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The Other Side of Everything - Dean Whitbread

making all our lives easier, more fulfilling, lovelier journeys

Warning: Bad Attitude

Posted on March 11th by Dean. Comments
I used to be a civil servant.

They gave me this written warning because I was far too cheerful as I signed on the long lines of people claiming unemployment benefit. Nobody complained, just the management didn’t like my bonhomie and generally pleasant demeanour.

Soon afterwards, I left this punitive employ, had an emergency appendix operation, then went to art school, and the rest, as they say, is history.

By publishing this letter I’m probably breaking the Official Secrets Act.

Posted via email from Dean Whitbread

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More Than Two Extinct Species Per Year In England

Posted on March 11th by Dean. Comments

More than two animals and plants a year are becoming extinct in England and hundreds more are severely threatened, a report published today reveals.

Natural England, the government’s agency responsible for the countryside, said the biggest national study of threats to biodiversity found nearly 500 species that had died out in England, all but a dozen in the last two centuries.

The losses recorded compare with a natural rate of about one extinction every 20 years before humans dominated the planet, but are almost certainly an underestimate because of poor records of any but the “biggest, scariest” creatures before the 1800s.

The high rate at which species are being lost is set to continue. Almost 1,000 other species face “severe” threats from the same problems that drove their relatives extinct – hunting, pollution, development, poor land management, invasive species and, more recently, climate change – says the report, Lost life: England’s lost and threatened species. This represents about a quarter of all species in the best-studied groups, including every reptile, dolphin and whale species, two-thirds of amphibians and one-third of butterflies and bumblebees. In total, the report records 55,000 known species in England.

“Each species has a role and, like the rivets in an aeroplane, the overall structure of our environment is weakened each time a single species is lost,” said Helen Phillips, the agency’s chief executive. “We seem to have endless capacity to get engaged about rainforests but this reminds us conservation begins at home.”

(Juliette Jowit, The Guardian – read full article)

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Into The Blood

Posted on March 10th by Dean. Comments

Almost always I feel peaceful after meditation. I’m more focused and aware as I get about my tasks. Sometimes, I feel like I’m cruising about on an invisible Segway; at other times, I get a rush of energy which requires managing.

It’s often creative, but also, despite the ongoing and increased calm which meditation brings – and maybe because of it – I start to remember resentments, insults, slights, as my sometime wounded ego kicks against and strikes out at the very process which is keeping it from dominating my life. That’s the way of egos – they like to be in charge, and they are notoriously unwilling to let go of selfishness.

Sometimes these ‘dreadful’ insults go back years, and despite my opinion to the contrary, they have not really been dealt with. They emerge from deep in my subconscious, rusty bicycles at the back of a garden shed, which should have been recycled the day after they stopped working.

Today, in a really pleasant mood, I recalled an old, somewhat narcissistic (aren’t we all!) but reliably negligent friend who texted me at random from a train a month ago,

“Thinking of you as I listen to your album. It’s great”

Very nice I thought, but it’s meaningless except as a function of his own sentimental nostalgia. If I meant anything to him (and I once did) he’d bother to actually call, he’d remember my birthday, he’d find out how I actually was. And frankly, the compliment is loaded. He’ll like things of mine so long as he doesn’t see them as competition.

Life is too short for such things to hang on to, so….

Forgotten. Goodbye.

Until now.

After meditation today, jumping about, making tea, relaxed, happy, I had the sudden urge to text back the following mischief:

“Not thinking about you much these days..” A bald statement of fact. He has gone his way, me mine. Tell it as it is. I don’t really mean anything to you. Why the pretense? It’s only vanity, whimsy… you’re shoring up your patched-together view of yourself and co-opting me into that pointless exercise.

Oh, the harsh, vexatious temptation to destroy goodwill. Which I ignored. Except to write it all down.

…into the blood, into the blood, into the blood, into the blood, into the blood…

Posted via email from Dean Whitbread

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Fire!

Posted on March 9th by Dean. Comments

It started with a bleep bleep bleep…

Posted via email from Dean Whitbread

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Fear

Posted on March 9th by Dean. Comments

I’m told that I’m quite brave. Certainly I am socially unafraid. However, I did spend a week climbing Cornish sea cliffs once, which I loved, except I forgot to pull out the climbing gear, and being the last one up, I had to go back down the overhang I had just overcome, pull out the gear, then make the ascent once more, leaning backwards, the sea crashing on jagged rocks 150 feet beneath me. I managed it.

There was a line of fit people all with their back against the rock, faces in Easter sunshine, looking at the spectacular Atlantic view. I slumped next to them, shattered.

“Beautiful isn’t it?” said the climb leader. I felt nothing, and burped.

“Why am I risking my life?” I thought coldly, “what macho foolishness is this?”

Then I felt afraid, not from the height, or the physical fear, but for the fact that only then I saw how I was falling into the trap of macho achievement.

Posted via email from Dean Whitbread

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Met Office: 100 Studies Show Evidence of Man-Made Climate Change

Posted on March 9th by Dean. Comments

It is an "increasingly remote possibility" that human activity is not the main cause of climate change, according to a major Met Office review of more than 100 scientific studies that track the observed changes in the Earth’s climate system.

The research will strengthen the case for human-induced climate change against sceptics who argue that the observed changes in the Earth’s climate can largely be explained by natural variability.

Climate scientists and the UN’s climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have come under intense pressure in recent months after the IPCC was forced to admit it had made two errors in its fourth assessment report published in 2007. Emails hacked from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in November have also sparked a series of inquiries into allegations of a lack of transparency by researchers and manipulation of the peer review process.

Asked whether his study was specifically scheduled as a fightback, Peter Stott, who led the review, said that the paper was originally drafted a year ago. But he added: "I hope people will look at that evidence and make up their minds informed by the scientific evidence."

Scientists matched computer models of different possible causes of climate change – both human and natural – to measured changes in factors such as air and sea temperature, Arctic sea ice cover and global rainfall patterns. This technique, called "optimal detection", showed clear fingerprints of human-induced global warming, according to Stott. "This wealth of evidence shows that there is an increasingly remote possibility that climate change is being dominated by natural factors rather than human factors." The paper reviewed numerous studies that were published since the last IPCC report.

Optimal detection considers to what extent an observation can be explained by natural variability, such as changing output from the sun, volcanic eruptions or El Niño, and how much can be explained by the well-established increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

According to Nasa, the last decade was the warmest on record and 2009 the second warmest year. Temperatures have risen by 0.2C per decade, over the past 30 years and average global temperatures have increased by 0.8C since 1880.

Posted via email from Preposterous Guru

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Extinctions Moving Faster Than Evolution

Posted on March 8th by Dean. Comments

For the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, humans are driving animals and plants to extinction faster than new species can evolve, one of the world’s experts on biodiversity has warned.
Conservation experts have already signalled that the world is in the grip of the "sixth great extinction" of species, driven by the destruction of natural habitats, hunting, the spread of alien predators and disease, and climate change.

However until recently it has been hoped that the rate at which new species were evolving could keep pace with the loss of diversity of life.

Speaking in advance of two reports next week on the state of wildlife in Britain and Europe, Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature – the body which officially declares species threatened and extinct – said that point had now "almost certainly" been crossed.

"Measuring the rate at which new species evolve is difficult, but there’s no question that the current extinction rates are faster than that; I think it’s inevitable," said Stuart.

The IUCN created shock waves with its major assessment of the world’s biodiversity in 2004, which calculated that the rate of extinction had reached 100-1,000 times that suggested by the fossil records before humans.

No formal calculations have been published since, but conservationists agree the rate of loss has increased since then, and Stuart said it was possible that the dramatic predictions of experts like the renowned Harvard biologist E O Wilson, that the rate of loss could reach 10,000 times the background rate in two decades, could be correct.

"All the evidence is he’s right," said Stuart. "Some people claim it already is that … things can only have deteriorated because of the drivers of the losses, such as habitat loss and climate change, all getting worse. But we haven’t measured extinction rates again since 2004 and because our current estimates contain a tenfold range there has to be a very big deterioration or improvement to pick up a change."

Extinction is part of the constant evolution of life, and only 2-4% of the species that have ever lived on Earth are thought to be alive today. However fossil records suggest that for most of the planet’s 3.5bn year history the steady rate of loss of species is thought to be about one in every million species each year.

Only 869 extinctions have been formally recorded since 1500, however, because scientists have only "described" nearly 2m of an estimated 5-30m species around the world, and only assessed the conservation status of 3% of those, the global rate of extinction is extrapolated from the rate of loss among species which are known. In this way the IUCN calculated in 2004 that the rate of loss had risen to 100-1,000 per millions species annually – a situation comparable to the five previous "mass extinctions" – the last of which was when the dinosaurs were wiped out about 65m years ago.

Posted via email from Preposterous Guru

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