Decline of the Empire

Saiga Antelope Are Dropping Dead Left And Right

I have written about the endangered saiga antelope before. See Teetering On The Brink But Still Cause For Hope (that's sarcasm in the title).  And now there is Kazakhstan’s ecological mystery: Why have over 100,000 saiga antelopes died in just a few weeks? (Washington Post, May 29, 2015)

As a species, saiga antelopes have endured a lot. They once roamed the Earth with Wooly Mammoths during the last Ice Age and but were almost driven to extinction by a loss of habitat and hunting during the late-20th century. Now the distinctive animals, easily distinguished by their large noses and prized for their meat and horns, are considered an endangered species and protected by the government of Kazakhstan.

Around May 10, however, they began dying en masse. Now, in just a few weeks, vast numbers of the species been found dead – Kazakhstan officials have said that almost 121,000 carcasses have been counted, according to Reuters, a number officials from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) have confirmed.

For an endangered species, this is dramatic, if not catastrophic. Kazakhstan's has around 90 percent of the world's saiga population, which was estimated to be around 250,000 before the deaths began. Experts are clearly shocked. "It is very painful to witness this mass mortality," Erlan Nysynbaev, vice minister of the Ministry of Agriculture of Kazakhstan, said.

"It's very dramatic and traumatic, with 100 per cent mortality," Richard Kock of the Royal Veterinary College told the New Scientist this week from Kazakhstan. "I know of no example in history with this level of mortality, killing all the animals and all the calves," Kock added, noting that the animals die after respiratory problems and extreme diarrhea.

Why Did I Post That Simon Sinek Video?

Let me tell you a story. At the end my personal "dark ages" (circa 2005-2009) when I wrote about peak oil for The Oil Drum and ASPO-USA, I had a running dispute with the leaders of ASPO-USA. I wanted them to put more of their limited budget toward the organization's website, where my weekly column appeared, in order to widen our reach. (I also wanted them to pay me more )

But that's not what those who led ASPO-USA wanted to do. Instead, each year they put as much as 80-90% of their precious budget into paying for a physical meet-up (the annual conference) in some host city. One year it was in Boston, one year it was in Houston, one year it was in Denver, and so on. The conference served one all-important overriding purpose—the peak oil faithful could all get together in some hotel to meet face to face and talk to each other. 

Peak oil folks could, for a few days each year, be literally surrounded by other people who believed what they believed, or had an interest (often financial) in pessimistic scenarios. Faces and bodies could be attached to often faceless and disembodied people one had only heard of, or had known only on the internet.

Back then, before I better understood how humans work, I used to think this conference thing was a total waste of time and money. Now, in my more enlightened older age, I understand that holding the conference was indeed the most important thing the organization could do because sponsoring the conference went the furthest toward meeting the very real social needs of "peakists" taken as a small, marginalized social group.

Simon Sinek On Human Sociality And Trust

Woody Allen once said "Eighty percent of success is showing up." Some versions say that 80% of life is showing up.

I would amend Allen's observation. I think it's more like 95% 

I was listening to the TED Radio Hour when I heard Simon Sinek say the following:

Trust is a feeling, a distinctly human experience. Simply doing everything that you promise you're going to do does not mean people will trust you. It just means you're reliable. And we all have friends who are total screw-ups, and yet, we still trust them. Trust comes from a sense of common values and beliefs.

And the reason trust is important is because when we are surrounded with people who believe what we believe, we're more confident to take risks. We're more confident to experiment, which requires failure, by the way. We're more confident to go off and explore knowing that there is someone from within our community, someone who believes what we believe, someone we trust and who trusts us will watch our back, help us when we fall over and watch our stuff and look after our children while we're gone. Our very survival depends on our ability to surround ourselves with people who believe what we believe.

And there it is — human sociality in a nutshell. Belief systems are arbitrary and often delusional, but it doesn't matter because it's the shared sameness that counts. It's the group itself that counts because our very survival depends on our ability to surround ourselves with people who believe what we believe. That's how evolution designed us.

I discussed this in the third Flatland essay, but everything I've read and thought about and observed since then leads me to think that I have consistently underestimated the centrality of social instincts in human behavior. A re-reading of Matthew Lieberman''s book Social has revealed some deep stuff I missed the first time around. Other sources have confirmed it.

Here's a video to see you into the weekend.

 

Global Warming — So Now What?

I'll get right into it: I don't belong to any human social world, so I can pretty much say anything I like. I don't come with all the heavy Flatland baggage which human sociality brings with it, so what I say stands or falls on its own merits or deficiencies. I don't have to kiss anybody's ass. I'm not harmonizing with other humans. My own self-interest is not involved. In fact, writing the stuff I do goes against my own self-interest. (I should be kissing somebody's ass! For money!)

In this way, I can bring a certain objectivity to the things I discuss.

Dave Roberts, formerly of Grist, now with Vox, doesn't have that luxury. He comes with a lot of baggage. So when Roberts wrote The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit shortly after I talked about the same awful truth, he got a lot of shit for it from those in his social world. The awful truth is that humanity has a snowball's chance in Hell of meeting the 2-degree (C) global warming policy target.

And, for the record, I ridiculed the 1.5-degree (C) target (low emissions scenario) in 2013 in an essay called Your Next Stop, The Twilight Zone. There was a follow-up called Confusion In The Twilight Zone. Both essays are long, but I recommend you read or review them both. 

In short, a few observers are just now getting around to noticing that meeting the 2-degree target is implausible (Roberts' phrase). They are now noticing that humans are fucking up because of the international climate negotiations to be held in Paris later this year.

Roberts got so much shit from those in his social world that he felt forced to write a defense of his unacceptable negativity in the first post. That defense is called The news on climate is awful. So now what?

Good question, Dave!

Global Warming — Living In La-La Land

Although nothing I see concerning climate issues surprises me from a Flatland point of view, I do find it very disconcerting to actually observe it day in and day out. I have always found it disconcerting. Talk about feeling alienated and helpless! Wow.

Let's review the craziness, shall we?  This post was spurred, in part, by the unsurprising revelation that Obama's Interior Department will permit Royal Dutch Shell to drill in the Chuchki Sea off the north coast of Alaska. Those of you who have been around for awhile will remember a post I wrote called JFC! (you know what that stands for). That post dealt with the absurdity of drilling in the warming Arctic to get more fossil fuels which will be used to further warm the Arctic—this is a positive feedback, if you view humans as part of nature, not separate from it.

On the other hand, if we want to keep this glorious global civilization we've got, we will need lots of energy to run it, let alone expand it. The usual suspects are accusing Obama of being in denial about climate change, urging him to leave all those fossil fuels in the ground. Those people cling to a fantasy which says that we can keep (and even expand) global civilization without burning fossil fuels.

Make It So!

Here's some news — there's a brouhaha concerning that Ecomodernist Manifesto.

Everybody should calm down. Nothing those ecomodernists and their critics say matters at all.

I can sum up the manifesto in 3 statements (well, OK, 4 statements if you count the "and" in the 2nd one).

• Industrial civilization is a nice thing to have! (Who could disagree?)

• We need to preserve and expand that civilization (have our cake) and decouple it from the natural world (and eat it too).

• Human ingenuity (more & better technology) allows us to have our cake and eat it too.

And I say, with Captain Picard, Make It So!

 

Elizabeth Warren Stakes Out The High Ground

You can think of this as an open thread. Feel free to say anything about anything.

UPDATE — This is an open thread, so I thought I'd throw in this little goodie because I will use it to make some points in the 4th Flatland essay (i.e., I will make a mockery of it).

An Ecomodernist Manifesto

And check out the authors too.

They should have called it The Flatland Manifesto. For example, the prefix technolog {y,ies} occurs — wait for it! — 51 times in 23 printed pages.

It is still early in 2015 but the media is already setting up the Clinton/Bush presidential campaign in 2016. I remember voting for a Clinton (Bill) running against a Bush (George the 1st) in 1992. If we get the predicted pairing, we will have the following sequence:

a Bush (1988-1992)

a Clinton (1992-2000)

a Bush (2000-2008)

Hopey-Changey (2008-2016)

a Clinton or a Bush (2016 - ?)

That's what I love about democracy! (America has no elite running the show )

Anyway, I see that Elizabeth Warren has staked out the high ground. This was easy to do since the high ground has been a vacant lot since 1975.

I ran across Bloomberg's Why Elizabeth Warren Makes Bankers So Uneasy, and So Quiet. With a title like that, I had to read it.

John Angelos Tells It Like It Is

John Angelos is the Chief Operating Officer for the Baltimore Orioles. His recent statement about the riots in Baltimore appeared on The Atlantic Magazine affiliate quartz.com on April 28, 2015. I've reprinted the introduction and the statement below.

The Baltimore Orioles played a game in an empty stadium (Camden Yards) the next day. The Orioles beat the Chicago White Sox, 8-2. Here's the Quartz introduction.

On Apr. 19, Baltimore, Maryland resident Freddie Gray died from spinal injuries while in police custody, sparking a series of protests against police brutality, some of which have turned violent. On Apr. 22,  leading area sport-radio personality Brett Hollander took to Twitter to criticize the demonstrations. “Any really important message [coming] out of these protests is lost when the rest of the community is disrupted,” he wrote, lamenting traffic congestion and road blocks linked to unrest.

John Angelos, Chief Operating Officer of the Orioles, Baltimore’s major-league baseball franchise, responded with a thoughtful, literate defense of this ostensibly “lost message.” It rings especially true, now that a fresh bout of violence has broken out...

And here's Angelos' statement. You also watch this interview with him on PBS. but you must first watch an advertisement from Goldman Sachs. The picture shows the the Orioles celebrating their win over the White Sox.

Brett, speaking only for myself, I agree with your point that the principal of peaceful, nonviolent protest and the observance of the rule of law is of utmost importance in any society. MLK, Gandhi, Mandela, and all great opposition leaders throughout history have always preached this precept.

Further, it is critical that in any democracy, investigation must be completed and due process must be honored before any government or police members are judged responsible.

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage, and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle-class and working-class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the US to third-world dictatorships, like China and others; plunged tens of millions of good, hardworking Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil-rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government, pay the true price, and ultimate price, and one that far exceeds the importance of any kids’ game played tonight, or ever, at Camden Yards.

We need to keep in mind [that] people are suffering and dying around the US, and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic, civil, and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.

Anything I might add would only detract from the beauty of Angelos' statement.