Tag: George Monbiot

Synchronicity of minds, part one.

A collection of essays and ideas that unite in a common theme.

Back in those times before dogs became the domesticated friends of man, the leader of the pack, the alpha female, had two key pack roles.  One of them was having first pick of the males, for mating purposes, and the other was knowing when their territory was no longer conducive to her pack’s interests.  When that happened the ‘boss lady’ was the one to signal that the pack had to find another, more beneficial, homestead.

While mankind is in desperate need of learning so many of the qualities of dogs the one example that is beyond us is finding a new homestead. This planet is the only homestead we have.

This basic and fundamental concept seems to be missing from the minds of leaders and power-brokers.  Missing big time!

Coincidentally, over recent days there have been three essays from three different authors that scream out the madness, to put it nicely, of the way of our world just now. Let me dip into those three essays.

First, to a recent essay from Tom Engelhardt over at TomDispatch.

American Jihad 2014 
The New Fundamentalists 
By Tom Engelhardt

In a 1950s civics textbook of mine, I can remember a Martian landing on Main Street, U.S.A., to be instructed in the glories of our political system.  You know, our tripartite government, checks and balances, miraculous set of rights, and vibrant democracy.  There was, Americans then thought, much to be proud of, and so for that generation of children, many Martians were instructed in the American way of life.  These days, I suspect, not so many.

Still, I wondered just what lessons might be offered to such a Martian crash-landing in Washington as 2014 begins.  Certainly checks, balances, rights, and democracy wouldn’t top any New Year’s list.  Since my childhood, in fact, that tripartite government has grown a fourth part, a national security state that is remarkably unchecked and unbalanced.  In recent times, that labyrinthine structure of intelligence agencies morphing into war-fighting outfits, the U.S. military (with its own secret military, the special operations forces, gestating inside it), and the Department of Homeland Security, a monster conglomeration of agencies that is an actual “defense department,” as well as a vast contingent of weapons makers, contractors, and profiteers bolstered by an army of lobbyists, has never stopped growing.  It has won the undying fealty of Congress, embraced the power of the presidency, made itself into a jobs program for the American people, and been largely free to do as it pleased with almost unlimited taxpayer dollars.

The expansion of Washington’s national security state — let’s call it the NSS — to gargantuan proportions has historically met little opposition.  In the wake of the Edward Snowdenrevelations, however, some resistance has arisen, especially when it comes to the “right” of one part of the NSS to turn the world into a listening post and gather, in particular, American communications of every sort.  The debate about this — invariably framed within the boundaries of whether or not we should have more security or more privacy and how exactly to balance the two — has been reasonably vigorous.  The problem is: it doesn’t begin to get at the real nature of the NSS or the problems it poses.

If I were to instruct that stray Martian lost in the nation’s capital, I might choose another framework entirely for my lesson.  After all, the focus of the NSS, which has like an incubus grown to monumental proportions inside the body of the political system, would seem distinctly monomaniacal, if only we could step outside our normal way of thinking for a moment.  At a cost of nearly a trillion dollars a year, its main global enemy consists of thousands of lightly armed jihadis and wannabe jihadis scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet.  They are capable of causing genuine damage — though far less to the United States than numerous other countries — but not of shaking our way of life.  And yet for the leaders, bureaucrats, corporate cronies, rank and file, and acolytes of the NSS, it’s a focus that can never be intense enough on behalf of a system that can never grow large enough or be well funded enough.

It’s a long, deeply thoughtful essay that deserves your full read.  This is how it closes:

After 12 long years in Afghanistan and an Obama era surge in that country, the latest grim National Intelligence Estimate from the U.S. intelligence community suggests that no matter what Washington now does, the likelihood is that things there will only go from bad enough to far worse.  Years of a drone campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula hasstrengthened that organization; an air intervention in Libya led to chaos, a dead ambassador, and a growing al-Qaeda movement in northern Africa — and so it repetitively goes.

Similarly, intelligence officials brag of terrorist plots — 54 of them! — that have been broken up thanks in whole or in part to the National Security Agency’s metadata sweeps of U.S. phone calls; it also claims that, given the need of secrecy, only four of them can be made public.  (The claims of success on even those four, when examined by journalists, have proved less than impressive.)  Meanwhile, the presidential task force charged with reviewing the NSA revelations, which had access to a far wider range of insider information, came to aneven more startling conclusion: not one instance could be found in which that metadata the NSA was storing in bulk had thwarted a terrorist plot. “Our review,” the panel wrote, “suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks.” (And keep in mind that, based on what we do know about such terror plots, a surprising number of them were planned or sparked or made possible by FBI-inspired plants.)

In fact, claims of success against such plots couldn’t be more faith-based, relying as they generally do on the word of intelligence officials who have proven themselves untrustworthy or on the impossible-to-prove-or-disprove claim that if such a system didn’t exist, far worse would have happened.  That version of a success story is well summarized in the claim that “we didn’t have another 9/11.”

In other words, in bang-for-the-buck practical terms, Washington’s national security state should be viewed as a remarkable failure.  And yet, in faith-based terms, it couldn’t be a greater success.  Its false gods are largely accepted by acclamation and regularly worshiped in Washington and beyond.  As the funding continues to pour in, the NSS has transformed itself into something like a shadow government in that city, while precluding from all serious discussion the possibility of its own future dismantlement or of what could replace it.  It has made other options ephemeral and more immediate dangers than terrorism to the health and wellbeing of Americans seem, at best, secondary.  It has pumped fear into the American soul.  It is a religion of state power.

No Martian could mistake it for anything else.

Tom Engelhardt, a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story.

Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt

Now let’s move from the USA to the UK.  George Monbiot penned an essay on the 6th January about the growing loss of freedoms in my old home country.  He opens:

Dead Zone

January 6, 2014

A shocking new bill threatens to make this country feel like a giant shopping mall.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 7th January 2014

Until the late 19th Century, much of our city space was owned by private landlords. Squares were gated, streets were controlled by turnpikes. The great unwashed, many of whom had been expelled from the countryside by acts of enclosure, were also excluded from desirable parts of town.

Social reformers and democratic movements tore down the barriers, and public space became a right, not a privilege. But social exclusion follows inequality as night follows day, and now, with little public debate, our city centres are again being privatised or semi-privatised. They are being turned by the companies that run them into soulless, cheerless, pasteurised piazzas, in which plastic policemen harry anyone loitering without intent to shop.

Streetlife in these places is reduced to a trance-world of consumerism, of conformity and atomisation, in which nothing unpredictable or disconcerting happens, a world made safe for selling mountains of pointless junk to tranquilised shoppers. Spontaneous gatherings of any other kind – unruly, exuberant, open-ended, oppositional – are banned. Young, homeless and eccentric people are, in the eyes of those upholding this dead-eyed, sanitised version of public order, guilty until proven innocent.

Then a few paragraphs later, the essay continues:

The existing rules are bad enough. Introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, anti-social behavour orders (Asbos) have criminalised an apparently endless range of activities, subjecting thousands – mostly young and poor – to bespoke laws. They have been used to enforce a kind of caste prohibition: personalised rules which prevent the untouchables from intruding into the lives of others.

You get an Asbo for behaving in a manner deemed by a magistrate as likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to other people. Under this injunction, the proscribed behaviour becomes a criminal offence. Asbos have been granted which forbid the carrying of condoms by a prostitute, homeless alcoholics from possessing alcohol in a public place, a soup kitchen from giving food to the poor, a young man from walking down any road other than his own, children from playing football in the street. They were used to ban peaceful protests against the Olympic clearances.

Inevitably, over half the people subject to Asbos break them. As Liberty says, these injunctions “set the young, vulnerable or mentally ill up to fail”, and fast-track them into the criminal justice system. They allow the courts to imprison people for offences which are not otherwise imprisonable. One homeless young man was sentenced to five years in jail for begging: an offence for which no custodial sentence exists. Asbos permit the police and courts to create their own laws and their own penal codes.

All this is about to get much worse. Tomorrow the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill reaches its report stage (close to the end of the process) in the House of Lords. It is remarkable how little fuss has been made about it, and how little we know of what is about to hit us.

The bill would permit injunctions against anyone of 10 or above who “has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person.” It would replace Asbos with Ipnas (Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance), which would not only forbid certain forms of behaviour, but also force the recipient to discharge positive obligations. In other words, they can impose a kind of community service on people who have committed no crime, which could, the law proposes, remain in force for the rest of their lives.

The bill also introduces Public Space Protection Orders, which can prevent either everybody or particular kinds of people from doing certain things in certain places. It creates new dispersal powers, which can be used by the police to exclude people from an area (there is no size limit), whether or not they have done anything wrong.

Please read the original essay in full as well as refer to background links that were included in that original.  I will offer the closing paragraphs.

The Home Office minister, Norman Baker, once a defender of civil liberties, now the architect of the most oppressive bill pushed through any recent parliament, claims that the amendments he offered in December will “reassure people that basic liberties will not be affected”(11). But Liberty describes them as “a little bit of window-dressing: nothing substantial has changed.”(12)

The new injunctions and the new dispersal orders create a system in which the authorities can prevent anyone from doing more or less anything. But they won’t be deployed against anyone. Advertisers, who cause plenty of nuisance and annoyance, have nothing to fear; nor do opera lovers hogging the pavements of Covent Garden. Annoyance and nuisance are what young people cause; they are inflicted by oddballs, the underclass, those who dispute the claims of power.

These laws will be used to stamp out plurality and difference, to douse the exuberance of youth, to pursue children for the crime of being young and together in a public place, to help turn this nation into a money-making monoculture, controlled, homogenised, lifeless, strifeless and bland. For a government which represents the old and the rich, that must sound like paradise.

www.monbiot.com

The last of the three essays was about Europe, being an essay on Naked Capitalism two days ago.

Written by Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain who also publishes the blog Raging Bull-Shit, the essay was originally posted at Testosterone Pit.

Death By A Thousand Cuts: The Silent Assassination Of European Democracy

As is gradually dawning on more and more people across the old continent, the European Union is riddled with fatal flaws and defects. Chief among them is the single currency which, rather than serving as the Union’s springboard to global dominance, could well be its ultimate undoing.

Another huge problem with the EU is its acute lack of transparency. Staggering as it may seem, in the last 20 years the Union has not passed a single audit. Indeed, so opaque is the state of its finances that in 2002 Marta Andreasen, the first ever professional accountant to serve as the Commission’s Chief Accountant, refused to sign off the organization’s 2001 accounts, citing concerns that the EU’s accounting system was “open to fraud.” After taking her concerns public, Andreasen was suspended and then later sacked by the Commission.

However, by far the EU’s greatest — and certainly most dangerous — structural flaw is its gaping democratic deficit. To paraphrase Nigel Farage, the stridently anti-EU British MEP, not only is the EU undemocratic, it is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Yet again, the essay must be read in full.  As with the others, I will include the closing paragraphs:

Of course none of this would be possible if it weren’t for the abject failure of modern nation-state democracy — not only in Europe, but across the globe. As Mair wrote in the first paragraph of his book, although the political parties themselves remain, “they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.”

The European elites have masterfully exploited this crisis of representative democracy and the resultant voter disaffection and apathy to enshrine a new system of rule by bureaucrats, bankers, technocrats and lobbyists (as I reported in Full Steam Ahead For the EU Gravy Train, Brussels is home to the second biggest lobby industry in the world, just behind Washington). If anything, we can expect this trend to accelerate in 2014 as the Eurocrats seek to consolidate their power grab through the imposition of EU-wide banking and fiscal union. Once that’s done, the quest for the holy grail of full-blown political union will begin in earnest.

Whether the EU is able to pull of this ultimate coup de grace in its decades-long coup d’état will depend on two vital factors: its ability to continue preventing economic reality from impacting the financial markets; and the willingness of hundreds of millions of European people to be herded and corralled into a new age of technocracy.

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“the abject failure of modern nation-state democracy — not only in Europe, but across the globe.”

Don Quijones wrote that with a focus on Europe.  But also a recognition that right across the world the rights and safeguards of everyday citizens are being dangerously undermined.  I will return tomorrow with Part Two and an insight into the growing power of those everyday citizens.

 

We must rewild!

It sounds counter-intuitive but it may be the only way forward.

Regular visitors to Learning from Dogs will know that from time to time I refer to the essays of George Monbiot. I was recently browsing Mr. Monbiot’s website and learnt that in July 2013 he gave a TED Talk on Rewilding.  It was called: For more wonder, rewild the world.

Here is that talk.  Do watch it first.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rZzHkpyPkc

Published on Sep 9, 2013

Wolves were once native to the US’ Yellowstone National Park — until hunting wiped them out. But when, in 1995, the wolves began to come back (thanks to an aggressive management program), something interesting happened: the rest of the park began to find a new, more healthful balance. In a bold thought experiment, George Monbiot imagines a wilder world in which humans work to restore the complex, lost natural food chains that once surrounded us.

The talk reminded me that a couple of months ago Patrice Ayme published an essay called REWILDING US.  With Patrice’s permission that essay is republished here in full.

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REWILDING US.

REALITY IS WILD & FEROCIOUS. IGNORING IT IS INHUMAN.

And Presents A Civilizational Risk.

Princeton is freaking out. Flesh devouring aliens are lurking out in the woods, threatening academia’s fragile thoughts. Krugman:

‘From the Princeton Town Topics, which used to be all about (a) parking (b) deer:

A growing population of coyotes in the wooded area bordering the Institute for Advanced Study has motivated the Princeton Animal Control Advisory Committee to recommend that sharpshooters be hired to help handle the problem. “There is a big pack over at the Institute Woods,” officer Johnson said this week. “I’m having a lot of complaints that they follow people around.”‘

You Can’t Always Eat Who You Want

The “Mountain Lion”, is a relative of the Cheetah (erroneously put in the cat family, felis, until last year or so). It has 40 names, in English alone, and is found from the American Arctic to Patagonia, from the sea shore to the high mountains. The weight above is that of the female. Males are heavier (typically up to 100 kilograms). The heaviest puma shot in Arizona was 300 pounds (136 kilos).

The lion/cougar/puma is capable of jumping up twenty feet from a standstill (yes, 6 meters; horizontally, 14 meters). It is capable of killing a grizzly (pumas and ‘golden bears’ were famous for their naturally occurring furious fights to death in California). The feline’s crafty method consisted of jumping on top of the bear, and blinding him with furious pawing. Top speed: 50 mph, 80 km/h. (By the way, there used to be pure cheetahs in North America, recently exterminated by man. I propose to re-install the Asian cheetah in the USA, in a sort of cheetah diplomacy with Iran.)

The philosophical question here is: what is this world all about? Is it about living on our knees, or ruling among animals and wilderness?

Why would Princeton panic about small canids? Because they don’t obey the established order?

Coyotes are totally clever, and not at all dangerous (being so clever). They have very varied voices, when in packs. Going out and shooting them is really primitive, and misses the main point of having nature around. That is: to teach humility, and teach the richness of our planet, visit hearts with emotional diversity, and minds with complexity.

Bears and Mountain Lions are a completely different matter. They are both extremely clever too, but can be very dangerous.

Running and hiking in the Sierra, I got charged by scary bears several times. I view this dangerosity as a plus, but it never loses my mind, and I got scared nearly out my wits more than once.

Once, in a national Park on the coast, I literally ran into two large lions in 30 minutes! Then I got charged by a large elk before he realized I was not a lion. Other high notes were finding a bear cub on the trail in the near vertical mountain side, on the way down, as dusk was coming.

Another high point was the large bear by the trail, who was lying like a bear rug, at 9pm, in an apparent ruse to let me approach until he could jump at his prey, as he did, before realizing that I was not a deer, something that obviously infuriated him. He was torn between making the human into dinner, and the instinct that this would turn badly for him.

In Alaska I was charged by a moose with her progeny… although I did not go as fast as an experienced mountain biker who happened to be there too, the anti-grizzly cannister in my hand emboldened me to succeed in a circuitous move  to proceed towards my distant destination, something facilitated by the calf’s crash into some obstacle, drawing his mother’s concern. Mountain running often requires to proceed, no matter the obstacles in the way, when one is too far to turn around.

Bears know rocks, they have been hurt by them, and so they fear airborn rocks (throw the rock on something noisy, to impress; I had to hit, with a very large rock, a charging bear directly, once; it fled; it was killed by rangers later after he caused a flesh wound to somebody else; some will find all this very violent; well, it is, that’s part of the whole point).

Mountain Lions are better charged and/or, roared or barked at. They fear insane behavior.

In general making lots of noise helps, with bears and lions. I don’t have clever tricks to suggest for bathing safely in the murky icy Pacific. Although I assume that the presence of sea lions bobbing on the surface placidly is indicative of the absence of an obvious white shark prowling… In any case the Pacific is so cold, you will probably die of cardiac arrest before you are devoured.

In Africa, there are about 500,000 elephants. 25,000 to 30,000 are killed, a year, to send the ivory to east Asia (China, Vietnam). So African elephants may disappear. This is beyond tragic, it’s irreplaceable. Elephants understand people’s gestures, without any learning (they apparently learn to use trunk gestures among themselves). One is talking about extremely intelligent animals here. (In contrast, chimpanzees have great difficulties understanding human gestures.)

Intelligence and culture are dominant among apex mammals. That’s what makes them so superior. Washington State had the smart idea to shoot full grown adult male mountain lions. Thus mountain lion society and culture collapsed, uneducated teenagers took over, and incidents with humans exploded (something about the quiet macho society!).

A Japanese specialist of chimpanzee intelligence who happens to have a bear in his lab, found that the bear did not underperform chimpanzees on mental tasks (that’s actually a problem with bears; being so clever, they can be unpredictable, one can never know what they have up their sleeve, like the one who mimicked a bear rug, above, or one who drove a car in Tahoe). A number of social mentally advanced animals (sea mammals, parrots) use advanced languages.

So what are my recommendations? The Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies ought to realize that, if it wants to become really brainy, it ought to give our fellow species a chance. They are part of what make our minds, in full.

Elephants and rhinoceroses used to be all over Europe and North America. They ought to be re-introduced right away, using Indian and African species (rare camels too; later, thanks to genetic engineering, part of those could be replaced by re-engineered ancient species, such as the Mammoth). Lions and leopard-like species ought to be reintroduced too.

It can work: in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is an impressive population of mountain lions.  I had many close calls (in the most recent incident, a few weeks ago, a lion peed an enormous and dreadfully smelling amount on a trail I was making a loop on, obviously to show me he owned the territory, a total wilderness reserve a few miles from Silicon Valley… especially at dusk).

However, the lions are extremely good at avoiding people (although one got killed by police in downtown Berkeley in the wee hours of the morning). They will all be collared in the next ten years, to find out what is going on. With modern technology (collars!) and sophisticated human-animal culture, there is no reason why extremely dangerous, but clever species could not live in reasonable intelligence with humans.

So rewilding is possible. It’s also necessary. Why? So we humans can recover our hearts, and our minds.

Whether we like it or not, we are made for this wild planet. By forgetting how wild it is, by shooting it into submission, we lose track of the fact human life, and civilization itself, are much more fragile than they look.

And thus, by turning our back to the wilds, we lose track of what reality really is. Worse: we never discover all what our minds can be, and how thrilling the universe is. We are actually bad students who refuse to attend the most important school, that taught by reality itself.

Rewilding is necessary, not just to instill a mood conducive to saving the planet, but also to remake us in all we are supposed to be.

Expect Evil, And Don’t Submit.

These are the times when, once again, the plutocratic phenomenon is trying to take over. That’s when the few use the methods of Pluto to terrorize and subjugate the many (to constitute what is variously named an elite, oligarchy, or “nomenklatura“, or aristocracy, that is, a plutocracy).

And how is that possible? Because the many have been made into a blind, stupid, meek herd (I refer to Nietzsche for the condemnation of the herd mentality).

How do we prevent that? Nietzsche advocated the mentality of the “blonde beast“. That meant the lion (and not what the Nazis claimed it was; few were as anti-Nazi as Nietzsche). Why lion? Because lions are domineering. I learned in Africa that one could go a long way with wild lions, as long as one gave them respect, and time to get out of the way. However, disrespecting a lion means death.

Lions don’t accept to live on their knees. When abominable forces from the giant Persian theocratic plutocracy put the tiny Athenian democracy in desperate military situations, Athenians fought like lions. And democracy won.

Yet, 150 years later, when fascist, plutocratic, but apparently not as abominable, Macedonian forces put Athens in a difficult situation, Athenians surrendered. They did not fight like lions. Democracy would not come back to Athens for 23 centuries (and only thanks to the European Union).

We will not defeat plutocracy if we do not rewild ourselves. First: Let there be lions.

***

Patrice Ayme

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Yet something else we need to learn from dogs.

Photograph taken 25th April, 2012.
Photograph taken 25th April, 2012.

The above photograph was taken of young Cleo, just fifteen months old, showing that her innate skills of being in the wild were alive and well, despite thousands of years of dogs being domesticated animals.  Ergo, humans could manage just as well.

A Winter’s Tale.

No, not the Shakespeare version!

Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale in 1623.  The title came to my mind following another tale written slightly more recently; just five days ago to be exact.

It’s a story published by George Monbiot that has a wonderful shape.  When I read it on Christmas Eve it seemed yet another story that Learning from Dogs readers would enjoy.  So, as ever, grateful for Mr. Monbiot’s permission to republish it.  His story is called Unearthed.

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Unearthed

December 23, 2013

A winter’s tale of guns, gold and greed.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th December 2013.

Perhaps I should have been more careful. Last year I decided that every Christmas I would tell a winter’s tale or two(1). Through a long history of doing stupid things, I’ve accumulated a stock of ripping yarns. But I failed to explain myself. Some people interpreted the tale I told last Christmas as making a political point about Travellers I had no intention of suggesting; a point that is in fact the opposite of what I believe(2). So please read what follows as a story and no more: true to the best of my knowledge and memory but without a polemical purpose.

I was told this tale by a gold prospector in the garimpos of Roraima: the illegal mines exacavated among the river gravels in the forests of northern Brazil. He and his friends swore it was true. Though parts of the story must have been filled in later, in the light of what I had seen I found it easy to believe.

To say that the mines were lawless is not quite correct. They stood outside the laws of the state, but had established their own codes, which were informed by power and honour and greed and lust. Every week, thieves were taken into the forest to be shot. Duels were fought on the airstrips, in which men took ten paces, turned and fired: the miners circulated Wild West comics and acted out scenes that might once have been mythical, but there became horribly real.

To illustrate the point, before we get to the tale itself: one evening João, a remarkable man from the north-east of Brazil, who, after leaving home at 14 then spending ten years crossing and recrossing the Amazon on foot, had found work as a minder for two prostitutes, took me and his charges to a bar at the end of the airstrip village in which I was staying. The bar and the strip of dirt were owned by Zé, a man who spent some of his vast earnings on causing trouble: roaming around with his band of pistoleiros, starting fights and roughing people up. Zé, in whose house I was staying (by his choice, not mine) was said to have killed five men, starting with his business partner: by this means he had acquired control of the airstrip, and the extortionate fees for landing and leaving.

The bar was a flimsy shack in which a ghetto blaster was turned up so high that you could scarcely hear the music. Ragged men swayed and lurched and sprawled across the more sober prostitutes. On every table there was a bottle or two of white rum and a revolver. The men who had stayed in their seats drummed their fingers nervously on the tabletops, halfway between their drinks and their guns. The door was shoved open, and Zé and his thugs walked in.

His was at all times an arresting presence: charming, mercurial and terrifying. A machete scar ran from one cheek, over his nose and across the other cheek. He wore a sawn-off denim jacket and two revolvers on his belt. He opened his arms and announced, in a voice loud enough to carry above the music, that he would buy drinks for everyone. Zé moved through the bar, slapping backs and shaking hands, flashing his gold teeth. João’s eyes darted around, watching people’s hands. Bottles of cachaça were passed down from the bar.

Suddenly João shoved me so hard that I almost fell off my chair. He grabbed my arm, managing at the same time to seize the two prostitutes, and propelled us towards the door. As we hurtled out of the bar it erupted in gunfire. Amazingly, only one man was killed: he was dragged onto the airstrip with a hole the size of an apple in his chest. He was one of an estimated 1,700 people murdered, in a community of 40,000, in just six months.

So here’s the story. Two men established a small stake in the mines, in a remote valley some distance from the nearest airstrip. They cut down the trees and began to excavate. They found the digging and hosing and sifting of the gravel exceedingly hard and, though they had discovered very little, they decided to hire two other men to do it for them. They agreed to split any findings equally with the workers. The two hired men dug for four months without success: with high pressure hoses they scoured great pits into which the trees collapsed; they turned the clear waters of the forest stream they excavated red with clay and tailings; they winnowed the gravel through meshed boxes; they dissolved the residues in mercury and burnt it off; but they produced almost nothing. Then they hit one of the richest deposits ever discovered in Roraima: in one day they extracted four kilos.

If you find a lot of gold in the garimpos you keep quiet – very quiet. A single shout of triumph can amount to suicide. You gather it up, hide it in your bag and explain to anyone who asks on your way out that months of work have brought you nothing but disease and misery. But first it must be divided.

The two men who owned the stake began to comprehend, for the first time, the implications of the deal they had done. “We risked our lives to establish this stake. We spent every cent we had – and plenty we didn’t – travelling here, buying the equipment and the diesel, hacking out a clearing in the forest, hiring these men. And now we have to split the gold equally with people who are no more than manual labourers, who would normally be paid a few dollars a day.” They told the two workers that they wanted a special meal that night, and sent them to the nearest airstrip to buy the ingredients.

As the two workers walked they began to ruminate. “We’ve nearly killed ourselves in that pit. We’ve been up before dawn every day and have worked until dusk. We’ve had malaria, foot rot, screw worm, sunstroke, while those two bastards have done nothing but lie in their hammocks shouting instructions. Now we’re expected to give them an equal share of the gold that we and we alone found.” When they reached the store, they bought cachaça, rice, beans, a packet of seasoning and a box of rat poison. They mixed the poison into the seasoning and set off back to the camp. Before they reached it, they were ambushed by the two owners and shot. The owners then picked up the bags and went back to the camp to celebrate over the first hot dinner they had had in weeks.

Some time later a party of men moving through the forest to look for new stakes walked into the camp. They found two skeletons over which vines were already beginning to creep. And four kilos of gold.

www.monbiot. com

References:

1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/26/my-inner-anarchist-lost-out-bourgeois

2. http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/10/as-it-happened/

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gold

Food and health

How less can be so much more.

I came at today’s post from a number of directions.

A few days ago I was catching up with a good friend back in the UK, Peter M.  We hadn’t spoken in a couple of months.  One of the items from my end was mentioning that I had converted to a vegetarian diet, verging on trying to be a vegan.  Jeannie has been a vegetarian for almost her entire life. Having made the change to a vegetarian diet, to my surprise I had gained 12 lbs (5.4 kgs) in the last month.  Peter then mentioned that he, too, had put on 8 kgs before deciding to try and cut back.  Peter and I are of the same age and motivated to stay as fit and healthy as we can.  Anyway, Peter’s route for losing some weight was to commit to the fasting arrangement promoted and recommended by Dr. Michael Mosley – more of this later.

The conversation also reminded me of an essay by George Monbiot back at the end of November: Wrong About Being Wrong. Mr. Monbiot wrote of his mind changes about being vegetarian.  With his permission, here is that essay.

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Wrong About Being Wrong

November 27, 2013

The argument seems, once more, decisively to favour veganism.

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 27th November 2013

He did it quietly, and the decision is the better for that: Al Gore, according to reports in the US press, has gone vegan.

Certain things could be said about other aspects of his lifestyle: his enormous houses and occasional use of private jets, for example. While we can’t demand that everyone who espouses green causes should live like a Jain monk, I think we can ask that they don’t live like Al Gore. He’s a brilliant campaigner, but I find the disjunction between the restraint he advocates and the size of his ecological footprint disorienting.

So saying, if he is managing to sustain his vegan diet, in this respect he puts most of us to shame. I tried it for 18 months and almost faded away. I lost two stone, went as white as a washbasin and could scarcely concentrate. I think I managed the diet badly; some people appear to thrive on it. Once, after I had been unnecessarily rude about vegans and their state of health (prompted no doubt by my own failure), I was invited to test my views in an unconventional debate with a vegan cage fighter. It was a kind invitation, but unfortunately I had a subsequent engagement.

In 2010, after reading a fascinating book by Simon Fairlie, a fair part of which was devoted to attacking my views, I wrote a column in which I maintained that I’d been wrong to claim that veganism is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice issue. Diverting grain that could have fed human beings to livestock, I’d argued, is grotesque when 800 million go hungry.

Fairlie does not dispute this, and provides many examples of the madness of the current livestock production system. But he points out that plenty of meat can be produced from feed which humans cannot eat, by sustaining pigs on waste and grazing cattle and sheep where crops can’t grow. I was swayed by his argument. But now I find myself becoming unswayed. In the spirit of unceasing self-flagellation I think I might have been wrong about being wrong.

Part of the problem is that while livestock could be fed on waste and rangelands, ever less of the meat we eat in the rich nations is produced this way. Over the past week, a row has erupted between chefs and pig farmers over the issue of swill. The chefs point out – as Simon Fairlie does – that it is ridiculous to feed pigs on soya grown at vast environmental cost in the Amazon instead of allowing them to dispose of our mountain of waste food. Feeding pigs on swill has been forbidden since the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001.

The farmers respond that the risks of spreading disease are too great and that pigs fed on waste grow more slowly than pigs fed on soya. I side with the chefs: I believe that a society capable of identifying the Higgs boson should be able to sterilise waste food. But I suspect that they’re not going to win: the industry and its regulators are firmly against them.

I should have seen it coming, but I watched in horror as the meat industry used my article to justify the consumption of all meat, however it was produced, rather than just the meat raised on food that humans can’t eat. A potential for good is used to justify harm.

While researching my book Feral, I also came to see extensive livestock rearing as a lot less benign than I – or Simon Fairlie – had assumed. The damage done to biodiversity, to water catchments and carbon stores by sheep and cattle grazing in places unsuitable for arable farming (which means, by and large, the hills) is out of all proportion to the amount of meat produced. Wasteful and destructive as feeding grain to livestock is, ranching appears to be even worse.

The belief that there is no conflict between this farming and arable production also seems to be unfounded: by preventing the growth of trees and other deep vegetation in the hills and by compacting the soil, grazing animals cause a cycle of flash floods and drought, sporadically drowning good land downstream and reducing the supply of irrigation water.

So can I follow Al Gore, and do it better than I did before? Well I intend at least to keep cutting my consumption of animal products, and to see how far I can go. It’s not easy, especially for a person as greedy and impetuous as I am, but there has to be a way.

http://www.monbiot.com

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Back to the conversation with Peter M. about fasting.  He spoke enthusiastically about Dr. Mosley who one quickly discovers,

Dr. Michael Mosley.
Dr. Michael Mosley.

Michael J. Mosley (born 22 March 1957) is a British journalist, medical doctor, producer and TV presenter. He is probably best known as a television presenter of programmes on biology and medicine, particularly his series on the workings of the human body, Inside the Human Body and his regular appearances as the friendly medic on The One Show.

He was interviewed by Steve Wright of BBC Radio 2 back in January, 2012 and that interview is on YouTube:

That BBC Horizon programme is no longer available to watch but a 4-minute extract may be seen here:

Inevitably, Dr. Mosley has a website Fast Diet that is packed full of valuable information.

So just as soon as we have the water back to the house and I can have a long, hot shower I intend to adopt the 5:2 diet.

Patterns and ripples.

It’s not just the climate change that is unsustainable!

Early in yesterday’s post I wrote:

My post last Monday, The lure of patterns, appears to have resonated far and wide.  In the sense of many echoes reinforcing the perilous nature of our present times and the desperately uncertain decades ahead.  Tomorrow I shall be writing specifically about those echoes.

Those echoes, as I chose to call them, were kicked off by a recent item on the blog Economic Populist.  The item was called Maps of Economic Disaster and had some sickening information.  Such as:

Today 15% of Americans live in poverty.  Below is a county map showing the previous year’s poverty rate and we see once again the South has high concentrations.

povertymap

People are living on the edge.  People living in liquid asset poverty is a whopping 43.9%.  This means 132.1 million people lack the savings to cover basic expenses for three months if they lose their job, have a medical emergency or some other sort of crisis.  The below map** breaks down that percentage state by state.  Pretty much half the country is living on the edge, paycheck to paycheck.

** I’ve not included that map but it may be seen here.  However, I did want to republish the closing map.

Finally, the next map shows how income inequality has grown in United States over time.  The gini index is a measure of income inequality, the higher then index gets, the worse income inequality is. If there is ever a map which shows the the destruction of the U.S. middle class, it is this one.

[N.B. The following map is an automated GIF so just left-click on it to see the sequence.  That sequence is essentially a coloured graphical image of each year, from 1977 through to 2012.  Don’t struggle with it.  All you have to note are the changing colours.  More colours towards the green end of the spectrum indicate a worsening gini index, i.e. a worsening measure of income inequality. ]

Gini map

America is clearly in dire straights and the above maps it all out.  Why then has this government, this Congress not put wages and jobs as jobs #1 is a good question.  Why America hasn’t outright revolted, demanding this government do so is a better one.

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George Monbiot.
George Monbiot.

Let me now turn to George Monbiot, a British writer known for his environmental and political activism.  WikiPedia describes Mr. Monbiot, in part, as:

He lives in Machynlleth, Wales, writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000) and Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice (2008). He is the founder of The Land is Ours, a peaceful campaign for the right of access to the countryside and its resources in the United Kingdom.

On his own website, he offers us this:

Here are some of the things I love: my family and friends, salt marshes, arguments, chalk streams, Russian literature, kayaking among dolphins, diversity of all kinds, rockpools, heritage apples, woods, fishing, swimming in the sea, gazpacho, ponds and ditches, growing vegetables, insects, pruning, forgotten corners, fossils, goldfinches, etymology, Bill Hicks, ruins, Shakespeare, landscape history, palaeoecology, Gavin and Stacey and Father Ted.

Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency.

Here is what I fear: other people’s cowardice.

There was a recent essay concerning the UK’s energy strategy posted by George Monbiot published in the Guardian on the 22nd October.  It is also on his website.

The essay opens, thus [my emphasis]:

Fiscal Meltdown

The government is betting the farm on a nuclear technology that might soon look as hip as the traction engine.

Seven years ago, I collected all the available cost estimates for nuclear power. The US Nuclear Energy Institute suggested a penny a kilowatt hour. The Royal Academy of Engineering confidently predicted 2.3p. The British government announced that in 2020 the price would be between 3 and 4p. The New Economics Foundation guessed that it could be anywhere between 3.4 and 8.3p. 8.3 pence was so far beyond what anyone else forecast that I treated it as scarcely credible. It falls a penny short of the price now agreed by the British government.

Mr. Monbiot’s essay concludes:

An estimate endorsed by the chief scientific adviser at the government’s energy department suggests that, if integral fast reactors were deployed, the UK’s stockpile of nuclear waste could be used to generate enough low-carbon energy to meet all UK demand for 500 years. These reactors would keep recycling the waste until hardly any remained: solving three huge problems – energy supply, nuclear waste and climate change – at once. Thorium reactors use an element that’s already extracted in large quantities as an unwanted by-product of other mining industries. They recycle their own waste, leaving almost nothing behind.

To build a plant at Hinkley Point which will still require uranium mining and still produce nuclear waste in 2063 is to commit to 20th-Century technologies through most of the 21st. In 2011 GE Hitachi offered to build a fast reactor to start generating electricity from waste plutonium and (unlike the Hinkley developers) to carry the cost if the project failed. I phoned the government on Monday morning to ask what happened to this proposal. I’m still waiting for an answer.

That global race the prime minister keeps talking about? He plainly intends to lose.

NB. I edited out the links to a comprehensive set of references to make the essay easier to read off the screen.  But all the facts reported by Mr. Monbiot may be seen here.

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Just two more or less random pieces of writing that have graced my ‘in-box’. Nothing scientific about my selection; just the sense that they are representative of the reams and reams of articles, essays and reports coming in on an almost daily basis from right across the world showing an ever-increasing credibility gap between the peoples of many nations and those who purport to serve those peoples in their respective Governments.

Frankly, I can’t even imagine how or when we will ‘transition’ out of this present period.  But one thing I am sure about. This schism between us, the people, and those who govern us is unsustainable!

Fascinating times! (I think!)

Need to go and hug a dog!

Come here, Hazel! I need some loving!
Come here, Hazel! I need some loving!

Lies, damn lies, and politicians!

A blatant example of what is so wrong with these present times.

Yesterday, in my post, A return to integrity, I offered up the hope:

Each of us, whoever you are, for the sake of your children and for all of the children in the world, embrace today the qualities, the values of Nature.

Love, Honesty, Loyalty, Trust, Openness, Faithfulness, Forgiveness, Affection.

Now if the shenanigans going on over here in my home country aren’t bad enough, then a recent essay from George Monbiot about the UK’s Department of Environment (DOE) really takes the cake.  The essay is called Age of Unreason, published in the UK Guardian newspaper, and for obvious copyright reasons, I can only offer limited extracts.  This is how the essay opens:

The governments of Britain, Canada and Australia are trying to stamp out scientific dissent.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1st Ooctober 2013

It’s as clear and chilling a statement of intent as you’re likely to read. Scientists should be “the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena.”(1) Vladimir Putin? Kim Jong-un? No, Professor Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser at the UK’s department for environment.

Boyd’s doctrine is a neat distillation of government policy in Britain, Canada and Australia. These governments have suppressed or misrepresented inconvenient findings on climate change, pollution, pesticides, fisheries and wildlife. They have shut down programmes which produce unwelcome findings and sought to muzzle scientists. This is a modern version of Soviet Lysenkoism: crushing academic dissent on behalf of bad science and corporate power(2).

Mr. Monbiot offers a very convincing argument to show how Professor Ian Boyd used poor scientific data to justify the culling of British badgers and how Boyd’s boss, the UK’s Environment Secretary Owen Paterson, is playing down the dangers of global warming – even suggesting the process had its advantages. George Monbiot goes on to show how that aforementioned Department has claimed, “that its field trials of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees showed that “effects on bees do not occur under normal circumstances”! [my italics].

Oh, and that there was an attempt to cull British buzzards to enable the rich and famous to ‘enjoy’ better pheasant shoots!

And more!  All very properly documented with footnotes.

Mr. Monbiot’s essay closes thus:

To be reasonable, when a government is manipulating and misrepresenting scientific findings, is to dissent. To be reasonable, when it is helping to destroy human life and the natural world, is to dissent. As Julien Benda argued in La Trahison des Clercs, democracy and civilisation depend on intellectuals resisting conformity and power(28).

A world in which scientists speak only through their minders and in which dissent is considered the antithesis of reason is a world shorn of meaningful democratic choices. You can judge a government by its treatment of inconvenient facts and the people who expose them. This one does not emerge well.

snarling-dog-e1360684279321
It’s enough to make a dog very angry!

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Please do go across and read the essay in full because Mr. Monbiot is a journalist whom one can trust.  In stark contrast to so many that purport to be governing on our behalf.

As an Englishman grateful to have the right to live in this fair country, it pains me to see what is happening to both my old country and my new one.  When I was granted my visa, my fiancee visa, from the US Embassy in London I was given a small booklet containing the text of the US Constitution.  Page One is open in front of me at this moment:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Enough said!

Our broken ways.

Our many broken ways!

Introspection warning! Long rant from me!

On the 21st., I published a post Be in peace this day! It was noting this year’s International Peace Day.  One of the comments left by Patrice Ayme, in response to an earlier comment from Alex Jones, was this:

Alex: I read your message, and I approve it. Very well put. As Lord Keynes said: ”In the end, we are all dead.” Death seems pretty violent to me. Yet, one can live with it, and embrace it, because, as there is no choice, we may as well.

War is not anymore a problem than peace is. What matters most is the harmony of the society with the environment, not strife within. Plutocrats have unbalanced the environment, so they should be reduced, and that means war, because peace certainly will not reduce them.

Force is the truth of man. Everything else is delusion, even the vegetarian style.

To which I replied:

Patrice, as much as I deeply respect your intellect, I fundamentally am at odds with the sentiments you express. But rather than hide behind a short reply that few will read and even fewer take notice of, I’m going to write a post exploring my reactions in detail. As always, your comments are welcomed.

This, then, is that post.

But where oh where to start?  Perhaps by me setting out this general premise.

Wherever one looks, it seems there are examples of madness bordering on the criminally insane.

In so many ways and at so many levels we are running the very real risk that by 2050 the end of this present era of human civilisation by the end of the century will be unavoidable.  Ergo: Born after 1980? Then brace yourself for the end times.

The only solution is to adopt the core values of humanity.  Very soon!

So on to a few examples of the present madness (and I would be the first to admit that I am, perhaps prejudicially, inclined to see the darkness of our present times).

First: Climate Change

The recent IPCC report made it clear that climate change is most likely a result of man’s activities on this planet.  As the summary for policy makers says (selected extracts):

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.

and

Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.

and [my emboldening]

Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes (Figure SPM.6 and Table SPM.1). This evidence for human influence has grown since AR4. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.

George Monbiot in his blog on The Guardian newspaper, wrote:

Former Irish President, Mary Robinson.
Former Irish President, Mary Robinson.

But denial is only part of the problem. More significant is the behaviour of powerful people who claim to accept the evidence. This week the former Irish president Mary Robinson added her voice to a call that some of us have been making for years: the only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Press any minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another, they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it.

As if to mark the publication of the new report, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has now plastered a giant poster across its ground-floor windows: “UK oil and gas: Energising Britain. £13.5bn is being invested in recovering UK oil and gas this year, more than any other industrial sector.”

The message couldn’t have been clearer if it had said “up yours”. It is an example of the way in which all governments collaborate in the disaster they publicly bemoan. They sagely agree with the need to do something to avert the catastrophe the panel foresees, while promoting the industries that cause it.

It doesn’t matter how many windmills or solar panels or nuclear plants you build if you are not simultaneously retiring fossil fuel production. We need a global programme whose purpose is to leave most coal and oil and gas reserves in the ground, while developing new sources of power and reducing the amazing amount of energy we waste.

But, far from doing so, governments everywhere are still seeking to squeeze every drop out of their own reserves, while trying to secure access to other people’s. As more accessible reservoirs are emptied, energy companies exploit the remotest parts of the planet, bribing and bullying governments to allow them to break open unexploited places: from the deep ocean to the melting Arctic.

And the governments who let them do it weep sticky black tears over the state of the planet.

The BBC News website published some reactions from notable people.  Take this one:

Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester

What has changed significantly since the last report is that we have pumped an additional 200 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Annual emissions are now 60% higher than at the time of the first report in 1990 and atmospheric CO2 levels are the highest they have been for over two million years.

So what are we doing in the UK to help reverse this reckless growth in emissions? Record levels of investment in North Sea oil, tax breaks for shale gas, investment in oil from tar sands and companies preparing to drill beneath the Arctic.

Against this backdrop, the UK Treasury is pushing for over 30 new gas power stations, whilst the government supports further airport expansion and has dropped its 2030 decarbonisation target – all this alongside beleaguered plans for a few wind farms and weak energy efficiency measures. Governments, businesses and high-emitting individuals around the world now face a stark choice: to reduce emissions in line with the clear message of the IPCC report, or continue with their carbon-profligate behaviour at the expense of both climate-vulnerable communities and future generations.

OK, let’s move to another example of our collective madness.

Second: The way we treat the natural wildlife.

Last Thursday, the New York Times published an item about a recent report confirming the terrible cost to our wildlife of fragmenting their habitat.  Here are the opening paragraphs, including the leading photograph in that NYT piece.

In Fragmented Forests, Rapid Mammal Extinctions

27zimmer-articleLarge-1
An isolated forest in the Chiew Larn reservoir. A Thai government project to supply hydroelectric power to the area transformed 150 forested hilltops into islands. ANTONY LYNAM
By CARL ZIMMER
September 26, 2013

In 1987, the government of Thailand launched a huge, unplanned experiment. They built a dam across the Khlong Saeng river, creating a 60-square-mile reservoir. As the Chiew Larn reservoir rose, it drowned the river valley, transforming 150 forested hilltops into islands, each with its own isolated menagerie of wildlife.

Conservation biologists have long known that fragmenting wilderness can put species at risk of extinction. But it’s been hard to gauge how long it takes for those species to disappear. Chiew Larn has given biologists the opportunity to measure the speed of mammal extinctions. “It’s a rare thing to come by in ecological studies,” said Luke Gibson, a biologist at the National University of Singapore.

Over two decades, Dr. Gibson and his colleagues have tracked the diversity of mammals on the islands. In Friday’s issue of the journal Science, they report that the extinctions have turned out to be distressingly fast.

“Our results should be a warning,” said Dr. Gibson. “This is the trend that the world is going in.”

On a similar theme, many will recall my post back on the 19th, Pity the bees; pity us when I drew attention to the drastic reduction in the numbers of wild bees, including the quote  “the vanishing honeybee could be the herald of a permanently diminished planet.“

Guard their future - and ours!
Guard their future – and ours!

Third: Money and power.

Again from The New York Times but this time an essay by Paul Krugman.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted

By 

Published: September 26, 2013

Robert Benmosche, the chief executive of the American International Group, said something stupid the other day. And we should be glad, because his comments help highlight an important but rarely discussed cost of extreme income inequality — namely, the rise of a small but powerful group of what can only be called sociopaths.

For those who don’t recall, A.I.G. is a giant insurance company that played a crucial role in creating the global economic crisis, exploiting loopholes in financial regulation to sell vast numbers of debt guarantees that it had no way to honor. Five years ago, U.S. authorities, fearing that A.I.G.’s collapse might destabilize the whole financial system, stepped in with a huge bailout. But even the policy makers felt ill used — for example, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, later testified that no other episode in the crisis made him so angry.

And it got worse. For a time, A.I.G. was essentially a ward of the federal government, which owned the bulk of its stock, yet it continued paying large executive bonuses. There was, understandably, much public furor.

So here’s what Mr. Benmosche did in an interview with The Wall Street Journal: He compared the uproar over bonuses to lynchings in the Deep South — the real kind, involving murder — and declared that the bonus backlash was “just as bad and just as wrong.”

OK, that’s enough ‘copying’ from me so please go and read more about the plight of those poor billionaires.  But if the NYT and Paul Krugman will forgive me, here’s the paragraph towards the end of the Krugman essay that makes me sick [my emboldening]:

The thing is, by and large, the wealthy have gotten their wish. Wall Street was bailed out, while workers and homeowners weren’t. Our so-called recovery has done nothing much for ordinary workers, but incomes at the top have soared, with almost all the gains from 2009 to 2012 going to the top 1 percent, and almost a third going to the top 0.01 percent — that is, people with incomes over $10 million.

(Patrice Ayme has a parallel essay over at his blog.)

Staying with the struggles of our billionaires for a moment longer, try the recent report on Bloomberg about the recent Monaco Yacht Show that included this:

As the yacht size has stretched — this year saw the launch of a record-holding 590-footer called the Azzam — so has the list of distractions onboard. Soaking in a jacuzzi, shooting hoops on a floating court or playing a baby grand Steinway piano no longer cut it.

“There is a change in attitude of super-yacht owners,” said Bert Houtman, founder and chairman of the Netherlands-based U-Boat Worx, surveying two of his submarine models on display quai-side in Monaco. “They’re fed up with drinking white wine and riding jet skis so they’re looking for another thrill.”

later including:

“A lot of guys who are billionaires have profound financial accomplishments and are now concerned about their legacy,” said Deppe. (Marc Deppe, Triton Subs vice-president of sales and marketing.)

It’s enough to make one weep!

Fourth: Politicians and governments not serving their peoples.

Making this my last example.  Simply because a recent item published on Naked Capitalism had so much detail on what is wrong with our leaders; in this particular case regarding the American Affordable Care Act (ACA).  This is how the article opens:

ObamaCare’s shameful and lethal three-year history — and future

Many people, and especially Obama supporters, characterize the ACA (ObamaCare) as “just starting” or a “work in progress” and then go on to urge that the program will have “glitches,” needs to be “tweaked,” isn’t yet “fully implemented,” and so forth. We think it’s a mistake to see the ACA as just starting. We also think it’s a mistake not to weigh the costs of ObamaCare’s stately three-year progress toward partial coverage for the the American people, and just as important to weigh the opportunity costs.

The ACA was passed in March 2010, incorporating many features designed to meet Republican objections to the Bill. Yet, in the end, Democrats never put Medicare for All on the table, abandoned the public option and many other features, and did not get a single Republican vote in either chamber.

The Democrats even saw to it that the bill was fiscally neutral over a 10 year projection at a time when the tanked economy needed more deficit spending and the jobs that would have brought. And to do that, they postponed implementation of most of the bill for more than three years, until now, allowing people to go without care, to die, to divorce, and to lose their homes or go bankrupt due to medical bills, just so they could argue that the bill was fiscally neutral. In gauging the record of the bill, these 3 to 3.5 years of waiting for its implementation and their real costs to the people of the United States must be taken into account.

It also must be taken into account that in the year before the ACA was passed there were some 45 million Americans uninsured, and they were dying at the rate of 1,000 more for every million than in the general population. That is, lack of insurance was causing more than 45,000 fatalities per year. (The cost of those deaths in money terms: $1.38 trillion).

This is how the article closes [my emphasis]:

That’s what we’ve lost by not trying to pass HR 676 and by trying instead to take a bipartisan insurance company conciliation approach to passing the ACA. This post, gives the total for the anticipated opportunity cost by comparing Romney’s 2012 alternative to the ACA, the baseline of no reform at all, the ACA, and Medicare for All over the period 2010 – 2022. Bottom line: the ACA is projected to cost 286,500 lives through 2022, assuming no change. That’s a lot better than the baseline and a lot better than Romney’s 2012 alternative. But it’s still terrible compared to what we might have had if we had a President who really represented people rather than Wall Street.

What if an effort to pass HR 676 had failed in 2009 because too many Democrats in the Senate defected to pass it? Well, I think this would have been very unlikely with the very large Democratic majority and the popularity of the president at its height, but even if it would have failed, then the Democrats could still have compromised with members of their party to pass enhanced Medicare for All for everyone under 26 and over 45, or under 26 and over 50, or whatever compromise would have moved those wayward Democrats up to the 50 vote mark. Such a compromise bill would still have lowered the fatalities substantially by providing insurance for those who needed it most and by enhancing the Medicare program for seniors (full coverage and no co-pays). It would also have been something Democrats could have run on and built upon in each successive election year, rather than having to defend the sorry ACA with its package of inadequate goodies, silly mandate, IRS enforcement, high cost for lousy coverage, and Rube Goldberg eligibility determination. Again there would have been no Tea Party, because Tea Partiers like Medicare, and there would have been no Republican nationwide sweep in 2010, no gerrymandering, no voter suppression, no anti-woman bills, and none of all the rest of the nonsense we’ve seen because the Democrats did what they did.

Earlier in the post I offered a general premise that included, “Wherever one seems to look there are examples of madness bordering on the criminally insane.”

To my mind, these examples support that premise. Trust me, there are countless more examples.

So what to do?  Because I am fundamentally at odds with the sentiment expressed by Patrice Ayme; “Force is the truth of man. Everything else is delusion, even the vegetarian style.”

The answer takes us to tomorrow’s post, A return to integrity.

And, yes, it does mention dogs!  Rather a lot as it happens!

The future is wild.

Fascinating presentation by George Monbiot.

I have long been a fan of George Monbiot as evidenced by a number of posts on Learning from Dogs from the said gentleman.  The last one was The Great Unmentionable, and before that DDT all over again?

George Monbiot is a man of passion about the planet we all live on and securing a sustainable future for us all.

So settle down comfortably for 15 minutes and listen to him.  You will understand both his passion and the vital message he offers us.

Published on Sep 9, 2013

Wolves were once native to the US’ Yellowstone National Park — until hunting wiped them out. But when, in 1995, the wolves began to come back (thanks to an aggressive management program), something interesting happened: the rest of the park began to find a new, more healthful balance. In a bold thought experiment, George Monbiot imagines a wilder world in which humans work to restore the complex, lost natural food chains that once surrounded us.

If you would like more of Mr. Monbiot’s writings, then here’s his website.

Healing our planet, person by person.

Jon Lavin reflects on the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.

Last week, I republished a number of Jon’s posts from way back and was delighted at how many of you enjoyed his writings.  Jon and his family are taking a well-earned vacation which clearly includes reading posts on Learning from Dogs: Poor soul!  This was made clear from an email Jon sent me yesterday afternoon.

Jon had read the essay from George Monbiot that was published three days ago under my post title of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) all over again?  So hopefully, this introduction puts Jon’s email into proper context.  The subject title of Jon’s email was DDT 2.0.

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Hi Paul!

Hope you guys are well on your lovely farm! We’re in sunny Falmouth for the week staying in our Ben’s student flat slowly working our way through his food supplies.

In my current chilled state, I read your reproduced article and I got to thinking; so you might pick out the odd bit of coherence in these ramblings!

I am reminded of David Hawkins’ ‘Scale of Human Consciousness’. If 80 percent of us are below the level of Integrity, and therefore truth, and the average level of integrity in business is below this level, it is no wonder that money comes before the greater good. Think of the banking crisis as a good example.

I guess we move forward at the speed of the slowest. We certainly seem to learn through the pain and suffering of our own making. I can understand now why this world is perfect for our development and advancement. We are exposed to every opportunity to better ourselves and not everyone has enough of what it takes to hit the mark. We just have to keep going until we get it, even if this means pain and suffering.

The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism talk about suffering and how we create it.The First Noble Truth states that life is suffering. The 2nd Noble Truth talks about our craving for things: money, possessions, etc.; cravings that create suffering. The Third Noble Truth talks of a cure and a way out of hopelessness and suffering and finally, the Fourth Noble Truth gives guidance on walking the path out of suffering.

So, although your article is awful, it is to be expected that we keep being attracted to these sorts of schemes and are attracted to money. We have to learn through pain and suffering until we get it right.

People frequently ask, “What can I do to help?”. Unfortunately or fortunately, there is a way out! The best way to help is to work on ourselves! Sounds a bit silly but by working and developing ourselves we raise the overall level of human consciousness. This means that when companies and individuals attempt to do things that are not integrous, there is less likelihood of them being successful.

Heady stuff really and I wouldn’t describe myself as Buddhist but I have to admit there seems to be some truth in this.

I hope some of this makes sense.

Warm wishes,

Jon.

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Well, of course it makes sense; perfect sense!  Reminds me of the old adage that one cannot truly help another without first helping oneself.

Thus what I read in Jon’s words is that by living a life of integrity we help bring up the overall level of human consciousness, right across our planet.  Let me stay with that for a moment longer.  Jon mentioned David Hawkins’ ‘Scale of Human Consciousness’.  It was included in a post in January 2012 The evolution of the domestic dog but to save you going there, here it is again:

Map of Consciousness, copyright Dr. David Hawkins
Map of Consciousness, copyright Dr. David Hawkins

One might argue that the column headed ‘LEVEL’ is a pseudonym for ‘Behaviour’. In other words, those behaviours from Courage and up represent integrity.

So when Jon writes, “The best way to help is to work on ourselves!“, what he is saying that by consciously abandoning levels below 200 we open ourselves to being a force for good beyond ourselves.  Just run your eye down the emotions from Ineffable to Affirmation and reflect on how others that offer those emotions affect us in such a positive and inspiring way.  Indeed, no better than reflecting on how a dog makes us feel when offering unconditional love!

Of course it’s not easy! Nothing great ever is. There is so much around us that we can hate (score 150), so much to create anxiety (score 100), and so many examples of despair (score 50).

But remember the beginning of integrity is 200.

Which is why trust (score 250) and optimism (score 310) and forgiveness (score 350) and especially love (score 500) are truly the tools of healing our planet.

You can start right now by hugging a dog (dogs score 210!).

Love and Trust - Grandson Morten hugging Dhalia.
Love and Trust – Grandson Morten hugging Dhalia.

Thank you, Jon.

Some content on this page was disabled on August 23, 2017 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Susan Hawkins. You can learn more about the DMCA here:

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Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) all over again?

The terribly worrying bee crisis.

Yesterday, I wrote about the growing awareness of a major crisis affecting bees in a number of countries.  Coincidentally, when researching the various articles for that post, into my email ‘inbox’ came the latest essay from George Monbiot published both in the UK Guardian newspaper and on his own blog.  The title was DDT 2.0.  I emailed Mr. Monbiot requesting permission to republish his essay in full on Learning from Dogs and promptly received his approval to so do.

But for those who for whatever reason, don’t recall clearly the history of DDT, here’s some background.

Wikipedia’s entry opens, thus:

DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) is an organochlorineinsecticide which is a colorless, crystalline solid, tasteless and almost odorless chemical compound. Technical DDT has been formulated in almost every conceivable form including solutions in xylene or petroleum distillates, emulsifiable concentrates, water-wettable powders, granules, aerosols, smoke candles, and charges for vaporisers and lotions.[2]

First synthesized in 1874, DDT’s insecticidal properties were not discovered until 1939, and it was used with great success in the second half of World War II to control malaria and typhus among civilians and troops. The Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.”[3] After the war, DDT was made available for use as an agricultural insecticide, and soon its production and use skyrocketed.[4]

Then goes on to mention Rachel Carson (1907 – 1964) and her mind-boggling expose of DDT in the famous book Silent Spring.

The legacy of Rachel Carson.
The legacy of Rachel Carson.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) website explains:

The Story of Silent Spring

How a courageous woman took on the chemical industry and raised important questions about humankind’s impact on nature.

Although their role will probably always be less celebrated than wars, marches, riots or stormy political campaigns, it is books that have at times most powerfully influenced social change in American life. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense galvanized radical sentiment in the early days of the American revolution; Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe roused Northern antipathy to slavery in the decade leading up to the Civil War; and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanity’s faith in technological progress and helped set the stage for the environmental movement.

Carson, a renowned nature author and a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was uniquely equipped to create so startling and inflammatory a book. A native of rural Pennsylvania, she had grown up with an enthusiasm for nature matched only by her love of writing and poetry. The educational brochures she wrote for the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as her published books and magazine articles, were characterized by meticulous research and a poetic evocation of her subject.

You can read the rest of that NRDC article here.

So with all that in mind, here’s the essay from George Monbiot.

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DDT 2.0

August 13, 2013

We’re just beginning to understand the wider impacts of neonicotinoids.

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 5th August 2013

It’s the new DDT: a class of poisons licensed for widespread use before they had been properly tested, which are now ripping the natural world apart. And it’s another demonstration of the old truth that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.

It is only now, when neonicotinoids are already the world’s most widely deployed insecticides, that we are beginning to understand how extensive their impacts are. Just as the manufacturers did for DDT, the corporations which make these toxins claimed that they were harmless to species other than the pests they targeted. Just as they did for DDT, they have threatened people who have raised concerns, published misleading claims and done all they can to bamboozle the public. And, as if to ensure that the story sticks to the old script, some governments have collaborated in this effort. Among the most culpable is the government of the United Kingdom.

As Professor Dave Goulson shows in his review of the impacts of these pesticides, we still know almost nothing about how most lifeforms are affected. But as the evidence has begun to accumulate, scientists have started discovering impacts across a vast range of wildlife.

Most people who read this newspaper will be aware by now of the evidence fingering neonicotinoids as a major cause of the decline of bees and other pollinators. These pesticides can be applied to the seeds of crops, and they remain in the plant as it grows, killing the insects which eat it. The quantities required to destroy insect life are astonishingly small: by volume these poisons are 10,000 times as powerful as DDT. When honeybees are exposed to just 5 nanogrammes of neonicotinoids, half of them will die. As bees, hoverflies, butterflies, moths, beetles and other pollinators feed from the flowers of treated crops, they are, it seems, able to absorb enough of the pesticide to compromise their survival.

But only a tiny proportion of the neonicotinoids that farmers use enter the pollen or nectar of the flower. Studies conducted so far suggest that only between 1.6 and 20% of the pesticide used for dressing seeds is actually absorbed by the crop: a far lower rate even than when toxins are sprayed onto leaves. Some of the residue blows off as dust, which is likely to wreak havoc among the populations of many species of insects in hedgerows and surrounding habitats. But the great majority – Goulson says “typically more than 90%” – of the pesticide applied to the seeds enters the soil.

In other words, the reality is a world apart from the impression created by the manufacturers, which keep describing the dressing of seeds with pesticides as “precise” and “targeted”.

Neonicotinoids are highly persistent chemicals, lasting (according to the few studies published so far) for up to 19 years in the soil. Because they are persistent, they are likely to accumulate: with every year of application the soil will become more toxic.

What these pesticides do once they are in the soil, no one knows, as sufficient research has not been conducted. But – deadly to all insects and possibly other species at tiny concentrations – they are likely to wipe out a high proportion of the soil fauna. Does this include earthworms? Or the birds and mammals that eat earthworms? Or for that matter, the birds and mammals that eat insects or treated seeds? We don’t yet know enough to say.

This is the story you’ll keep hearing about these pesticides: we have gone into it blind. Our governments have approved their use without the faintest idea of what the consequences are likely to be.

You might have had the impression that neonicotinoids have been banned by the European Union. They have not. The use of a few of these pesticides has been suspended for two years, but only for certain purposes. Listening to the legislators, you could be forgiven for believing that the only animals which might be affected are honeybees, and the only way in which they can be killed is through the flowers of plants whose seeds were dressed.

But neonicotinoids are also sprayed onto the leaves of a wide variety of crop plants. They are also spread over pastures and parks in granules, in order to kill insects that live in the soil and eat the roots of the grass. These applications, and many others, remain legal in the European Union, even though we don’t know how severe the wider impacts are. We do, however, know enough to conclude that they are likely to be  bad.

Of course, not all the neonicotinoids entering the soil stay there indefinitely. You’ll be relieved to hear that some of them are washed out, whereupon … ah yes, they end up in groundwater or in the rivers. What happens there? Who knows? Neonicotinoids are not even listed among the substances that must be monitored under the EU’s water framework directive, so we have no clear picture of what their concentrations are in the water that we and many other species use.

But a study conducted in the Netherlands shows that some of the water leaving horticultural areas is so heavily contaminated with these pesticides that it could be used to treat lice. The same study shows that even at much lower concentrations – no greater than the limits set by the European Union – the neonicotinoids entering river systems wipe out half the invertebrate species you would expect to find in the water. That’s another way of saying erasing much of the foodweb.

I was prompted to write this article by the horrible news from the River Kennet in southern England: a highly protected ecosystem that is listed among the few dozen true chalk streams on earth. Last month someone – farmer or householder, no one yet knows – flushed another kind of pesticide, chlorpyrifos, down their sink. The amount was equivalent – in pure form – to two teaspoonsful. It passed through Marlborough sewage works and wiped out most of the invertebrates in fifteen miles of the river.

The news hit me like a bereavement. The best job I ever had was working, during a summer vacation from university, as temporary waterkeeper on the section of the Kennet owned by the Sutton estate. The incumbent had died suddenly. It was a difficult job and, for the most part, I made a mess of it. But I came to know and love that stretch of river, and to marvel at the astonishing profusion of life the clear water contained. Up to my chest in it for much of the day, I immersed myself in the ecology, and spent far more time than I should have done watching watervoles and kingfishers; giant chub fanning their fins in the shade of the trees; great spotted trout so loyal to their posts that they had brushed white the gravel of the river bed beneath their tails; native crayfish; dragonflies; mayflies; caddis larvae; freshwater shrimps and all the other teeming creatures of the benthos.

In the evenings, wanting company and fascinated in equal measure by the protest and the remarkable people it attracted, I would stop at the peace camp outside the gates of the Greenham Common nuclear base. I’ve told the strange story that unfolded during my visits in another post.

Campaigners seeking to protect the river have described how, after the contamination,the river stank from the carcases of the decaying insects and shrimps. Without insects and shrimps to feed on, the fish, birds and amphibians that use the river are likely to fade away and die.

After absorbing this news, I remembered the Dutch study, and it struck me that neonicotinoid pesticides are likely, in many places, to be reducing the life of the rivers they enter to a similar extent: not once, but for as long as they are deployed on the surrounding land.

Richard Benyon, the minister supposed to be in charge of protecting wildlife and biodiversity, who happens to own the fishing rights on part of the River Kennet, and to represent a constituency through which it passes, expressed his “anger” about the chlorpyrifos poisoning. Should he not also be expressing his anger at the routine poisoning of rivers by neonicotinoids?

Were he to do so, he would find himself in serious trouble with his boss. Just as they are systematically poisoning our ecosystems, neonicotinoids have also poisoned the policies (admittedly pretty toxic already) of the department supposed to be regulating them. In April, Damian Carrington, writing in the Observer, exposed a letter sent by the ministerin charge of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Owen Paterson, to Syngenta, which manufactures some of these pesticides. Paterson promised the company that his efforts to prevent its products from being banned “will continue and intensify in the coming days”.

And sure enough, the UK refused to support the temporary bans proposed by the commission both in April and last month, despite the massive petitions and the 80,000 emails on the subject that Paterson received. When Paterson and Deathra were faced with a choice between the survival of natural world and the profits of the pesticides companies, there was not much doubt about how they would jump. Fortunately they failed.

Their attempt to justify their votes led to one of the most disgraceful episodes in the sorry record of this government. The government’s new chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, championed a “study” Deathra had commissioned, which purported to show that neonicotinoids do not kill bees. It was not published in a peer-reviewed journal, nor could it be, as as any self-respecting scientist, let alone the government’s chief scientist, should have been able to see in a moment that it was complete junk. Among many other problems, the controls were hopelessly contaminated with the pesticide whose impacts the trial was supposed to be testing. The “study” was later ripped apart by the European Food Safety Authority.

But Walport did still worse, making wildly misleading statements about the science, and using scare tactics and emotional blackmail to try to prevent the pesticides from being banned, on behalf of his new masters.

It is hard to emphasise sufficiently the importance of this moment or the dangers it contains: the total failure of the government’s primary source of scientific advice, right at the beginning of his tenure. The chief scientist is not meant to be a toadying boot-licker, but someone who stands up for the facts and the principles of science against political pressure. Walport disgraced his post, betrayed the scientific community and sold the natural world down the river, apparently to please his employers.

Last week, as if to remind us of the extent of the capture of this government by the corporations it is supposed to be regulating, the scientist who led the worthless trials that Walport and Paterson cited as their excuse left the government to take up a new post at … Syngenta. It seems to me that she was, in effect, working for them already.

So here we have a department staggering around like a drunkard with a loaded machine gun, assuring us that it’sh perfectly shafe. The people who should be defending the natural world have conspired with the manufacturers of broad-spectrum biocides to permit levels of destruction at which we can only guess. In doing so they appear to be engineering another silent spring.

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Frankly, there are more and more occasions when I think that if homo sapiens becomes virtually extinct there will be no queries as to why it happened.  Then again, a much more positive muse would be to see the ever-increasing madness going on in today’s world as the crumbling death throws of a materialistic and consumptionist era that is past its time.