a show in Hanover in 1882. They were not like German Shepherds as we know them today though being rough coated, short tailed and rather resembling mongrels. The German Shepherd Dog as we now know it didn’t really appear until after the Second World War.

The breed was actually created by the cross breeding of working sheep dogs from rural Germany by an ex cavalry officer called Max von Stephanitz whose aim was to create a working dog for herding which could trot for long periods.

A breed standard was drawn up and the first breed show took place in 1899 following which the GSD became firmly established across Germany. In 1906 the first dogs were exported to the USA .

Since then, the breed has grown enormously in popularity and is now one of the most popular pedigree breeds in the UK as a pet as well as being the favourite working breed for many forces, especially the police. They are widely used for security purposes because of their strong protective instincts.

Many people in the UK still call these dogs Alsatians which may partly be due to the fact that when they were first bred, the Alsace region of France, where these dogs were very popular, was part of Germany . I still get people who think that Alsatians are the traditional short coat black and tan dogs and that German Shepherds are the long coated dogs that have become popular.

GSD’s make wonderful family pets and will protect family and home.

These dogs are highly intelligent and will show undying devotion to their master but they are dogs that need company and stimulation to be at their best. It is however, important to remember that this is a working breed and that they do have certain characteristics that some people might find difficult to live with. The German Shepherd should be steady, loyal, self assured, courageous and willing and should not be nervous over aggressive or shy. Nervous aggression is something that we are now seeing more often as a result of bad breeding. It is sad but there has always been indiscriminate breeding of German Shepherds right from the start, which has lead to problems with temperament and health.

Before leaving the GSDR website, please read more about this important charity, “We are one of the longest standing and largest German Shepherd rescues in the UK.” and if there is any way at all that you can help, please, please, please! (And fellow bloggers, consider a post spreading the word about this wonderful charity and these most magnificent of dogs.)

So a few memories of German Shepherds closer to home.

Young Pharaoh 12th August, 2003 when he was just 10 weeks old.

We are friends for life! Each for the other.

Pharaoh, ten-years-old, and King of his Castle! Taken on the 3rd June, 2013 at our home in Oregon.

The arrival of young Cleo!

I suspect Pharaoh is explaining to Cleo that there’s only rule of the house – his rule!

Picture taken April 7th, 2012

From puppy to Big Dog! Cleo resting where she shouldn’t be! February, 2013.

What magnificent animals they are!

Perfect timing, set three

Yet another Sunday with some breathtaking photographs.

I’m sure most readers will recall the background, but just in case not all of you, here’s what was posted on the 30th June.

Sit back and be amazed!

A friend from Payson, Arizona, Lew Levenson, recently sent across a set of 38 astounding photographs, all on the theme of perfectly timed shots.

They are so fabulous that I have decided that for today and the following four Sundays I will post a selection.

So today, the first set of 8 photographs. Trust me you will love them, so a big thank you to Lew. Do say which are your best ones!

Then another set of incredible photographs last Sunday. So to the third set.

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And guess what? Yes, more photographs next Sunday.

Love of nature

We are, above all, so intimately part of the natural world.

In yesterday’s post, I shared an email that I had sent to friend, Dan, that included:

I want to retreat from these areas and focus on what is most valuable to me.

Aspects of my life such as love, friendship with ‘old’ travelers, the natural world, being in the present, community, our animals (especially Pharaoh who is over 10), my writings, my book, our small world here at 4000 Hugo; you get my drift!

Well it didn’t take me long to come across an email that John Hurlburt had sent not so long ago recommending the following film.

Enjoy!

Published on May 5, 2012

Video by Scott Mckinley Productions, Produced for Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation for Ad campaign. Licensed music by Kenny G.. This short video won Best of Category at the International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula Montana! The majority was shot on location in Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park and The National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Before you turn away from this, go across to the website of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Or do an image search on the ‘web’ where you will, for example, find this breathtaking picture:

Bull Elk on top of the World. Copyright ©2011-2013 Vic Schendel Photography, all rights reserved.

Vic Schendel Photography may be found here and I do recommend having a leisurely browse through the website.

Perfect timing, set two.

More amazing photographs.

The first set was published a week ago. As I wrote then,

Sit back and be amazed!

A friend from Payson, Arizona, Lew Levenson, recently sent across a set of 38 astounding photographs, all on the theme of perfectly timed shots.

They are so fabulous that I have decided that for today and the following four Sundays I will post a selection.

So today, the first set of 8 photographs. Trust me you will love them, so a big thank you to Lew. Do say which are your best ones!

Here is the second set of 8 stunning pictures.

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Yet another set next Sunday.

Down here, from up there!

The power of mankind’s footprint on Planet Earth.

Last Friday, I published a post under the title of People, people, everywhere! Coincidentally, that same day over on Transition Town Payson‘s blog a post was published Urban Sprawl, a Vision from Space! It seemed like a fitting follow-on to that post on Learning from Dogs and is reproduced with the kind permission of the TTP team (thanks Rob).

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Urban Sprawl, a Vision From Space!

Posted on June 28, 2013 by rsingram

Urban Sprawl has a major impact on all our Resources!

In the Sun Belt Areas of our country, phenomenal growth has occurred over the past 30 years. Satellite images from 1984 through 2012 show the impacts on the Landscape in a time lapse image that is a scary picture of what the next 30 years may bring.

A blog article from the Atlantic Cities website forwarded to me by my friend Dave H. It is a geographic time lapse of satellite images provided by Google. Their article titled “The Devastating Impact of 30 Years of Sprawl, as Seen From Space.” gives startling images of how our cities have grown.

“These GIFs were recorded from Google’s “Landsat Annual Time Lapse” tool by Samuel Aston Williams, a young Texas architect. Williams wanted to contribute something new to a startling series of showing three decades of human-landscape intervention recently produced by a collaboration of Google, NASA, TIME and others.”

Read the full article.

The Atlantic Cities also published a blog titled “A Terrifying, Fascinating Time lapse of 30 Years Impact on Earth.” The images in this blog shows development in other places on the earth in a scary 30 year blink of an eye.

“Since the 1970s, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have been amassing satellite images of every inch of our planet as part of the Landsat program. Over time, the images reveal a record of change: of cities expanding, lakes and forests disappearing, new islands emerging from the sea off the coast of rising Middle East metropolises like Dubai.

If you could thumb through these historic pictures as if in a flip book, they would show stunning change across the earth’s surface, in both our natural environments and our man-made ones. Now, the digital equivalent of that experience is possible – three decades of global change as GIF – in a project unveiled today between NASA, the USGS, TIME, Google, and the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Landsat images taken between 1984 and 2012 have been converted into a seamless, navigable animation built from millions of satellite photos. As Google wrote this morning on its blog: “We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public.”

See the time lapse images here.

Here’s the Problem!

World Population Growth.

Our Population is only going to Grow Larger!

World population details here.

NASA has also been Following Urban Sprawl

This is how Baltimore has grown in 200 Years!

“October 11, 2002: While space technology was undergoing its spectacular birth during the 1950s and ’60s, and visionaries were predicting the spread of human colonies into space, another kind of human colony was spreading rapidly–right here on Earth!

It was the dawn of the modern suburb, a time of post-war prosperity when housing developments popped up across the landscape like mushrooms after a rain.

A half-century later, we now understand that many environmental problems accompany the outward spread of cities: fragmenting and destroying wildlife habitat, for example, and discharging polluted runoff water into streams and lakes.”

More information here.

Urban Sprawl in the United States is covered in Photos by Christoph Gielen

The photo below was taken by Christoph Gielen. There is a symmetrical beauty to his aerial photos of Urban Areas. Please go to his Twisted Sifter website for phenomenal aerial photos of our Urban Centers.

A Great Aerial photo by Christoph Gielen of an Arizona Neighborhood

Urban Sprawl is defined in detail at the Wiki website;

An interesting phenomena is that Sprawl is a term only used in America for Urban Growth, “The term “sprawl” is most often associated with US land use; outside the US (and especially outside the Anglosphere), the term “peri-urbanisation” is often used to denote similar dynamics and phenomena.”

Perfect timing, set one.

Sit back and be amazed!

A friend from Payson, Arizona, Lew Levenson, recently sent across a set of 38 astounding photographs, all on the theme of perfectly timed shots.

They are so fabulous that I have decided that for today and the following four Sundays I will post a selection.

So today, the first set of 8 photographs. Trust me you will love them, so a big thank you to Lew. Do say which are your best ones!

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Another set next Sunday.

Mid-week break.

Just ran out of time yesterday, so enjoy the following:

(Sent to me by Dan Gomez.)

The beautiful strange-eyed kitten, taken in Lovech, Bulgaria in the summer of 2009 by Bobby Pfeiffer.

Zakynthos Island in Greece. The water is so clear, it looks like the boat is floating in the air.

This is what ocean sand looks like when it’s magnified 250 times.

California Red-Sided Garter Snake.

Zanjeer, The Golden Labrador Who Saved Thousands Of Lives.

In March 1993, a series of 12 bombs went off across Mumbai, India. The serial blasts left 257 dead and 713 injured. But in the aftermath, an unlikely hero emerged. According to Reuters, a golden labrador named Zanjeer worked with the bomb squad and saved thousands of lives by detecting “more than 3,329 kgs of the explosive RDX, 600 detonators, 249 hand grenades and 6,406 rounds of live ammunition.” He helped avert three more bombs in the days following the blasts.

The dog died of bone cancer in 2000. He was eight years old.

In the photo, a senior police officer lays a wreath of flowers on Zanjeer as he was buried with full police honors at a widely-attended ceremony.

The love of a woman for her horse!

The incredible story of one woman’s loyalty to her horse – she spent three hours holding its head above the tide after it got stuck in the mud on a beach in Australia. His owner, Nicole Graham, who was enjoying an afternoon ride, stayed with him as rescuers struggled for three hours to pull him out. With moments to spare, the 500kg horse, named Astro, was freed with the help of a tractor and harness at Avalon Beach in Geelong, Victoria, Australia .

Returning to Nature

The power of serendipity!

Why the choice of this sub-heading? Well, just because a number of quite separate articles and essays have come together to offer a powerful, cohesive argument for reconsidering the role of Nature in the future of mankind.

Of course, my use of words in that preceding sentence is completely ludicrous; the suggestion that ‘Nature’ is disconnected from ‘mankind’. Yet millions of us, to a greater or lesser degree, do behave as if we are the masters of the world.

So let me dip into what has been ‘crossing my desk’ in recent times.

On May 28th, George Monbiot published in The Guardian newspaper an essay entitled A Manifesto for Rewilding the World. (The link takes you to the article on the Monbiot blogsite.) Here’s how that essay opened,

Until modern humans arrived, every continent except Antarctica possessed a megafauna. In the Americas, alongside mastodons, mammoths, four-tusked and spiral-tusked elephants, there was a beaver the size of a black bear: eight feet from nose to tail(1). There were giant bison weighing two tonnes, which carried horns seven feet across(2).

The short-faced bear stood thirteen feet in its hind socks(3). One hypothesis maintains that its astonishing size and shocking armoury of teeth and claws are the hallmarks of a specialist scavenger: it specialised in driving giant lions and sabretooth cats off their prey(4). The Argentine roc (Argentavis magnificens) had a wingspan of 26 feet(5). Sabretooth salmon nine feet long migrated up Pacific coast rivers(6).

During the previous interglacial period, Britain and Europe contained much of the megafauna we now associate with the tropics: forest elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions and hyaenas. The elephants, rhinos and hippos were driven into southern Europe by the ice, then exterminated around 40,000 years ago when modern humans arrived(7,8,9). Lions and hyaenas persisted: lions hunted reindeer across the frozen wastes of Britain until 11,000 years ago(10, 11). The distribution of these animals has little to do with temperature: only where they co-evolved with humans and learnt to fear them did they survive.

I’m not going to reproduce the bulk of the article; just hoped that I have tickled your curiousity sufficient for you to read it in full here. But will just show you how it closed:

Despite the best efforts of governments, farmers and conservationists, nature is already beginning to return. One estimate suggests that two thirds of the previously-forested parts of the US have reforested, as farming and logging have retreated, especially from the eastern half of the country(23). Another proposes that by 2030 farmers on the European Continent (though not in Britain, where no major shift is expected) will vacate around 30 million hectares (75 million acres), roughly the size of Poland(24). While the mesofauna is already beginning to spread back across Europe, land areas of this size could perhaps permit the reintroduction of some of our lost megafauna. Why should Europe not have a Serengeti or two?

Above all, rewilding offers a positive environmentalism. Environmentalists have long known what they are against; now we can explain what we are for. It introduces hope where hope seemed absent. It offers us a chance to replace our silent spring with a raucous summer.

Then further research for this post brought to light an interview with David Suzuki in February. Widely reported, I picked the version published on Straight.com, from which comes:

In December, Canadian specialty TV channel Business News Network interviewed me about the climate summit in Copenhagen. My six-minute interview followed a five-minute live report from Copenhagen, about poor countries demanding more money to address climate change and rich countries pleading a lack of resources. Before and after those spots were all kinds of reports on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the price of gold and the loonie, and the implications of some new phone technology.

For me, this brought into sharp focus the inevitable failure of our negotiating efforts on climate change. BNN, like the New York-based Bloomberg channel, is a 24-hour-a-day network focused completely on business. These networks indicate that the economy is our top priority. And at Copenhagen, money dominated the discussions and the outcome.

But where is the 24-hour network dealing with the biosphere? As biological creatures, we depend on clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy, and biodiversity for our well-being and survival. Surely protecting those fundamental needs should be our top priority and should dominate our thinking and the way we live. After all, we are animals and our biological dependence on the biosphere for our most basic needs should be obvious.

The economy is a human construct, not a force of nature like entropy, gravity, or the speed of light or our biological makeup. It makes no sense to elevate the economy above the things that keep us alive. But that’s what our prime minister does when he claims we can’t even try to meet the Kyoto targets because that might have a detrimental effect on the economy.

This economic system is built on exploiting raw materials from the biosphere and dumping the waste back into the biosphere. And conventional economics dismisses all the “services” that nature performs to keep the planet habitable for animals like us as “externalities”. As long as economic considerations trump all other factors in our decisions, we will never work our way out of the problems we’ve created.

Concluding:

Nature is our home. Nature provides our most fundamental needs. Nature dictates limits. If we are striving for a truly sustainable future, we have to subordinate our activities to the limits that come from nature. We know how much carbon dioxide can be reabsorbed by all the green things in the oceans and on land, and we know we are exceeding those limits. That’s why carbon is building up in the atmosphere. So our goal is clear. All of humanity must find a way to keep emissions below the limits imposed by the biosphere.

The only equitable course is to determine the acceptable level of emissions on a global per capita basis. Those who fall below the line should be compensated for their small carbon footprint while those who are far above should be assessed accordingly. But the economy must be aligned with the limits imposed by the biosphere, not above them.

Quite clearly, if we continue to turn our backs on Nature, the consequences won’t be long in tapping us on the shoulder.

So, going to close it today with this, seen nearly a month ago on the PRI website:

oooo

Plant a Tree

Trees — by Kristof Nordin May 27, 2013

Imagine the type of world we could see
If instead of saying ‘pray,’ we said, ‘plant a tree’.
With this one little change so much more could be done
To protect all living things found under the sun.

We could ‘plant a tree’ for our troops sent away into war
So when they return they’d come home to find more.
We could ‘plant a tree’ at our churches with our husband or wife
To praise the Creator through a celebration of life.

We could ‘plant a tree’ for the needy and for those with no food
We could even plant in public without seeming rude.
The government would not have to introduce rules,
And most likely we could ‘plant a tree’ at our schools.

If we took it to task to ‘plant trees’ for the poorest,
We would all soon be reaping the wealth of a forest.
We could plant freely with those of all religions and creeds,
The improvement of earth would be based on these deeds.

We could plant with our neighbours, our family, and friends,
And ‘plant a tree’ with our enemies to help make amends.
If we ‘plant a tree’ for the sick to show them we care,
We would also be healing the soil, water, and air.

We could ‘plant a tree’ to observe when two people wed,
And plant one with our kids each night before bed.
Throughout the history of the whole human race
We find respect for the ‘tree’ has always had a place.

The great Ash of the Norse was their tree of the World,
And on a tree in the Garden is where the serpent once curled.
It was in groves of Oaks that the Druid priests wandered,
And under the Bodhi where the great Buddha pondered.

In the Bible it’s clear that we have all that we need:
‘All the trees with their fruits and plants yielding seed’.
Despite all these lessons that the past has taught
Now days, it seems, we cut our trees without thought.

This is confirmed by the Koran, for in it we read:
‘Many are the marvels of earth, yet we pay them no heed’.
We all have a duty, no matter what nation
To perform our part in protecting Creation.

Just think what we’d have if we had picked up a spade
Every time each one of us bowed our heads and prayed.

Further Reading:

oooOOOooo

The theme continues tomorrow.

The Naturalists Who Are Terrified of Nature

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Why German Shepherds Have Had Their Day

By SUSAN ORLEAN

History and Origins of the German Shepherd Dog

A brief insight into the development of the breed

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Trees — by Kristof Nordin May 27, 2013

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