Category: Science

Our Earthing experiences.

This is really starting to open our eyes!

On Saturday, the 14th June, I published a post Are you grounded?  That post was a reaction to this book that Jean and I had recently read.

english2ndbkcover
I also explained that we had ordered an earthing sheet for the bed and that I would report further upon our findings.

Today’s post is that further report.

The slim box containing the half-sheet kit was delivered on the 18th June, five days ago at the time of writing this.

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The next photograph shows more clearly what was included in the kit.

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From left to right: Case histories from users, an earthing rod above, the earthing half-sheet, and below the sheet, an outlet ground checker, the earthing connection cord, the book, and a full-length DVD of a film on the subject of grounding.

It was then a case of laying the sheet on the bed as recommended in the instruction guide.

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Then upon testing that we had a safe earthing connection via the ground pin on our nearby outlet, it was a case of connecting the earthing sheet to ground, as may be observed in the next photograph.

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I’m writing this yesterday.  We have both slept on the earthing sheet for four nights now.

So what are the results so far?

Jean

Jean has had leg muscle cramps each night for months and months.  Often just enough to waken her but frequently sufficiently severe to require her getting out of bed and walking around the room.  I can vouch for the latter!

Jean has had those four nights totally free from cramps!

Plus Jean has reported sleeping more soundly.

Me – Prostate

In recent months my bladder has been showing ‘old man’s bladder control’!  Certainly, over the last year I have been getting up for a pee two times, frequently three times, during the night.

During the day, I could hardly take a hot drink without the need to pee within minutes.  It had got to the stage where I would avoid having a drink before Jean and I went out unless I was certain that there would be public restrooms available.  I was taking a natural prostate medicine, morning and evening, but still starting to think that it wouldn’t be long before I would need to see a medical specialist.

Since sleeping on the earthing sheet, I have gone down to getting up just once during the night.  But it’s better than that!

I have stopped the prostate tablets.  During the day, my bladder control is hugely improved.  I hold my breath that this is going to continue.

Me – Memory

Like many of my age (I’m 70 in November), my short-term memory is not what it used to be.  I have not noticed any improvements in this area.

But I am sleeping much more soundly, which is never a bad thing.

But get this!

Being an old Englishman with a sense of connection to the ancient customs of Stonehenge, especially observing the sun’s dawn on the morning of Mid-Summer’s Day, I had looked up the exact local time equivalent of the moment of the Solstice here in Oregon.

Stonehenge at Dawn. On the morning of Mid-Summer's Day the sun rises exactly over the heel stone.
Stonehenge at Dawn. On the morning of Mid-Summer’s Day the sun rises exactly over the heel stone.

Early in the hours of the morning of June 21st, ergo Mid-Summer’s Day, I woke unexpectedly.  I lay there wondering what had awoken me.  It wasn’t to jump out of bed and have a pee.  How strange!

I lay there for what felt like ten minutes and then curious as to the hour reached across and pressed the illuminate button on my bedside clock.  It read 3:48 am.

3:48 am!! How could that be! I could hardly believe it!

Let me explain.

The previous afternoon, I had been curious as to the exact time of the 2014 Summer Solstice.  Had looked it up online.  In the United Kingdom that precise moment was 10:41 am.  The equivalent time of the Summer Solstice in Oregon’s local Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) was 3:41 am.

I knew that was when I had woken up.

Now that’s what I call being grounded to the Planet!

OK, that’s enough for today but there is much more information about the whole business of being grounded to the planet. I shall return to the subject in Wednesday’s post.

Way to go!
Way to go!

Living longer and feeling better!

Can’t be more valuable aspirations than these!

Last Saturday, I published a post called Are you grounded? The essence of that post was that grounding our bodies on a very regular basis, as in daily, was the primary means of avoiding a wide range of illnesses. In that post was included the first part of a speech given by Dr. Stephen Sinatra M.D. and I promised to include today the full speech.

So here are the videos including that Part One that was included on Saturday.  (I do hope I have them in order!)

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

A simple heart-healing exercise

Sharing the “secret” for living longer 

The healing modality

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These further items also could be of interest to you.

Dr. Sinatra has his own website that may be found here.

There’s a 90-minute interview of Dr. Sinatra by Dr. Mercola; see below.

And much more if you spend a short while exploring the internet.

Are you grounded?

Or just away with the fairies!

Sorry, just kidding: Couldn’t resist!

I have just finished reading a book with the title of Earthing.

english2ndbkcover

It has been an absolutely fascinating read and one, I’m bound to say, that seems entirely plausible.

That is that our modern lifestyle that has us disconnected from Mother Earth for much of our time is the cause of many ailments. As the associated website explains:

CONNECT TO THE EARTH AND FEEL BETTER!

Just as the sun gives us warmth and vitamin D, the Earth underfoot gives us food and water, a surface to walk, sit, stand, play, and build on, and something you never, ever thought about—an eternal, natural, and gentle energy. Think of it perhaps as vitamin G: G for ground. What does that mean to you? Maybe the difference between feeling good and not so good, of having little or a lot of energy, or sleeping well or not so well.

You can’t see the Earth’s energy but some people can feel it as a warm, tingling, and pleasant sensation when they are out walking barefoot along the water’s edge at the beach or on a stretch of dew-moistened grass.

Throughout history humans walked barefoot and slept on the ground. But modern lifestyle, including the widespread use of insulative rubber, or plastic-soled shoes, has disconnected us from the Earth’s energy and, of course, we no longer sleep on the ground. Fascinating new research has raised the possibility that this disconnect may actually contribute to chronic pain, fatigue, and poor sleep that plague so many people.

The remedy for the disconnect is simple. Walk barefoot outdoors whenever possible and/or sleep, work, or relax indoors in contact with conductive sheets or mats that transfer the energy to your body. People who do so on a regular basis say they sleep better, feel better, and have more energy during the day. This simple practice is called Earthing, also known as grounding, and it is both a technology and a movement which is transforming lives across the planet.

Were you aware, for example, that the sole of our foot has more nerve endings per square inch than any other part of our body! And more sweat glands! All from thousands of years of being connected to the Earth.

Curious?

Then watch Part One of a conference video by Dr. Stephen Sinatra, one of the authors of the book:

(The remaining parts of Dr. Sinatra’s talk will be presented in a post on Monday!)

Jean and I have just ordered the half-sheet and I shall be delighted to write more of our experiences over the coming weeks.

And I don’t need to remind you that dogs have been in bare-foot contact with Planet Earth for some time now!

Stay healthy!

 

Back to dogs and play

A range of ideas that elevate our understanding of dogs.

Last Thursday, I wrote the opening to what became a two-part essay.  The essence of that first part was the conclusion by Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, that, “Clearly dogs and many other animals can truly teach us about traits such as trust, friendship, forgiveness, love, and hope.”

You will recall that the reference to Marc Bekoff came from an article written by David Grimm (1) in The Washington Post.  Let me refer back to that article:

In the wild, coyotes ostracize pack members that don’t play by the rules. Something similar happens in dog parks: If three dogs are playing and one bites or tackles too hard, the other two are likely to give him the cold shoulder and stop playing with him, Bekoff says. Such behavior, he says, suggests that dogs are capable of morality, a mind-set once thought to be uniquely human.

Even morality hints at something deeper, however. To enforce moral conduct, dogs must be able to experience a spectrum of emotions, from joy to indignation, guilt to jealousy. They must also be able to read these emotions in others, distinguishing accident from intent, honesty from deceit. And indeed, recent studies by other scientists have shown evidence of these abilities (confirming what many dog owners already feel about their pets).

Scientists have found, for example, that dogs trained to shake hands with humans will stop shaking if they notice that they aren’t being rewarded for the trick although a nearby dog is — a sign, the researchers suggested, that dogs can sense inequity.

Other studies have revealed that dogs yawn when they see humans yawning and that they nuzzle and lick people who are crying; scientists consider both behaviors displays of empathy, a rarely documented trait in the animal kingdom. Dogs have even been shown to be pessimistic: When a group of canines in one study learned that a bowl placed on one side of the room contained a treat and a bowl on the other side contained nothing, some of the dogs just sat there when the empty bowl was placed in the center of the room; they figured it was empty and didn’t waste their time. These same dogs evinced what researchers said was a similar pessimistic attitude when their masters left for work: They were more likely to howl and tear up the couch when their owner disappeared, possibly because they didn’t believe their master would return.

Most, if not all, dog owners would be very familiar with many of the behavioural traits that Marc Bekoff covers.  Take this next aspect, for instance:

Bekoff’s recent work suggests another remarkable canine skill: the ability to know what another animal is thinking — a so-called “theory of mind.”

Dogs seem to display a rudimentary form of this skill during play. He has noticed, for example, that one dog won’t begin trying to play with another dog until he has her attention. To get her to notice, he may nip the other dog or run into her field of view. That, Bekoff says, shows that the one wanting to play knows that she’s not paying attention to him. Though this may seem like a simple skill, it’s incredibly important to our species. Without it, we can have a hard time learning or interacting with the world around us.

From the above, it was but a short step, in web-search terms, to discover the Duke Canine Cognition Center at Duke University.

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Duke Canine Cognition Center

The Duke Canine Cognition Center (DCCC) is dedicated to the study of dog psychology. Our goal is to understand the flexibility and limitations of dog cognition. In doing so, we gain a window into the mind of animals as well as the evolution of our own species. We can also apply our knowledge of dog cognition to improving programs in which dogs are bred and trained to help humans (i.e. service dogs for the disabled, etc.).

We study dog cognition by inviting dog owners living in the vicinity of Duke University (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) to volunteer their pet dog(s) to play fun problem solving games where they can win treats (food or toys). The Duke Canine Cognition Center has the highest acceptance rate and cheapest tuition at Duke! So join hundreds of others and sign up today so that your dog can help us gain an even better understanding of our very best friends.

Then from there, the discovery of Brian Hare:

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Brian Hare is the director of the above Duke Canine Cognition Center, the co-author of The Genius of Dogs, and co-founder of Dognition.

So will leave it there for today but all this clearly offers us much to browse and learn about our truly best friend!

Reference:

1. David Grimm is a deputy news editor at Science and the author of the new book “Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship With Cats and Dogs.”

http://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Canine-Evolving-Relationship-Cats/dp/1610391330/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1400593725&sr=8-1&keywords=david+grimm

Learning from the play of dogs.

A recent newspaper article offers yet more learning from dogs.

I can’t recall how I came across the article but so what!  What I do recall was reading a recent item in The Washington Post and thinking that has to be reported here on Learning from Dogs.

The article, written by David Grimm, was entitled: In dogs’ play, researchers see honesty and deceit, perhaps something like morality. Here’s how it opened:

A shaggy brown terrier approaches a large chocolate Labrador in a city park. When the terrier gets close, he adopts a yogalike pose, crouching on his forepaws and hiking his butt into the air. The Lab gives an excited bark, and soon the two dogs are somersaulting and tugging on each other’s ears. Then the terrier takes off and the Lab gives chase, his tail wagging wildly. When the two meet once more, the whole thing begins again.

Watch a couple of dogs play, and you’ll probably see seemingly random gestures, lots of frenetic activity and a whole lot of energy being expended. But decades of research suggest that beneath this apparently frivolous fun lies a hidden language of honesty and deceit, empathy and perhaps even a humanlike morality.

Now I don’t have permission to reproduce the entire article but will draw your attention to this further piece:

All of this suggests that dogs have a kind of moral code — one long hidden to humans until a cognitive ethologist named Marc Bekoff began to crack it.

A wiry 68-year-old with reddish-gray hair tied back in a long ponytail, Bekoff is a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he taught for 32 years. He began studying animal behavior in the early 1970s, spending four years videotaping groups of dogs, wolves and coyotes in large enclosures and slowly playing back the tapes, jotting down every nip, yip and lick. “Twenty minutes of film could take a week to analyze,” he says.

The data revealed insights into how the animals maintained their tight social bonds — by grooming each other, for example. But what changed Bekoff’s life was watching them play. The wolves would chase each other, run, jump and roll over for seemingly no other reason than to have fun.

Few people had studied animal play, but Bekoff was intrigued. “Play is a major expenditure of energy, and it can be dangerous,” he says. “You can twist a shoulder or break a leg, and it can increase your chances of being preyed upon. So why do they do it? It has to feel good.”

Suddenly, Bekoff wasn’t interested just in behavior; he was interested also in emotions and, fundamentally, what was going on inside these animals’ heads.

Marc Bekoff’s name rang a bell with me and, sure enough, I found that previously he was mentioned here.  It was a post called Daisy offers a lesson for all,:

Animal Emotions

Do animals think and feel?
by Marc Bekoff – Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Daisy: The Injured Dog Who Believed She’d Walk Again and Did

Anthrozoology, also called human-animal studies (HAS), is a rapidly growing and expanding interdisciplinary field. A recent and comprehensive review of this wide-ranging discipline can be found in Paul Waldau’s book titled Animal Studies: An Introduction. Many of the essays I write for Psychology Today have something to do with anthrozoology in that they focus on the wide variety of relationships that humans establish with nonhuman animals (animals). Some essays also discuss what we can learn from other animals, including traits such as trust, friendship, forgiveness, love, and hope.

Often, a simple video captures the essence of the deep nature of the incredibly close and enduring bonds we form with other animals and they with us. As a case in point, my recent essay called “A Dog and His Man” showed a dog exuberantly expressing his deep feelings for a human companion he hadn’t seen for six months. Another essay titled “My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals” dealt with the relationship between homeless people and the animals with whom they share their lives.

Daisy: An unforgettable and inspirational symbol of dedication and hope

I just saw another video called “Daisy – the Little Pup Who Believed” that is well-worth sharing widely with others of all ages. There is no way I can summarize the depth of five-month old Daisy’s resolve to walk again after she was injured or of the devotion of the woman, Jolene, who found her on the side of a road – scared, malnourished, unable to walk or wag her tail, the people who contributed money to help her along, or the wonderful veterinarians and staff at Barrie Veterinary Hospital in Ontario, Canada, who took care of her. You can also read about Daisy’s remarkable and inspirational journey here.

Please take five minutes out of your day to watch this video, read the text, listen to the song that accompanies it, and share it widely. I am sure you will get teary as you watch Daisy go from an injured little ball of fur living in a ditch on the side of a road with a broken spine to learning to walk in water to romping around wildly as if life had been that proverbial pail of cherries from the start.

I’ve watched Daisy’s journey many times and every single time my eyes get watery. Among the many lessons in this wonderful video is “stay strong and never give up”. Clearly dogs and many other animals can truly teach us about traits such as trust, friendship, forgiveness, love, and hope.

Back to that Washington Post article.

Bekoff’s recent work suggests another remarkable canine skill: the ability to know what another animal is thinking — a so-called “theory of mind.”

Dogs seem to display a rudimentary form of this skill during play. He has noticed, for example, that one dog won’t begin trying to play with another dog until he has her attention. To get her to notice, he may nip the other dog or run into her field of view. That, Bekoff says, shows that the one wanting to play knows that she’s not paying attention to him. Though this may seem like a simple skill, it’s incredibly important to our species. Without it, we can have a hard time learning or interacting with the world around us.

So will leave you with this video and return to the theme tomorrow.

Is it just me?

Some days, one just wonders about a world that appears to be stark, raving mad!

One of the fundamental things that mankind is not learning from dogs, or from other animals for that fact, is having a sensitivity to danger.

Even happy, domesticated dogs, as with cats, are incredibly quick to pick up on something that just doesn’t ‘feel right’!

For example, take what was written here last Wednesday. About the extreme madness of our dependency on oil for our food!

Why is there no outcry?

Just recently, NOAA reported that “April 2014 was tied with April of 2010 as being the warmest April on record globally for land and ocean surface combined. NOAA also said that – globally – the January 2014 to April 2014 period was the 6th warmest Jan-Apr period on record.”

Why is there no outcry?

Just ten days ago, I wrote a post under the title of The nature of delusions. Included in that post was an essay from George Monbiot he called Are We Bothered? His proposition being, “The more we consume, the less we care about the living planet.”

Part of me hates the way that this blog often touches on pain and negativity but my motivation is simply that doing nothing, ignoring what is so wrong in the world, would be the height of irresponsibility.

All of which is a preamble to another George Monbiot essay. Mr. Monbiot is a powerful writer as his many essays demonstrate. But this latest one from him is one of the most powerful essays in a very long time.

It’s not a comfortable read. But sure as hell, it’s a must read!

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The Impossibility of Growth

May 27, 2014

Why collapse and salvation are hard to distinguish from each other.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th May 2014

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham (1).

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It’s 2.5 billion billion solar systems (2). It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues were miraculously to vanish, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.

Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained (3). But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.

It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and the pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, as the most accessible reserves have been exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition.

On Friday, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable (4), the Ecuadorean government decided that oil drilling would go ahead in the heart of the Yasuni national park (5). It had made an offer to other governments: if they gave it half the value of the oil in that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in the ground. You could see this as blackmail or you could see it as fair trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are rich: why, the government argued, should it leave them untouched without compensation when everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for $3.6bn and received $13m. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company with a colourful record of destruction and spills (6), will now enter one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of rainforest is said to contain more species than exist in the entire continent of North America (7).

The UK oil company Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa’s oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (8); one of the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, of chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain, where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the south-east (9), the government fantasises about turning the leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this end it’s changing the trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to local people (10,11). These new reserves solve nothing. They do not end our hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.

The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.

Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in ten years (12). The trade body Forest Industries tell us that “global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow.” (13) If, in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?

Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don’t need. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fantasies about the colonisation of space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced (14).

As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year’s predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we were miraculously to reduce the consumption of raw materials by 90% we delay the inevitable by just 75 years(15). Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.

The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st Century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7853

2. Grantham expressed this volume as 1057 cubic metres. In his paper We Need To Talk About Growth, Michael Rowan translated this as 2.5 billion billion solar systems. (http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/). This source gives the volume of the solar system (if it is treated as a sphere) at 39,629,013,196,241.7 cubic kilometres, which is roughly 40 x 1021 cubic metres. Multiplied by 2.5 billion billion, this gives 1041 cubic metres.

Since posting this, I’ve received the following clarifications:

From Jacob Bayless:

“… about the volume of the solar system — there is no agreed-upon definition of its diameter, which is why the figures vary wildly. (There are also two definitions of ‘a billion’, which adds to the confusion). Using the radius of Neptune’s orbit, as the farthest ‘planet’ from the sun, gives the 2.5 billion billion figure:

The orbit of Neptune is 4.5 x 10^12 m radius, which yields a 4 x 10^38 cubic m sphere. Multiplying this by 2.5 x 10^18, or “2.5 billion billion”, gives 10^57 cubic m. So that calculation checks out.

The heliopause radius would be another possible way to measure the solar system radius; it’s 4 times as far and thus 64 times the volume.”

From Geoff Briggs:

“Michael Rowan has taken the size of the solar system to be the orbit of Neptune, which is kind of understandable, but the sun’s influence extends a LOT further than that, so his estimate is correspondingly significantly overstated (ie the extra billion).

The 39,629,… cubic km figure from yahoo answers is based on a correct calculation in light years, but then a massive cock-up in the conversion to cubic km. The author seems to have assumed that a light year is about 21,000,000m, which is off by about eight orders of magnitude. 4.2 cubic light years is about 3.6 x 10^39 cubic km (and hence about 3.6 x 10^48 cubic metres).”

From Andrew Bryce:

“Starting volume of Egyptian possessions = 1 m3

after 3000 years volume = 1 x (1.045)^3000

= 2.23 x 10^57 m3

Assume the radius of the solar system is 50 AU (the distance to the Kuiper belt)

1 AU = 1.496 x 10^11 m

radius of the solar system = 50 AU = 7.48 x 10^12 m

volume of solar system = 4/3 x pi x r^3

= 1.75 x 10^39 m3

so the Egyptian possessions would require 2.23 x 10^57 / 1.75 x 10^39 solar systems

= 1.27 x 10^18

= about 1.27 billion billion solar systems

If you consider the radius of the solar system to be 40 AU (about the mid point of the orbit of Pluto), then you would get a figure of about 2.5 billion solar systems.”

But: “if you round off the volume of possessions to exactly 10^57 m3, and you assume the radius of the solar system to be 30 AU (the orbit of Neptune), then you would also get a figure of around 2.5 billion billion solar systems (well, 2.64 billion billion), which might be where the calculation came from. That would be a better definition for the size of the solar system, because it has a neatly defined edge.”

3. EA Wrigley, 2010. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University Press.

4. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/12/western-antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse-has-already-begun-scientists-warn

5. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/ecuador-amazon-yasuni-national-park-oil-drill

6. http://www.entornointeligente.com/articulo/2559574/ECUADOR-Gobierno-concede-licencia-para-la-explotacion-de-dos-campos-del-ITT-23052014

7. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/16/ecuador-approves-yasuni-amazon-oil-drilling

8. http://www.wwf.org.uk/how_you_can_help/virunga/

9. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/fracking-report-billions-barrels-oil-government-cynicism

10. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/fracking/10598473/Fracking-could-be-allowed-under-homes-without-owners-permission.html

11. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/23/fracking-report-billions-barrels-oil-government-cynicism

12. Philippe Sibaud, 2012. Opening Pandora’s Box: The New Wave of Land Grabbing by the Extractive Industries and the Devastating Impact on Earth. The Gaia Foundation. http://www.gaiafoundation.org/opening-pandoras-box

13. http://www.forestindustries.fi/industry/paper_cardboard_converted/paper_pulp/Global-paper-consumption-is-growing-1287.html

14. https://www.globalonenessproject.org/library/articles/space-race-over

15. Michael Rowan, 2014. We Need To Talk About Growth (And we need to do the sums as well.) http://persuademe.com.au/need-talk-growth-need-sums-well/

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Why is there no outcry!

 

The future of food.

Eating oil!

Yesterday’s introduction to today’s essay was predominantly the film made by Rebecca Hosking investigating how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low-energy farm for the future.  Rebecca discovering, unsurprisingly, that nature holds the key.

The film highlighted the degree to which our modern system of food production and distribution is dependent on oil.  I am sure that Jean and I were far from alone in not fully appreciating just how much oil is used in agriculture.  Let’s start with the UK.

Following the oil crisis in 1973, a book was published in 1978 by B.M. Green under the title of Eating Oil (1). In 2005, Norman Church wrote an essay over at the website 321energy.com in which he referred to that book.  Here’s some of what he wrote.

The aim of the book [Eating Oil] was to investigate the extent to which food supply in industrialised countries relied on fossil fuels. In the summer of 2000 the degree of dependence on oil in the UK food system was demonstrated once again when protestors blockaded oil refineries and fuel distribution depots. The fuel crises disrupted the distribution of food and industry leaders warned that their stores would be out of food within days. The lessons of 1973 have not been heeded.

Today the food system is even more reliant on cheap crude oil. Virtually all of the processes in the modern food system are now dependent upon this finite resource, which is nearing its depletion phase.

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The article is a ‘must-read’ for anyone who wants to understand better the approaching crisis and the madness of present behaviours.  Take this, for example (my emphasis):

One indicator of the unsustainability of the contemporary food system is the ratio of energy outputs – the energy content of a food product (calories) – to the energy inputs.

The latter is all the energy consumed in producing, processing, packaging and distributing that product. The energy ratio (energy out/energy in) in agriculture has decreased from being close to 100 for traditional pre-industrial societies to less than 1 in most cases in the present food system, as energy inputs, mainly in the form of fossil fuels, have gradually increased.

However, transport energy consumption is also significant, and if included in these ratios would mean that the ratio would decrease further. For example, when iceberg lettuce is imported to the UK from the USA by plane, the energy ratio is only 0.00786. In other words 127 calories of energy (aviation fuel) are needed to transport 1 calorie of lettuce across the Atlantic. If the energy consumed during lettuce cultivation, packaging, refrigeration, distribution in the UK and shopping by car was included, the energy needed would be even higher. Similarly, 97 calories of transport energy are needed to import 1 calorie of asparagus by plane from Chile, and 66 units of energy are consumed when flying 1 unit of carrot energy from South Africa.

Just how energy inefficient the food system is can be seen in the crazy case of the Swedish tomato ketchup. Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology analysed the production of tomato ketchup (2). The study considered the production of inputs to agriculture, tomato cultivation and conversion to tomato paste (in Italy), the processing and packaging of the paste and other ingredients into tomato ketchup in Sweden and the retail and storage of the final product. All this involved more than 52 transport and process stages.

References:

1: Green, B. M., 1978. Eating Oil – Energy Use in Food Production. Westview Press, Boulder, CO. 1978.
2: Andersson, K. Ohlsson, P and Olsson, P. 1996, Life Cycle Assessment of Tomato Ketchup. The Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology, Gothenburg.

But, surprise, surprise, it’s no different here in the USA!

Dale Allen Pfeiffer
Dale Allen Pfeiffer

Dale Allen Pfeiffer‘s (1) book Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture makes it clear (my emphasis):

The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. Estimates of the net energy balance of agriculture in the United States show that ten calories of hydrocarbon energy are required to produce one calorie of food. Such an imbalance cannot continue in a world of diminishing hydrocarbon resources.

References:

1: Dale Allen Pfeiffer is a geologist and writer from Michigan, U.S. who has investigated and written about energy depletion and potential future resource wars.

Over at The Wolf at the Door British website (1) author Paul Thompson, another Devonian, offered this article about peak oil and farming (and 1 hectare is 2.47 acres):

AGRICULTURE

When we think of the problems associated with peak oil, our first thoughts may turn to transport, electricity, or plastics. The use that tends not to come to mind, yet could be the most devastating of them all, is agriculture.

The Diesel Farm

tractor

Tractor Oil and gas are essential to modern farming. The most obvious use is to run the tractors and machines. Car drivers can switch to public transport, lorries can move their goods (partially, at least) to railways, but the only option for a tractor or combine harvester is a horse or an ox. Clearly modern agriculture could not switch to an animal-power-based system and hope to continue with modern yields. A tractor can plough in an hour an area that a horse would take a day to (0.9–1 hectare). The horse also needs more skill and you have to put aside some of your crop to feed it. Imagine trying to gather the harvests of the vast fields of maize and wheat of the USA using only horse- and human-power.

But diesel is only one of the uses for oil and gas. Another, possibly more important use, is petrochemicals.

Petrochemicals

Nitrogen is one of the most important elements in fertilisers. In the most common method, the Haber-Bosch process, hydrogen is combined with nitrogen to form ammonia. It requires high temperatures and strong atmospheric pressure, therefore a great deal of energy. The nitrogen is taken from the atmosphere while the hydrogen is obtained from natural gas. The process became economical in the 1920s and since then, fertilisers have become indispensable. Worldwide use of commercial fertiliser more than doubled between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

The use of fertilisers allows farmers to grow the same crops each year, rather than rotating (previously farmers planted fields with legumes that restored nitrogen to the soil.)

Oil and gas are also used in the production of many herbicides and pesticides.

References:

1: There is a note from Paul on the home page, “I created this site several years ago and do not have the time any longer to keep it updated. Therefore you will find that the data is only relevant up to around 2006 and some of the links will no longer be correct. However the principles of peak oil still apply and I have left the site online as a useful introduction to the problem that hasn’t gone away.”

Alright! That’s enough to upset anyone!

Thankfully, there are a number of positive moves going on all over the world and tomorrow I will conclude the essay with details of those positive happenings!

In the meantime, think about what you eat!

The future of food – introduction.

How food and carbon-based energy are irresistibly woven together.

Farm-for-Future

Jean and I watched this BBC Nature programme the other evening.  Not directly from the BBC but because it has been uploaded to YouTube and thence was promoted on Top Documentary Films.

The film is 48-minutes long and, frankly, there’s not much point in reading the rest of the post until you have viewed the film!

Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key.

With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family’s wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year’s high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is.

Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.

Nature holds the key!

So, rather than tempt you to read on and not watch the film, that’s all you are getting for today! 😉

Settle yourself down somewhere comfortable and watch the film.

Trust me, it will open your eyes!

My main essay follows tomorrow!

The nature of delusions.

Sometimes the truth isn’t so obvious!

Yesterday, I wrote a post under the title of Running on empty!  I listed just a few recent items that had left me feeling very dispirited.  Trust me, not a familiar place!

I also raised the question ……

All of this is sending out a message. The message that if we are not very, very careful this could be the end-game for human civilisation on this Planet.

But do you know what really puzzles me?

It’s that this message is increasingly one that meets with nods of approval and words of agreement from more and more people that one sees going about one’s normal life.

…… then didn’t expand on what was puzzling me!

Let me come at this again; in full!

But do you know what really puzzles me?  It is the terrible lethargy across so many societies. The lack of any substantial social and political force for change. Especially, when so many scientists involved in climate research are warning we are leaving it dangerously late.

I’m no psychologist; far from it. But I want to recount a true story that gave me an insight into one of my own delusions.  Please stay with me because it does have a message at the end of it! 😉

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Many years ago, I spent 5 years living on a boat in Larnaca in Cyprus.  My boat was a wonderful heavy-displacement ocean-going yacht.  A type known as a Tradewind 33.  Here is a picture of my boat.

Tradewind 33 - Songbird of Kent.
Tradewind 33 – Songbird of Kent.

For years I had devoured all the books written by the great yacht sailors who had sailed the oceans, many of them completing solo circumnavigations of the world.  Part of me wanted to sail the oceans.

Living on a boat close to me was Les Powles.  Many will not have heard of Les but this quiet, softly-spoken man knows a thing or two about solo ocean sailing. As an article in The Guardian newspaper explained (in part):

In the 1980s and 90s a British man called Les Powles sailed three times round the world – always single-handedly, once non-stop. He couldn’t afford a radio transmitter, and on his greatest adventure he didn’t speak to anyone for 329 days. At 84, his ­circumnavigating days are now behind him, but he still lives on his boat, the Solitaire. What’s the ­appeal of sailing, I asked him. “It’s the solitude. When you’re out at sea on your own, there’s no government or bankers to worry about. You’re not ­responsible to anyone but yourself.”

Three times around the world – solo!

Thus getting to know Les was a great inspiration in getting me over the hurdle of can I really do this!  (Les once said to me “the first three days are the worst!”)

Thus it came about that I departed Larnaca and worked my way Westwards along the Mediterranean, eventually arriving in Gibraltar.  After a few days getting ‘Songbird’ ready for my first ocean leg, Gibraltar to the Azores, I took a deep breath and headed West out into the Atlantic Ocean. Frankly, I was a tad too late to be starting out but the thought of spending a Winter in and around Gibraltar was too much to contemplate and, anyway, it was only 8 or 9 days sailing to the Azores; a distance of 1,125 land miles or 980 nautical miles.

Fewer than 48-hours before my estimate of coming into Horta Marina on the Azores island of Faial, Songbird of Kent was struck by an early, fierce Winter gale.  I seem to recall it was touching Force 10 Beaufort Scale (54 – 63 mph or 48 – 55 knots).

Anyway, it just about finished me off: literally as well as psychologically! I was so frightened, so utterly scared that I could think of nothing else other than getting to Horta and never going sailing again.

It revealed my delusion!

It proved that I had been in love with the courageousness of those many ocean sailors that I had read about. In love with the idea of a solo Atlantic crossing and being seen as a courageous hero. But, in truth, utterly in denial about what ocean sailing was really about!

So with the theme of delusion in your head, have a read of a recent post by George Monbiot. The post is called Are We Bothered? It is republished with the kind permission of George.

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Are We Bothered?

May 16, 2014

The more we consume, the less we care about the living planet.

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 9th May 2014

That didn’t take long. The public interest in the state of the natural world stimulated by the winter floods receded almost as quickly as the waters did. A YouGov poll showed that the number of respondents placing the environment among their top three issues of concern rose from 6% in mid-January to 23% in mid-February. By early April – though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just published two massive and horrifying reports – the proportion had fallen back to 11%.

CarbonBrief has plotted the results on this graph:

GM1

Sustaining interest in this great but slow-burning crisis is a challenge no one seems to have mastered. Only when the crisis causes or exacerbates an acute disaster – such as the floods – is there a flicker of anxiety, but that quickly dies away.

Why is it so difficult to persuade people to care about our wonderful planet, the world that gave rise to us and upon which we wholly depend? And why do you encounter a barrage of hostility and denial whenever you attempt it (and not only from the professional liars who are paid by coal and oil and timber companies to sow confusion and channel hatred)?

The first thing to note, in trying to answer this question, is that the rich anglophone countries are anomalous. In this bar chart (copied from the website of the New York Times) you can see how atypical the attitudes of people in the US and the UK are. Because almost everything we read in this country is published in rich, English-speaking nations, we might get the false impression that the world doesn’t care very much.

GM2

This belief is likely to be reinforced by the cherished notion that we lead the world in knowledge, sophistication and compassion. The bar chart puts me in mind of the famous quote perhaps mistakenly attributed to Gandhi. When asked by a journalist during a visit to Britain, “What do you think of Western civilization?”, he’s reputed to have replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

Our erroneous belief that we are more concerned about manmade climate change than the people of other nations informs the sentiment, often voiced by the press and politicians, that there’s no point in acting if the rest of the world won’t play its part. For example, last year the Chancellor, George Osborne, remarked:

“I don’t want us to be the only people out there in front of the rest of the world. I certainly think we shouldn’t be further ahead of our partners in Europe.”

But we’re not “the only people out there in front of the rest of the world.” In fact we’re not in front at all. As this map produced by Oxford University’s Smith School suggests, we are some way behind not only some other rich nations but also a number of countries much poorer than ours.

GM3

As for the US, Australia and Canada, they are ranked among the worst of all: comprehensively failing to limit their massive contribution to a global problem. We justify our foot-dragging with a mistaken premise. Our refusal to stop pumping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is pure selfishness.

Both the map and the bar chart overlap to some degree with the fascinating results of the Greendex survey of consumer attitudes.

For years we’ve been told that people cannot afford to care about the natural world until they become rich; that only economic growth can save the biosphere, that civilisation marches towards enlightenment about our impacts on the living planet. The results suggest the opposite.

As you can see from the following graph, the people consulted in poorer countries feel, on average, much guiltier about their impacts on the natural world than people in rich countries, even though those impacts tend to be smaller. Of the nations surveyed, the people of Germany, the US, Australia and Britain feel the least consumer guilt; the people of India, China, Mexico and Brazil the most.

GM4

The more we consume, the less we feel. And maybe that doesn’t just apply to guilt.

Perhaps that’s the point of our otherwise-pointless hyperconsumption: it smothers feeling. It might also be the effect of the constant bombardment of advertising and marketing. They seek to replace our attachments to people and place with attachments to objects: attachments which the next round of advertising then breaks in the hope of attaching us to a different set of objects.

The richer we are and the more we consume, the more self-centred and careless of the lives of others we appear to become. Even if you somehow put aside the direct, physical impacts of rising consumption, it’s hard to understand how anyone could imagine that economic growth is a formula for protecting the planet.

So what we seem to see here is the turning of a vicious circle. The more harm we do, the less concerned about it we become. And the more hyperconsumerism destroys relationships, communities and the physical fabric of the Earth, the more we try to fill the void in our lives by buying more stuff.

All this is accompanied in the rich anglophone nations with the extreme neoliberalism promoted by both press and politicians, and a great concentration of power in the hands of the financial and fossil fuel sectors, which lobby hard, in the public sphere and in private, to prevent change.

So the perennially low level of concern, which flickers upwards momentarily when disaster strikes, then slumps back into the customary stupor, is an almost inevitable result of a society that has become restructured around shopping, fashion, celebrity and an obsession with money. How we break the circle and wake people out of this dreamworld is the question that all those who love the living planet should address. There will be no easy answers.

http://www.monbiot.com

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Tomorrow I will offer my own reflection on all of this – and finish off the story of me and ocean sailing!

Do animals fall in love?

Opening our minds to a beautiful concept!

One of the better things about my old home country, the United Kingdom, is The Open University.  As Wikipedia explains:

The OU was established in 1969 and the first students enrolled in January 1971. The University administration is based at Walton Hall, Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, but has regional centres in each of its thirteen regions around the United Kingdom. It also has offices and regional examination centres in most other European countries. The university awards undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, as well as non-degree qualifications such as diplomas and certificates or continuing education units.

With more than 250,000 students enrolled, including around 32,000 aged under 25 and more than 50,000 overseas students, it is the largest academic institution in the United Kingdom (and one of the largest in Europe) by student number, and qualifies as one of the world’s largest universities.

For reasons that I am unclear about, I subscribe to the OU’s newsletter.  Thus it was that a few weeks ago, this dropped into my ‘in-box’.

Do animals fall in love?

Do romantic relationships exist in the animal kingdom?

Throughout his lifetime, evolutionist and biologist Charles Darwin researched and wrote about how he felt that love can exist within the animal world. Particularly in his papers ‘The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals’ and ‘Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals’, he explored how animals can display supposed ‘human emotions’ like pleasure, pain, happiness and misery. He investigated how animals could seemingly appear to feel ‘down’ when separated from their companions, and seemed to jump for joy and touch one another in a way similar to a human hug when reunited.

Although monogamy and lifelong pair bonds are generally rare in the animal kingdom, some animals seem to thrive on it. Recent research has shown that Gibbons, who were thought to mate for life, have more complicated relationships, with mates occasionally philandering, and even sometimes dumping a mate, suggesting some similarity to human relationships. Swans also form monogamous pair bonds that last for many years, and occassionally for life. Loyalty to their mates has made them a virtually universal symbol of love. But some researchers believe it isn’t as romantic as it first appears, and that they stay together because spending extra time attracting a new mate has the potential to impact on the otherwise reproductive time.

Darwin’s theories have paved the way for further studies. In this free article, Tim Halliday explores natural selection and evolution in the animal world.

Here is that article.

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Natural Selection and Evolution

Tim Halliday explores natural selection and evolution in the animal world

By: Professor Tim Halliday (Department of Life Sciences, The Open University)*

In the Rules of Life series, and its accompanying CD, Aubrey Manning looks at the behaviour of animals and describes many new discoveries about the way that this is beautifully adapted to meet the challenges which animals face in their daily lives. The scientific study of animal behaviour, or ethology, was founded some 50 years ago by Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. Their most significant contribution was to bring together the study of natural history with an understanding of evolution by natural selection. Since then, the numerous studies that have been made of animal behaviour have revealed that animals do many things that challenge many of the ideas that people had about natural selection 50 years ago. Natural selection theory has developed enormously since that time, largely as the result of animal behaviour studies, and a number of popular misconceptions about evolution have been revealed to be false as a result.

One such misconception is embodied in the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, first coined by Herbert Spencer, and often used to encapsulate the way natural selection works. It is misleading, because ‘survival’ is only part of the story. Evolutionary change comes about because some individuals are more successful in reproduction and so pass on their genes to succeeding generations. As a result, the characteristics that make individuals successful in reproduction become more common in the population. It is thus reproduction that is important in evolution, and survival becomes simply a means to that end.

The importance of this point becomes apparent when we appreciate that, for most animals, reproduction is a very costly and sometimes dangerous activity, as illustrated many times in the series. To engage effectively in reproductive activity requires a great deal of energy and other resources that could otherwise be put towards survival. This is apparent in the common observation that animals show a greatly reduced growth rate, or stop growing altogether, when they reach sexual maturity. The resources that they derive from feeding are diverted from growth to reproduction.

A second common misconception is that natural selection acts ‘for the good of the species’. There are numerous examples of animal behaviour that show that this cannot be the case. For example, African lions live in prides, consisting of several females and their cubs, controlled by a group of two or three males. Other mature males are excluded from living in a pride. From time to time, a coalition of excluded males is formed and they attempt to take over a pride, by attacking and driving away the current pride-holders. If they succeed in doing this, their first act is to kill any cubs in the pride that are still being suckled by their mothers. To kill the young of one’s own species cannot benefit the species. The adaptive value of this behaviour for males is that, deprived of the cubs they have been suckling, the females very quickly come on heat and can conceive cubs fathered by the new pride-holders.

This example illustrates another common misconception about evolution, that, when mating, males and females are acting cooperatively. While it is in the interests of both parents that reproduction is successful, the way that that success comes about is not necessarily the same for the two sexes. For male lions, it is of no reproductive benefit to them to guard females that give birth to cubs fathered by other males. Infanticide is of benefit to them because it ensures that cubs born in the pride are their offspring. Infanticide is costly for females because the considerable time and resources that they have put into producing cubs is wasted. There is thus a conflict between the sexes, even though they have to behave cooperatively if either is to reproduce at all.

The interplay of cooperation and conflict is also apparent in the relationship between parents and offspring. For animals that produce more than one young at a time, it is usually to the advantage of the parent to share food more or less equally among its progeny. For each individual progeny, however, it is to its advantage if it receives more food than its siblings. There is thus a great deal of competition among progeny. This takes a bizarre form in the European Fire Salamander, and in a species of shark described in one of the programmes. In these animals, the young develop within the mother and, as they grow, they eat one another until only one, very large young is left. It may be that producing one offspring at a time is a good strategy from the mother’s point of view, or it could be that she would have higher reproductive success if she produced more; it may be, however that she has no choice in the matter.

The key to understanding evolution by natural selection is to think of it, not in terms of an individual’s survival, but in terms of its effectiveness in passing on its genes, what in the series is referred to as ‘genetic accounting’. Natural selection favours those individuals that pass on the most copies of their genes. This enables us to explain many aspects of animal behaviour that are difficult to explain purely in terms of survival. For example, in many species, particularly among birds, certain adult individuals do not breed themselves, but help other adults to do so, for example by feeding their young. In almost all cases, helpers turn out to be close relatives of the parents they are helping and so they are, in an indirect way, helping to spread those genes that they share with their relatives.

* Tim Halliday is professor of biology at The Open University, where he has worked on newts, toads and frogs since 1977.

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Two photographs that offer my answer to the question: Do animals fall in love?

animallove

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Hazel asleep with her dear friend Cleo. (Hazel to the left.)
Hazel asleep with her dear friend Cleo. (Hazel to the left.)