You may wonder about the title of this post? Stay with me for a moment.
As has been written before on Learning from Dogs, when dogs were living in the wild just three animals had pack roles. The leader of the pack, always a female animal, was the alpha dog. Second in command was the beta dog, always a dominant male, and the third role was the omega or clown dog. The wild dog pack was thought to have consisted, typically, of about 50 animals.
The wisdom of thousands of years showing clearly in Pharaoh’s eyes, our very own beta dog.
As leader of her pack an alpha dog had two primary functions . One was having first choice as to the male dog she was going to mate with – thus demonstrating how women always choose! 😉
Her second important duty was deciding that her pack’s home range was insufficient for the needs of her ‘family’. As wolves still do, wild dogs lived within small, well-defined territories when food was abundant. When food became less abundant then it was time to move to more fertile grounds. As an aside, research in South Africa as to the area requirements for a small pack of African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) shows they require from 65 square kilometers (25 square miles) to 150 sq. km. (58 sq. mi.). (See footnote.)
Dogs, like all wild animals, instinctively live in harmony with nature. So the call from the alpha dog to find a new range didn’t mean they left their old one as a barren disaster area. You can see where this is heading!
Wild dogs were in contact with early man at least 50,000 years ago. (Just reflect for a moment on the length of that relationship between man and dog.) So each specie has had plenty of time to learn from the other.
Thus, as mankind is on the verge of discovering that our existing ‘territory’ is becoming unsustainable for the healthy life of the species, one fundamental learning point from dogs appears to have escaped us: Mankind doesn’t have a new range available to our species.
This preamble came to mind when I recently read a short but powerful essay on Alex Jones’ blog The Liberated Way. The essay was called A global leaky bucket. Alex has very kindly given me permission to republish it.
A global leaky bucket
Global weather extremes will force people to hard choices.
Nature will have the last word in the debate over sustainability.
I write this in despair, it is snowing again here in Colchester UK. I admit envy for those of you who live in California or Hong Kong area, I see your photographs where the seasons always seem to be warm and sunny. The northern Jet Stream refuses to move, Greenland enjoys growing strawberries as the lambs die in the fields of Britain from the winter that refuses to let go.
The extremes of weather are noted in the South of the world as well as the North. Argentina has had the worst floods in decades last week. The cause is that the systems such as the Jet Stream are paralysed in one place, thus everyone suffers flood, drought or winter in excess. Nobody is sure why this paralysis is going on with systems like the Jet Stream, some say it is climate change, the point is that we are experiencing this, and it appears to be more than a temporary issue.
My opinion is that these weather extremes are here to stay for the long duration. One is then left with a harsh reality of does one seek to control the weather or adapt to the weather? How does one control the weather, a chaotic energy system where even a small change can have great consequences? Perhaps adaptation is the better option, but does one know how huge those adaptations will have to be where drought and flood could be lasting decades?
Lets say food, water and energy are all contained in a bucket. We take a jug and scoop out from the bucket what we need. There is a tap that is constantly running filling the bucket with the food, water and energy. We waste those resources so the bucket leaks. We disrupt or destroy the renewal systems in the ecosystems so the tap is no longer running as fast as it should. We are greedy consumers so we take more than we need from the bucket with our jug. How will the bucket look now? Is this a sustainable future to you?
If our global weather extremes continue as they are it will be like a storm rocking the bucket spilling its contents, will our bucket future look even less sustainable? Extreme weather destroys harvests, kills animals, sends already distressed ecosystems into the abyss. What happens when the bucket is so empty that people can no longer enjoy their lifestyle of wasteful excess, or worse that people grow cold, hungry and thirsty? Do they sit there and do nothing but die? Will they fight? Who will fight who? As the bucket contents get ever smaller, who will win in the fighting for what is left?
Copyright (c) Alex Jones 2011-2013.
Colchester has a place in my past as I started and ran a business there between the years of 1978 to 1986. More about that some other day.
Back to Alex’s essay. It strongly resonated with a recent item on Peter Sinclair’s excellent blog Climate Denial Crock of the Week which I will refer to tomorrow.
So I will leave you with this tragic, emotional thought – where, oh where, is our alpha dog?
Footnote: The figures for the ranges of wild dogs were taken from a fascinating paper published by Lindsay, du Toit and Mills that may be read here.
I closed yesterday’s post with this quotation from Carl Sagan, “It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.“
So easy to write. Nay, a thousand times more easy to trot out than to embrace. Even that word embrace is too warm and fuzzy.
I’m sure that the human psyche lives in a bubble of delusion. Clearly, if the level of delusion is abnormal then we can’t function properly as social animals. Just take a moment or two to muse over the ways that you ‘shelter’ from reality. Trust me I don’t exclude myself.
However, there are times when reality with a capital ‘R’ smacks us in the face. Death of a loved one, unanticipated break-up of one’s marriage are two that come to mind. Undoubtedly, there are others.
In yesterday’s post where I wrote of my experiences from reading Guy McPherson’s book, Walking Away from Empire, I freely admitted the struggle of embracing the truth, the Reality of where we are; ‘we’ as in industrialised man.
Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)
Reflect on the relationship that hope has with reality. Aristotle wrote, “Hope is a waking dream” and that comes from over 2,300 years ago!
More recently, the aforementioned Professor wrote of hope:
With respect to the question, I spoke and wrote about hope way back in August 2007, when this website was launched. In that long essay — the bloated, unedited, transcript of a presentation I had delivered a few days earlier — I described hope as follows:
I view hope as the left-brain product of love, analogous to democracy as the product of freedom, or liberty. Notably, Patrick Henry did not say, “Give me democracy or give me death.” Like the rest of the founding fathers, Henry knew that freedom was primary to democracy; without the guiding light of freedom, or liberty, democracy breaks up on the shoals. Love keeps our left brain in check — that’s the message of the world’s religions. But our right-brain love creates the foundation for hope: love for nature, love for our children and grandchildren, love for each other. Without love to light the way, hope breaks up on the shoals.
Staying with Guy McPherson for a tad longer, over on Transition Voice there was an essay from him under the title of Sadly, extinction is no laughing matter.
Picking up on the Carl Sagan quote again (“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.“) McPherson writes:
Many people disagree with Sagan, choosing delusion over reality, believing we can have infinite growth on a finite planet with no consequences for people or other creatures, other life forms, other organisms. The people in this latter group seek hope, and many of them disparage me and my actions for inducing despair.
Finally, though, I’ve concluded that hope is hopeless. As Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, “Hope is the most evil of evils, because it prolongs man’s torment.”
To put Ed Abbey’s spin on it, “Action is the antidote to despair.” So, even though I no longer think my actions matter for humans, I’ll take action.
A worthy pity party
Near-term human extinction is a difficult pill to swallow, as is economic collapse. But ignoring ugly truths does not make them any less true. Despair is an expected and appropriate response to this information. Recognizing, accepting, and moving beyond despair are important subsequent steps.
But first, let’s despair.
Ed Abbey’s idea that action is the antidote to fear reminds me of a recent essay from Alex Jones over at The Liberated Way. (If you haven’t previously come across Alex’s writings trust me you will be inspired!)
That essay was How to change the world published on the 28th February last. Here’s how it opens:
Changes to self acts as ripples of change to the world.
Throw a rock into a pool it creates ripples, eventually the pool grows still again. Like the pool nature will move to a state of harmony if given the chance.
We all know that humanity and this planet suffer many challenges. Many feel they need to change or improve the world. Those people fail to realise that nature knows where the state of harmony is, and is attempting to get to that state of harmony, therefore one has no need to change or improve the world.
The reason those words jumped off the page at me (OK, screen!) was the key message that letting go of what man feels compelled to do and allowing the natural forces on this planet to reign supreme is the answer. The message that we have to go back to the natural way of doing things. Right back to the harmony that early man had with the planet before farming corrupted our values.
Alex’s essay continues:
The problem with the desire to change the world is it becomes a form of control, attempting to force others to do something they have no desire to do. One of the problems of humanity is control, everyone trying to control each other, self and nature, which ends in conflict where nobody but the strongest wins. The problem with control is choice, liberty and creativity is taken away from those being controlled, and there is no opportunity to gain wisdom from mistakes.
I have spent too many years of my life trying to change or improve the world. I won some battles, I lost others. Worse, I became sometimes no better than those I fought against. Often control made the situation worse. I am reminded of the Greek legend of King Sisyphus who was condemned to roll a boulder up a steep hill only to see it roll down again, an activity he was condemned to repeat for all of eternity. Trying to change or improve the world was my equivalent of King Sisyphus.
The answer is to be a ripple of change to the world by doing our own thing. By changing ourselves, by living our dreams, setting an example, we emanate ripples of change into the world. We transform the world by transforming ourselves. Remember that stone that splashed into the pool? We are the stone, our activities in making ourselves happy, healthy and abundant becomes the ripples of change into the world. We force nobody to do anything, since all our efforts are focused on ourselves, we show by example which others may copy. People will follow our example since they see what we do works.
It is hard to let go, but let go we must. Change is inside rippling outwards.
It’s the old adage about change. It first has to start from within. As I warned in yesterday’s post, “When you read this book brace yourself for what you see staring out of the mirror back at you. There will be no room left for delusion.”
Ironically for a post that carries the title of ‘Going beyond the self” going out of oneself is the only way to see reality, to brush away delusion. From which place one can then allow change from within to occur.
I shall close with a quote from one of my favourite authors Aldous Huxley:
“Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”
(Reposted from The Liberated Way with the generous permission of Alex Jones)
Go beyond the appearance and the behaviour to the nature that underpins everything.
The truth of being a cat is relative only to this cat.
Recent events got me thinking about what truth is. I find that nobody has a monopoly on truth, that truth is relative. Take for example the colour red, I see red as red, the bee sees red as black. Truth is the product of self, the bee brain makes red black and my brain red as red; truth in this sense is relative to the beholder of the truth.
God.
Take the example of God, some believe in God, some reject God, some like me sit on the fence as agnostics. Those that believe in God differ on what God is: energy, gravity, a mind, with no mind, in creation, separate from creation. God is one of those ideas that can neither be disproved or proven with any certainty. Truth is relative to the beholder.
Nothing is certain.
Truth then to me is never one conclusion, but can be a diversity of conclusions. Red can be red but can also be black depending on the beholder, thus truth is relative. It is better to say I believe the truth to be, rather than say this is the truth. With the universe composed of visible and hidden variables, always changing and in feedback loops nothing can be claimed with any certainty.
Belief.
Since truth is relative it is better to say that I act and think according to a belief rather than a truth, the same for everyone. When the word belief is mentioned some people choke on it, they believe that the universe is deterministic, that there is only one truth, often the one they believe it to be. It is apparent neither Bee nor I have a monopoly on the truth of what the colour red is, we hold different beliefs of the colour red relative to ourselves.
The hubristic need to monopolise belief.
I see no harm in a world holding a diversity of beliefs. So what if a Native American believes a tree has a spirit, a belief based on animism? Yet to the Christian missionary the Native American is a lost soul to be saved, and to the Atheist the Native American is one to be converted to the progress of modern science. The outsider has this need to force their own beliefs onto the Native American, resulting in widespread suicide, mental illness, drug abuse and alcoholism amongst the people whose belief systems they obliterated. The need of some to westernise Islam or Islam to convert the West sets the scene for a so-called clash of civilisations: violence, hate, fear and anger.
Black swans.
Even in my own empirical and inductive approach to truth, I know I can only draw a probability of truth. I may count 1000 white swans on a lake and conclude the world only has white swans, then one day a black swan appears. I have to be open to the possibility of black swans, which is a position of humility.
Hubris hates diversity of belief.
The individual or group who claims their truth is the only truth is gripped in hubris. Truth is relative, there can be many truths. Hubris follows through to control, the individual or group needs and acts to force their belief upon other people who have a different belief of a truth relative to them. Those inflicted with hubris hate diversity, they only want one truth, that of their own. The horrors of Nazi Germany, or the Crusades or of Vietnam were because a group of people wanted a world based on their own beliefs with all other beliefs eliminated.
Grounding belief like roots of a tree.
A belief should be grounded like a tree has roots that anchors it into the ground, otherwise it moves into fantasy. To ground a belief it is to be tested by asking questions, by looking for observable, experiential or demonstrable evidence of its existence. A belief untested but accepted without question is ignorance, it is opinion.
Follow the common.
When Heraclitus suggests “follow the common”, he means to deal with things based upon their nature: it is common for all ducks to love water; it is common for all energy to flow; it is common for all things to evolve or change through strife. Heraclitus suggests people go beyond appearances and behaviour to the underlying nature of the universe, and in this one grounds belief in the common of reality rather than in the ignorance of opinion.
I must share the feelings of millions of others across the world when I admit to going through periods of quiet despair about where ‘modern man’ has got himself. (I don’t intend to be gender specific!)
It goes way beyond the disbelief at some of the things happening today; way beyond the anger that is generated by so many examples of greed and corruption. It goes to a point where I just want to snuggle down with Jean, curl up with the dogs and kiss the rest of the world good-bye!
The expression that comes to mind is the one about the last person to leave the planet please switch the lights off!
(As if to demonstrate how sensitive dogs are to the feelings of us humans, Cleo just came into the room where I am writing this and laid her head across my left thigh. I stroked her head and then she wandered back to our bed next door – I then took the following photograph)
So what’s feeding my feelings?
Well, as many of you know yesterday and Sunday had posts about saving the Ecuadorian Jaguar and the African Lion. In the case of the former, it’s:
The president of Ecuador claims to stand for indigenous rights and the environment, but he has just come up with a new plan to bring oil speculators in to 4 million hectares of jungle. (That’s 9.9 million acres in old money!)
In the case of the African Lion, it’s:
In the past fifty years, the African lion population declined by as much as 90%. Many of the lion prides that do exist today are so genetically weak from being small and isolated by international borders that they can’t promise a future for African lions ….. two thirds of the African lions killed by trophy hunters end up in the U.S. That’s thousands of lions!
Last Friday I wrote about how community living for wolves and dogs had given those species “group survival and well-being“ that we humans couldn’t even dream about.
I attended a lecture at Essex University Colchester last Wednesday on the plight of indigenous indians in Canada, specifically those in Labrador. The Canadian government has embarked on a scheme to disenfranchise the indians of all their land, wipe out all their rights forever, and place them in perpetual bondage. Underlying this horror was what has happened to the indians themselves, a people tainted with mental illness, alcoholism and high suicide rates.
I asked the lecturer why it is that it appears all indigenous people across the globe share this common trait of high levels of abuse, mental illness, suicide and alcoholism. The answer given was that outsiders desired to force their alien world views upon these people destroying their sense of personal identity. For example many of these people see land as a shared resource, the capitalist ideas of land ownership is at odds with their world view. All Native American problem solving is through talking, and everyone has choice, whereas outsiders prefer to impose solutions and intellectualise with clever words.
Just read that last paragraph carefully again and note “outsiders desired to force their alien world views upon these people destroying their sense of personal identity.”
Back closer to home, the struggles of the North American Indians are well-known.
So no nice, neat solution to this place that I’m in just now other than to put down my pen and let the music from the following two videos wash over me.
If you read this far, thank you for suffering the ramblings of this silly old fart!
Like countless others, when we look back 12 months and recall what we thought 2012 had in store, we now realise that we didn’t have a clue! As the silly expression goes, “I can predict anything except those things that involve the future!”
So repeating the process is stupid; I have no doubt that 2013 will be brim full of surprises. At all levels: personal, local, national and global. But ….. (You knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you!)
But a conversation that I had with Peter McCarthy on the 27th December resonated with me to such a degree that I felt the urge to pen some thoughts. I worked with Peter some years ago at Clevedon Hall, we shared an interest in flying a TB20 and both of us studied for our CAA Instrument Rating. We became good friends.
Clevedon Hall, Somerset, England
So come with me today for a stroll around the grounds of change, possibly an epochal period of change.
Let’s start with what may be the biggest catalyst of change heading our way – our broken political system.
Christine of 350orbust fame published this yesterday.
The view that many western societies are a very long way from being fair is growing. If you want to dig a little deeper into the appalling statistics of the USA, for example, dip into a recent essay written by Charles Hugh Smith that appeared on Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity blog.
It’s a long essay packed full of powerful facts and statistics. Try this one:
6. The assets that generate unearned income are highly concentrated, and as a result so is the unearned income. The top 1% owns twice as much stock-market wealth as the bottom 90%. This income-producing wealth enables the top 1% to act as a financial aristocracy, buying influence and favors from equivalently concentrated political Elites.
Let me go to Charles’ conclusion:
What few dare admit, much less state publicly, is that the Constitutional limits on the financial Aristocracy and the Tyranny of the Majority have failed. This guarantees a future Constitutional crisis as each political class – the financial Aristocracy, the top 24% who pay most of the taxes, the dwindling middle class and the bottom 50% who depend on Federal transfers – will battle for control as the Status Quo collapses under the weight of its unsustainable promises.
H’mmm!
Back to the conversation with Peter. He felt that there was a massive failure of the democratic process in the UK, and by implication in the USA.
Peter continued by saying that many elected politicians, especially at the level of local politics, weren’t smart people. Smart, innovative, entrepreneurial people chose not to go into politics. Those that were elected had too much power and too many vested interests for the good of the societies that they were meant to represent. In the USA the involvement of private money in politics is nothing short of corruption of the highest order; my personal opinion, no less and no more.
In moderation, Churchill’s saying comes to mind. “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”
Let’s move on.
No-one can deny that in so many areas of our lives, the degree of change seems unprecedented. Whether we are speaking of the huge social changes at work, enormous technological changes, such as the way that we communicate with each other, medical practises, and on and on. Then add in the consequences of the change in the Earth’s climate, whether or not one sees this as the outcome of man’s activities and …. well, you get the idea!
Here’s a lovely perspective from Alex Jones who writes the blog, The Liberated Way. Just a few days ago, Alex wrote this:
As hard and gloomy as some of my blog posts on the future of humanity have been, I thought it time to offer good news as to where we are heading. I shall call this the global realignment. Few will disagree that the current activities and ideas of humanity in relation to the environment are unsustainable and point to our self-destruction. History also shows that whenever a crisis occurs traumatic events and the ideas of new thinkers causes a paradigm shift in attitudes and thinking.
Contrary to the fantasy of many people, there will be no celestial champion on a white horse riding forward to save humanity from itself. The change will come from a series of traumatic events and individual thinkers which will plant the seeds of change, which will ripple forward as a tsunami of changes of ideas and attitudes on a global scale.
So much change. So much uncertainty. Such a feeling of being lost in unfamiliar lands.
Or have we been here before?
Have you heard of the Kondratieff Wave?
The Kondratieff Wave (Kondratiev Wave or K-wave) theory is proposing the existence of the extra-long, 50+ years long cycles of growth in the modern market (capitalist) economy. The theory was proposed in 1920s by Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev.
Wikipedia has a good summary available here. A Google search will find much more material, such as this chart:
The Wikipedia entry has a simpler diagram, see below, that shows the four stages of each cycle.
So how to draw this to a close?
In a sense, in a very real sense, there isn’t a close. The future has always been uncertain and as history shows change is the only constant.
Peter concluded that a better society was ahead and hoped that he would live sufficiently long to witness it. That gets my vote!
Happy New Year to you.
Thank you for taking an interest in Learning from Dogs.
Yesterday, I wrote about the fabulous success of the British otter having gone from the crumbling edge of extinction to now being found in every English county.
For something completely different, and I do mean completely, have a read of this item that appeared in the British Guardian newspaper of the 18th August.
Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists
Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report
It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.
Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.
This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity “prepare for actual contact”.
Beneficial encounters ranged from the mere detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for example through the interception of alien broadcasts, to contact with cooperative organisms that help us advance our knowledge and solve global problems such as hunger, poverty and disease.
Another beneficial outcome the authors entertain sees humanity triumph over a more powerful alien aggressor, or even being saved by a second group of ETs. “In these scenarios, humanity benefits not only from the major moral victory of having defeated a daunting rival, but also from the opportunity to reverse-engineer ETI technology,” the authors write.
Other kinds of close encounter may be less rewarding and leave much of human society feeling indifferent towards alien life. The extraterrestrials may be too different from us to communicate with usefully. They might invite humanity to join the “Galactic Club” only for the entry requirements to be too bureaucratic and tedious for humans to bother with. They could even become a nuisance, like the stranded, prawn-like creatures that are kept in a refugee camp in the 2009 South African movie, District 9, the report explains.
The most unappealing outcomes would arise if extraterrestrials caused harm to humanity, even if by accident. While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us, the report adds that people might also suffer from being physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents, humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy uninhabitable.
To bolster humanity’s chances of survival, the researchers call for caution in sending signals into space, and in particular warn against broadcasting information about our biological make-up, which could be used to manufacture weapons that target humans. Instead, any contact with ETs should be limited to mathematical discourse “until we have a better idea of the type of ETI we are dealing with.”
The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.
“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.
“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.
Even if we never make contact with extraterrestrials, the report argues that considering the potential scenarios may help to plot the future path of human civilisation, avoid collapse and achieve long-term survival.
I am bound to say that if Mr Domagal-Goldman and his colleagues believe that spending time and money on the possible outcomes of contact with extraterrestrials is a good idea in these present times then I am minded about those other visitors from outer space who passed Planet Earth by because there were no signs of intelligent life!
Learning from Dogs 