How to Kill an Elephant: Eighteen Months to Save the Planet

By Robert Pins

Global warming will either grab your interest or see you running in the opposite direction. But there is another way. It is a truth that is never realized, a truth that cannot surface once buried in the media and in politicians’ singlespeak, and a truth that is tantalizingly beyond your reach.

How to Kill an Elephant exposes this truth for all to see, yet this is not a book about global warming; it is a book about human nature exposed for all its inadequacies. It starts with elephants, inexorably being driven to extinction by elephants of our own creation. Where does it finish? That’s for you to decide.

Fancy a cane toad sandwich washed down with a cup of tea? Have you ever seen stalactites playing chess? You can expect a deadly serious read with a soupçon of levity and straightforward humour, because life really is too short not to indulge a little.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546296546

Robert Pins

Robert Pins is a retired owner and industrialist with varied experience with a wide range of the trials that are raised by the dogma and the red tape of our oh-so dysfunctional society. He is truly disillusioned with what passes for leadership and direction as we consign “solutions” to the out tray. Business as usual solves nothing as we continue our route march to the precipice in the clouds.

Book preview

How to Kill an

ELEPHANT

Eighteen Months to Save the Planet

ROBERT PINS

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AuthorHouse™ UK

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403 USA

www.authorhouse.co.uk

Phone: [phone]

Copyright © 2018 Robert Pins. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/23/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9655-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9656-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9654-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018909732

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover image credit: Delamere Forest, 2012 (c) Charlotte Fox

https://charlottefoxphotography.com

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction: The Executive Summary

Lies to Children

Why Is a Christmas Tree a Tree and Not a Bush?

Hannibal

Did Adam’s Descendants Learn Anything?

What if All Sticks Were White?

Curtains Made of Iron

Would You Live in a Caravan?

Anyone for Skinny Milk?

The Footpad and Highwayman Code

When Four Multiplied by Four Equals Nothing

Immunei bollocksii

Suntan Lotion

Betty Didn’t Buy Some Butter

Pareto Rule, or the Law of Diminishing Returns

Ford Illusions

Fancy a Tipple, or Twelve?

Gross Domestic Product

At Last a Use for Elephants, Nearly.

An Introduction to Princesses

Mission Creep

Welcome to the Jungle

Robin Hood and His Merry Men

Empire of the Sun

Animal Husbandry and the Keeping of Pets

Crime and Punishment

Community Firemen

Nearly Back to Runts

Great Brains

Patio Furniture

Bound by Charter

Paradise? Or Luton Airport?

Keep Your Eyes Peeled

Great Works

Do Crocodiles Smile?

No Need to Worry, I Have a Band Aid

Better To Burn Out than to Fade Away

The Willingness to Create Momentum

When Half Could Mean All

Corruption

Get Your Hair Cut

Gingerbread Houses

Let Us Stack Some Bricks

Revolution! Well, Not Really

Our Future Could Be Going Up in Smoke

The Price of a JCB?

Wasteful Enterprises

Chinese Whispers

Lord Whatshisname

Education Is a Force Multiplier

Straight Talking: Honest Politics

Thumb Up or Thumb Down

How Much?

What is it MeEnroe used to Say?

Nihilism

Wrong Way Round

ASAP

Apocalypse

Chimera

Viva la Revolución

The Coal Question

All Roads Lead to…

NHS

A New Paradigm

STUs. It Had to Happen Eventually

The Dangers of Frig Spaces

The Truth Is Out There

GDP

Spreading the Load

What Price an Olympic Medal?

The Human Excavator

A World Run by Highway Engineers

The Prime Directive

Evolutionary Cul-de-Sac

Betrayed by Our Appetite

Seeing Past the Avatars

Killing Strangers

Custom and Practice

It Must Be Important – Look How Much We’ve Spent

Unjust Distinction

Guidance Note

Empire-Building

Warped Cooperation

Hannibal: An Update

A Security Door with No Lock

Our Way

Waiting for …?

You Have to Lose to Win

The Herding Instincts of Grass

Deaf Spiders

The Folly of Leadership

The Permanence of Sandcastles

The Human Species Competes

EPC (Energy Performance Certificate)

The Food World War

Parturition, the Act of Giving Birth

Dying for a Sweet

It Ain’t Rocket Science

A Time for Excess

2,600,000,000 Is a Large Number

Cheese Wells

War

Pachyderms

Where is William Wilberforce when you need him?

Can You See the Blinding Light?

We Must Preserve Our Present, but Only so We May Exploit It in Future

Give It to Julia

Witness for the Prosecution, or Should That Be Defence?

Ownership

Are You Bored Yet?

Holy Bait Balls

Truth or Lie?

Lie or Die

Command and Control Limits

An Experiment in Thought

Un-princess

WMDs: Weapons of Mass Destruction

Tribe

The Glue That Holds Society Together

The Unattainable Dream

A Sense of Perception

If David had Missed

The Dangers of Social Smoking

Stonehenge Reborn

Sneaky Snakes

If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next

We Have No Leaders, Only Followers Who Had a Head Start

Fascism

Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora

HVOs

Is There a Way?

Painted Ladies

Usual Sales Patter

If a Tree Falls in the Forest and There Is Nobody There to Hear it

Corbyn

Promotion

Budgetary Constraints and the Failure to Achieve Balance

Pine Processionary Moths

Thanks to My Publisher

Highwaymen, a Final Word

Zack Hemsey

Epilogue: Trainee Arseholes

About the Author

Eighteen Months to Save the Planet

Introduction: The Executive Summary

How to Kill an Elephant should start with an apology.

World leader after world leader stands before the world’s media and offers solutions to all that ails us. Given that these leaders’ solutions are plausible, sincere, deeply impassioned, and above all else, fundamentally flawed, the time is right for a reply.

This is my reply: the time for politeness is past. I am hard-hitting and devoid of rose-tinted glasses. And rest assured, all princesses are dead.

I aim to open the eyes of my reader, to lift your thoughts to a different reality that plays out in your daily lives. You will identify with some sections of How to Kill an Elephant because you will have been exposed to the mind-numbing realities of the ‘it’s more than my job is worth’ type of assertion that passes for sentient thought. Scanning the newspaper headlines, I frequently think, At last, someone has actually worked it out, before realising that whomever it is has merely breathed across the surface, afraid to penetrate even one cell below it.

How to Kill an Elephant should start with an apology, I agree. I am ready to accept yours.

Now, having set myself up to fail, faster than a speeding meteor, I will attempt to provide you with some structure to the book and its contents.

I have compiled a lifetime of un-thought practices which serve to ensure the free passage of our species as we each seek to earn a living in the race for survival. I have taken simple, everyday examples of actions and practices that serve to ensure that the job gets done and have dissected these to expose their inner workings. But it is not enough to expose them, because to achieve my task, I have to teach you how to do it for yourself. So it is that I will return time and again to previously addressed topics, not to strip an onion, as the analogy goes, but to build an onion, layer by layer, hopefully according to exhibition standards. These un-thought practices exposures could best be described as my revenge—the revenge achieved by exposing all the mindless inequities forced upon my life and by calling their originators to task.

I will appeal to different aspects of your lives to attract your attention. It could be as simple as cost; the wasting of my hard-earned taxes; or the hours spent working for others so that they can waste my effort and, consequently, my life. It could be the cost of a packet of crisps or the cost of admission to the cinema. It could be the cost in lives of feeding the birds. (Which lives am I referring to, birds’ lives, human lives, or the lives of something else?) It could be a cost in terms of STUs, not sexually transmitted, but deadly nonetheless. (A full explanation will be given later.) Perhaps it is a cost in a future lost while taking the time to reflect on a present and a past lost as well. All right, I know, any idiot can moan, and if truth be known, I could represent Great Britain in the Olympics if such an event were added. (Although, no doubt, my style of moaning wouldn’t measure up to the style expected by the judges. See, I can even moan about moaning.) Rest assured, everything we do has a cost, a cost ultimately borne by earth.

After the exposure of the mindless processes that dominate our waking hours comes the search for the reasons for these processes. It is not enough to ridicule the actions and intent without gaining an explanation for—and understanding of—just why things are going wrong.

There is a search for understanding, a search for leadership, and a search for the controlling mechanism. And, given that ours is the only planet known to harbour life, a search for biology seems appropriate as well. Our species has the power of dominion over the beasts and fowl of land and sea, not through any God-given right but through the ingenuity of the human brain, a brain that is rapidly outstripping the capacity of our planet. The human brain offers so much promise. Indeed, it could even guarantee us a future, if only we were in control of it. I have found the control mechanism for the brain.

And elephants. How could I have nearly forgotten elephants? Consider How to Kill an Elephant to be a comprehensive guidebook to the identification of elephants, their feeding habits, their breeding methods, how to train and house them, and most importantly why we need to kill them. Inoculations for exotic diseases from far-flung places will not be needed because most of these elephants have never seen warmer climes. This is a new genus of elephant that you didn’t even know existed and therefore that you singularly ignore. These pachyderms have a momentum and mind of their own and resist all attempts to control them. They are often sired (apparently) by that most damaging of agents: good intentions.

These elephants are not content with trampling on the field margins because their ambitions are without constraint.

Rest assured, everything we do has a cost, a cost ultimately borne by earth. While others earnestly engage in the search for other habitable planets (didn’t some chap by the name of Noah try something similar once before?), let’s call it Earth 2.0, the thought keeps coming back to me that the wise money would be on hedging one’s bets by trying to fix Earth 1.0.

But in my comprehensive guide to the identification of elephants, wisdom, money, and betting all qualify as pachyderms. Pachyderm is the now defunct grouping of animals with thick skins into a related order where the thickness of the skin supposedly confers a common biological heritage. In my interpretation of the world, Homo sapiens—that is ‘wise man’— money, and betting are all innately related and qualify perfectly as thick-skinned animals worthy of joining the order.

Just a thought—not really an afterthought, I must confess: the latter half of ‘Rest assured, everything we do has a cost, a cost ultimately borne by earth’ actually translates to ‘a cost ultimately borne by humankind’. Would that be an inconvenient truth? Don’t think for one instant that this is yet another book about climate change and our need to reduce our carbon footprint because that could be construed as a good intention. I can hear the patter of Elephantidae tiptoeing through the undergrowth. (Tiptoeing? Well, they do have five toes per foot, but they also have the ability to harden or soften the pads of their feet, enabling them to have a stealth mode. It’s just that ‘in stealth mode through the undergrowth’ doesn’t have as pleasant a ring to it. Actually, scratch the whole argument because the structure of the foot means that elephants are effectively always walking on the tips of their toes. Anyway, How to Kill an Elephant is not about climate change.)

By now I have either whetted your appetite or triggered a rush towards the exit. You may consider that the book’s content is above your pay grade and that therefore you may leave it to ‘those in charge’ to sort out the issues. I have posited the question of whom the survivors would blame in the event of a nuclear apocalypse and have concluded that we would blame ‘those in charge’, when in reality the fault lies with you and me for allowing them to take charge in the first place. I could apologise for being so long-winded, verbose if you would prefer, but my aim is not to offer an alternative point of view. My aim is to offer an alternative way of thinking.

Perhaps an illustration of the pitfalls of an alternative view versus an alternative way of thinking would help, something currently filling the media screens that you can relate to. Harvey Weinstein and others have recently been exposed for their exploitative attitudes towards aspiring actresses. The floodgates have been opened, and the reactions have been displayed on the award ceremony red carpets and in the Twitter feeds. The position of power was abused by these individuals, and the redress is perfectly attuned to rebalancing the equation. What these men have (allegedly, pending court cases) done is wrong. What we have seen is the pendulum swinging from male domination to the other extreme, female domination. What we will begin to see in the near future is the abuse of power by women in the industry as they seek to dominate men. What we need is an alternative way of thinking, not an alternative way of doing the same thing. And while we are at it, I predict that in the new woman-controlled movie environment, the allure of the female body will still be used to bring the paying customers within range.

While written as non-fiction, How to Kill an Elephant is not unlike a whodunit novel that eventually reveals the real villains. But don’t be jumping to any early conclusions as you decide on my apparent prejudices. Consider them to be red herrings, designed to throw you off the scent before the unveiling in the drawing room leads to the arrest.

We may even learn who killed the elephant from among the list of potential culprits, whereupon those of us who are innocent can continue on the path to living happily ever after.

Note that this volume you are reading is not the expurgated version. I have on occasion vented my frustration with some wholly appropriate rude words.

We live not in a real world but in a wholly artificial one created by … hmm, whom shall we blame? To create a really good illusion, it helps if those enveloped within it are also willing participants actively engaged in the supporting mechanism. For children it can be very simple, as they still believe in magic and have yet to learn the term prestidigitation. For adults, magic tricks astound and baffle us in equal measure, but beyond the bewilderment lies the knowledge that magic doesn’t exist and that the mind is being tricked. For now, I will throw just one name into the ring for the creator of our illusion. Rest assured, there are many names to discover within this book, but I’ll start with just one: advertising. It creates the illusion of need and desire that helps to drive our seemingly endless appetite for products in the acquisition of which to invest our waking activities.

I confess that How to Kill an Elephant is not an easy book to read. Many of the topics covered are denatured—that is to say, cooked to change their shape, taste, and appearance in order to give you a better understanding. Beef Wellington is still cow for example. For those of us unfamiliar with the kitchen, could we track the product from either end, from beef Wellington to a cow, or from a cow to beef Wellington? To add or strip a small number of ingredients and processes is to transform our understanding of the finished product and its origin. While we can all reach for the recipe book, there remains an element of magic that we don’t fully understand, namely the process of cooking. A very simple explanation of cooking is that the proteins and other long molecules are damaged (denatured) by heat, and it is this that produces the different flavours. How willingly we embrace the process without ever understanding it. The old TV advert used to ask, ‘How do you want your eggs, fried or boiled?’ Or do you want them scrambled, poached, or in an omelette, or for that matter soft or hard boiled, sunny side up, or over easy? The point I am trying to prove is that our appetite can stretch far beyond the original idea and that different styles of denaturing can offer a variety of different tastes and textures to excite the palate (with or without soldiers? That would be bread fingers for dipping in the soft boiled egg for the demilitarised uninitiated). I will try to give an understanding of the ‘magic’.

I will not apologise for the constant repetition of conclusions. This is deliberate. Every hour of our waking days, non-solutions to our most pressing problems are drip-fed into our environment. I have felt the need to respond with my own drip-feeding lest the message be diluted.

I tend to write on my tablet in random sections, often late at night when my brain seems to clear, and I only give up when the words stop coming. Then I mow the lawn or feed the boiler or collect logs, using the time to think about and polish my earlier thoughts. You should try it sometime. I’ll even show you where to stack the logs. I react to all sorts of external stimuli, such as passing comments, or TV news or newspapers, and invariably attempt to rip the pro forma to shreds. And after a while, it becomes effortless—second nature to me. You will understand the attention to pro forma as the book’s theme develops. By the very randomness of the media process, the topics can be widely dispersed, although the treatment becomes more and more focussed. My aim is to treat each topic as a single fibre. Over time, you will realise that all these fibres have begun to form an intertwined rope that binds all the disparate thoughts into a central tenet.

You need to divest yourself of personal involvement and understand the distinction between us and them, the latter being the faceless masses. And before you consider my comments about the ‘faceless masses’ as being tantamount to racism, or a similar anti-social attitude, know that the book’s ambition is to give all of humankind a future by changing its present. This book endeavours to place the human race into a petri dish for closer examination. A degree of dispassion is needed to observe correctly.

I should also say that I am not fixated on speeding, although I don’t speed in 30 mph zones. I use speeding as an example of how something so simple is really very complicated. It isn’t complicated at all; it is actually very simple. And it is a wonderful example that can be readily understood by all drivers, if only they would vibrate a brain cell. While I concentrate on speeding vehicles and the law, I could just as easily have concentrated on the banning of pistols in the UK or on ‘Thou shalt not kill’. If you would prefer, ‘don’t trade in ivory’ equates to ‘don’t exceed 30 mph’.

Finally, I have endeavoured to add a little humour to the text, if only to ease and reward the reader’s task.

No more procrastination.

Lies to Children

When we are young with limited vocabularies and attention spans, we often receive short, convenient answers that solve the immediate problem. These answers are called ‘lies to children’. We can all think of examples, although the answer to one about where babies come from, ‘under the gooseberry bush’, is surprisingly accurate when considering the slang. The problem is that these lies become a shorthand guide to life and knowledge. We are bombarded with so much data that our brains have to develop a shorthand method of filtering out what is of importance, and we compartmentalise our lives accordingly. So it is that we travel through our lives firmly grasping these staple lies without devoting any thought to them. And we develop others to fill the non-existent cracks in our thought processes.

Some people have a rude awakening but fail to extrapolate beyond the immediate problem. Remember when your mother took you to the doctor for some ‘magic medicine’ that would make you better, or tell you to always ask a policeman if you got lost? Develop a chronic illness or complain of child sexual harassment in Rochdale, and you will understand the folly of these lies.

In these two simple examples, we have blown open two immense social topics that can be widened to cover the medical profession and the police. But this isn’t enough, because it questions the National Health Service (NHS) and the criminal justice system. Yet if we question these, we must also question government and how they function. Rochdale involved the systematic sexual abuse and exploitation of predominantly white girls at the hands of predominantly Muslim men of Pakistani origin, so we must also question social attitudes.

We are exposed to millions of snippets of information throughout our lives. Some are formally presented to us at schools and in textbooks, whereas the vast majority are just out there on the news, in newspapers, on the Internet, and in television programmes. We learn from colleagues, friends, and family. This information-gathering process shapes and steers us throughout our lives. Very often we are too busy thinking about what we do and how we do it that, paradoxically, we don’t in fact think about what we do and how we do it. As a simple example, spend some time watching labourers move material with a wheelbarrow. See how often they fill the barrow before turning it in the direction they want to travel. Turning an empty barrow is easier than turning a full one, but the job is to move the material, and the material will be moved.

You may take pity on a beggar in the street and slip a couple of quid to help. But in the process, you reward the beggar and remove any incentive to actually change his or her life. Yet you think this helps. Now I’m not talking about some blind boy with a handicap in India here. I’m talking about your city centre beggar who’s surrounded by our entire welfare state and the product of our free education system. If you stop and think, every individual born and raised in Britain for the last seventy years has benefited from all the state has to offer in regard to health, welfare, and education, a programme of works set up to eliminate the need for begging.

Most of us buy a poppy in the annual Poppy Day collection period leading up to Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday, and we are bombarded by the choice of ‘retail source’; we can buy them at work, in the street, at pubs, in shops, and even at the door to our house. If you’ve bought one at work and are wearing it, you can happily walk past all other point-of-sale outlets without buying another, since you have already contributed. Most of us pay tax. Even if we don’t earn any or enough money to pay income tax, we still pay VAT or duty on products we buy. So I am quite happy to walk past a beggar without taking my hands out of my pockets on the basis that I have already contributed. Why do it again? I can also ignore the clever marketing ploy of ‘Have a nice day,’ because I am and don’t feel the need to sit in dirty clothes at my pitch all day. This assumes that I can ignore the beggar on the basis that somebody else (the state) has already made provisions for him or her, so I don’t need to. (We will talk about cheese wells later.) But the state doesn’t have any money. They have my and your money collected via taxes, and we charge them with the responsibility to ensure nobody has to beg to survive in Britain today.

Let’s reverse the situation and turn the clock back, say, 150 years. Begging, poverty, illiteracy, and ill health are common, and massive deprivation exists throughout the nation. Let’s do something about it. Let’s engineer a safety net, a catchall to ensure that all citizens can achieve a minimum standard of health, education, wealth, and happiness. Let’s engage the greatest brains available to devise an equitable arrangement to make it so and, in the process, eliminate begging from our streets. But one of the earliest problems you will encounter will be that these greatest brains will all approach the problem with different ideas and perspectives. Leave it to the debating committee and one of two things will happen: nothing (and nothing is not an option) because you cannot reach agreement, or something because different factions will be overrun or ignored, or the brains with the greatest vision and strength of personality will drive through their own ambitions to the exclusion of others. Now this process could almost be used as a model for politics and politicians; if you haven’t got the answer, press on anyway, because it coincides with your beliefs (well, actually, I’ve been offered a promotion/plum job if I move my grouping across to agree). Straightaway, we have encountered a major issue, because our new system for providing for the poor and destitute begins life by providing for the greatest brains and all that such a thing entails.

So this is why we end up with compulsory religious education in a secular state. No doubt we need to thank the bishops for this, as they were looking after their own interests. Sorry, our Christian interests. The real questions will be, does it work and has it worked?

My childhood interest was biology, and while it has never featured in my career, it has featured large as a hobby. For years I have photographed and lately filmed any aspect of nature and learnt about the habitats we occupy at home and abroad.

While many regard Homo sapiens to be beyond nature, I will try to demonstrate that nothing could be further from the truth. For all our intellect and ingenuity, we are still bound by our DNA and follow biological models, although we never accept the idea in our actions an understanding of this premise is essential to our continuing survival.

Why Is a Christmas Tree a Tree and Not a Bush?

The growing tip, or apical bud, of a pine tree releases a chemical that travels down the stem, inhibiting the growth of all side shoots. Damage the apical bud and two or more replacement buds will become established, each dominating the buds below it. This is one reason deer and squirrels are considered pests in forestry plantations. Eat the top bud and your tree loses its shape and becomes a stunted bush.

Why is a gooseberry bush a bush and not a tree? (That would be real gooseberry bushes.) After all, they both contain lignin, the substance of trees—wood.

By extrapolation, the apical bud does not dominate the side shoots and they all have an equal chance of growth potential. Now the bush shape is determined by sunlight, wind direction, animal damage (watch out for the thorns), and competition from other plants.

But you will never find a gooseberry tree.

While staying in the Picos de Europa in northern Spain, I chanced upon a leaflet directing me to an ancient holm oak. As I was staying just a few miles away, I took the turn off the main road and took the loop in search of this specimen worthy of such comment. I could not find it, not at the first attempt anyway. At the second attempt I found the plaque advertising its presence and looked in wonder at such a tiny tree. This set me to thinking. And then I realised that all the other holm oaks are bushes and I had seen thousands of them. Here the damage is done by the goats, both herded and feral, that crop the growing tips, and in times gone by, by deer. So here we see a strategy for survival. This tree can survive quite happily as a shrub and will flower and set acorns to secure future generations, but occasionally through luck, or an absence of damage, it will achieve its full potential and win an award (plaque).

This is a natural process, a strategy for survival—and one that works. Travel to the rainforests of Asia and seek out the apex predators, the poster boys of the wildlife protection efforts. A healthy forest or ecosystem supports its apex predators, we are told, and by definition the presence or absence of tigers gives an instant snapshot of the value of the habitat. But why only one tiger? Why not three different types of large predator? Think apical bud domination. The presence of tigers within an ecosystem inhibits and prevents alternative apex predators from surviving or developing. They don’t do it with chemicals but with tooth, claw, and muscle, and they dominate. The tiger therefore becomes an evolutionary block to other species that would occupy the same niche.

Leopards are other big cats that survive in these forests, but they survive because they occupy a different niche from the tiger. Given the opportunity, the removal of tigers, and enough time to evolve, leopards would develop to achieve the full apex domination that the tiger enjoys.

That is not to say that a leopard is an imperfect tiger. The leopard is a perfect leopard, but it is held in its niche by the presence of tigers, which in turn determines what a leopard will be.

Think Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and so forth, each an apex ‘predator’ or, should we say, ‘dominator’. Each has developed and grown to dominate its own niche within the business environment. Each, through its actions, inhibits the growth and development of its own competitors while at the same time creating a demand for successful mimicry. Does every leopard seek to become a tiger?

But the rainforest is more than tigers, more than mammals; it is full of birds, insects, reptiles, fungi, moulds, bacteria, and so forth. Business is more than Google; it is full of stationers, furniture makers, coffee makers, et al. who use Google to facilitate their own requirements as they in turn provide or facilitate for Google.

We all marvel at the delicate beauty and grace of butterflies. Where is the apex butterfly? It doesn’t exist, so the conclusion is that in plant terms, butterflies are bushes.

But not all ‘trees’ have to be large. Consider the bracken Pteridium aquilinum; this invasive fern grows to 1.5 metres or so but crowds out light and prevents that light from reaching the vegetation beneath it, thus dominating its environment. The humble zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) has invaded European waters from the Caspian Sea. It tolerates low levels of oxygen and can exist in such huge numbers that it can seriously reduce the oxygen levels in freshwater rivers, effectively denuding them of the normal fauna. Trees themselves form forests, dense masses of canopy stretching for miles in all directions, until halted by geographical features such as rivers, cliffs, or bare rock. It is only at the fringes that full sunlight can reach ground level and that other ecosystems have a chance to survive. Shade-tolerant plants can thrive to form undergrowth, and seeds and young plants react vigorously to chance opportunities such as a forest giant dying and falling. But that is not to say that an impoverished ecosystem exists. Rather, an abundance of life is supported on the trees and by the waste products of trees, namely dead leaves and decaying wood. Just don’t expect to find grass.

We describe mature woodland as a climax environment, one that has reached its natural zenith, its climax, and is in equilibrium with the climate, an environment that has arrived and is not journeying to something else. This of course ignores the evolutionary pressures that exist within the entirety of such an environment, that is the drive for an advantage, an edge to secure the survival of each individual over its neighbour.

Where does humankind sit in all this?

Take Homo and assume for the purpose of the discussion that hominids have been on earth for two million years. Homo sapiens has been around for one hundred thousand years or so, but truly modern humankind has existed for perhaps sixty thousand years. In simple terms, that’s two million years of being a bush and sixty thousand years of being a tree, an apex dominator. Maybe I am being too generous here and perhaps the invention of agriculture around ten thousand years ago is the true event that took us to local domination.

Curiously enough, trees are believed to have been the catalyst for the human ape, or rather the lack of them—trees, that is. A commonly held idea is that as the climate of East Africa dried out due to changing weather systems the tree canopy began to thin and gaps appeared between isolated pockets of trees. Our tree-living ancestors took to the ground to cross the gaps between trees. Learning to exploit this changed and new habitat provided the impetus for walking upright. Many fortuitous gene alterations later, we have hominids.

In the simple foregoing paragraph I have slipped in some remarkable claims:

• Climate change resulted in fewer trees and initiated the drive to adapt or die.

• Climate change destroyed the equilibrium that had taken our ancestors up to their respective points of development.

• Climate change forced the development of new actions and overcame resistance to change.

Scientists are collecting evidence to show that deforestation is producing climate change in West Africa and the Amazon. Trees, through the rapid transit of moisture from root to leaf surface and subsequent ‘sweating’ (transpiration), introduce vast quantities of water vapour into the atmosphere, which produces rainfall and sets the cycle going again. Remove a sufficient area of trees and the ‘normal’ rainfall patterns are disrupted and drought can occur in the ‘rainforest’, an oxymoron but nevertheless the apparent truth.

Cast your thoughts back to the end of the last ice age. As the ice melted, cold-tolerant plants migrated north, trailing the newly exposed ground. We call it tundra today, and it still exists in northern climes. Within a few thousand years, as temperatures rose, this tundra was replaced with woodland in successive waves. First with the windblown seeds that only generate in full sun, such as those of birch, and then the slower march of oak and beech, we arrived at what we would call climax forest, the Great Wood that covered vast areas of temperate Europe with cold-adapted conifers to the northern edge.

But if the modern example of forest destruction causing climate change is accepted, then by definition the development and expansion of the Great Wood also caused climate change.

So here we have a paradox. Climate change is good because it drives evolutionary change, the likes of which ultimately led to the origins of human beings. Modern-day climate change caused by the activities of humankind is bad and must be curtailed. Imagine for one instant that some great body, call it God, Mother Nature, or some superior alien life form, had the power to prevent climate change and could halt the present-day trend. Let’s wave the magic wand and return all the fossil carbon to the ground and revert to the status quo. But while we are crossing our fingers in the hope that such an entity exists, we should be thankful that the same entity didn’t exist a couple of million years ago, because without climate change, we wouldn’t exist.

The counterargument to this is that the climate change that dried out East African forests was natural and what we are doing is not, because the latter is man-made.

Think back to the Great Wood full of trees, not bushes. Think back to the advent of agriculture, when humankind ceased to be a bush and became a tree. Now tell me that humanity’s activity is not a natural process and that it is a ‘bad thing’ without at the same time condemning the Great Wood for changing the climate of Europe.

Climate change then could be directly responsible for the evolution of our species and our ability to change the climate today (if you buy into the argument that climate change is man-made that rages today).

Remember the millennium bug and the panic induced in computer systems operators around the globe that led to an entire industry of ‘experts’ setting upon the task of ensuring that computers didn’t crash at midnight on 31 December 1999? Early newspaper reports suggested that planes would fall from the skies, defence systems would fold, and life as we know it would cease to exist. Governments and boardrooms worldwide set up task forces and programmes to prevent this computer Armageddon. I must apologise to younger readers, who will be asking, ‘What the hell is he talking about?’

Well, as it turns out, nothing. Hospitals continued to prescribe medicines, garages continued to supply petrol at the pumps, pubs continued to supply beer, and not a single plane fell out of the sky. We certainly dodged a bullet there.

Am I seriously comparing climate change, the single greatest challenge facing humankind, with the millennium bug?

Consider the word ‘momentum’.

Before delving too deeply into this, I will throw in a couple of personal anecdotes. Fifteen years ago I was referred to a surgeon about my sore feet. Plantar fasciitis (policeman’s heel) was the diagnosis: inflammation, and tearing of the fleshy pad on the sole of the foot from its anchorage points. My surgeon promptly operated and temporarily solved the problem for me. It was decided to operate on my left foot because it was the worst of the two, with the second operation to follow as soon as I had healed (should that be ‘heeled’?) Many years later I suffered a recurrence of this painful condition, but this time I ended up with a physiotherapist. She, bless her, spent five minutes looking at my lower leg and suggested the root cause of the problem was over-tight Achilles tendons. Fifteen minutes of calf muscle stretching removed 90 per cent of the discomfort within a day. I asked her if I had needed the operation, and she replied, ‘Probably not.’ In a similar vein, I have arthritis in both shoulders and had an arthroscopy on my left shoulder to relieve the pain. I was originally booked in for my right shoulder, but during the wait my left shoulder became the most painful, so we switched sides. As soon as my left shoulder healed, I would have the right done. I had extensive physiotherapy on my shoulders after the first operation and haven’t been back. I have had two operations, each one of a matched pair, but in both instances I never felt the need for the second operation, because the physio had done the job for me.

My point is, ask a surgeon and he will operate; ask a physiotherapist and be offered therapy.

So, ask a climate change scientist if climate change exists and don’t be surprised at the answer.

Back to momentum. The millennium bug originated because somewhere in the early mists of computer programming, the programs were written in such a way that they included a date, a date that began with the numeral 1, as in 1979 or 1993, and nobody knew what would happen to the computer code if it failed to recognise a number beginning with the numeral 2, such as 2000. This was because nobody had thought in the early days that programs would extend into the twenty-first century. I personally knew of a programmer employed by a pub chain who was paid £50,000 for a six-month contract to ensure Y2K compliance. (It even had its own catchy title.)

Throw in some newspaper articles and television reports, and before you knew it we had a slow-speed stampede of worry feeding off its own momentum that crashed like a tsunami against the rock of indifference that was 1 January 2000.

Now, of course, climate change is different, if only for its scale. Scientists, bless them, have learnt that the key to securing funding for whatever pet project they have in mind is to mention climate change. How can I secure funding to study bats, dolphins, jellyfish, mountain pastures, Antarctic ice formation, polar bear populations, lichen growth patterns, or [insert name of your personal interest here]?

Think it’s hard to secure funding? Try securing funding to prove that climate change doesn’t exist and you will find out how irresistible the avalanche of climate change is.

But it goes beyond that; climate change is now an industry in its own right, a topic that I want to explore using different examples.

During the 1970s Margaret Thatcher came to power in the UK and introduced many sweeping changes to government policies. (Many regard her as divisive, but love her or loathe her, it doesn’t matter.) Among these policies was the selling off of state assets to the public, be it private individuals or city organisations.

This saw the sale of British Telecommunications, British Gas, and electricity and water boards, to name a few. Thatcher’s early years were characterised by high unemployment figures. People on radio phone-ins often referred to themselves as one of ‘Maggie’s three million’, blaming her for their lack of a job.

During the 1980s my company employed a number of ‘secretarial staff’, some of whom had come from water and electricity companies. The tales they told about their employment experience were mind-blowing.

Example 1: Three women worked in one small office designed for one person. They produced tape measures to ensure that each individual had an equal and demarcated space between them. They would fight for the chance to type a letter and would then spend all day typing and retyping the same perfect letter because they had something to do. One woman spent her days sharpening and blunting boxes of pencils. Three women were employed to do twenty minutes of work a day between them.

Example 2: One woman worked for Anglian Water in a large typing pool of thirty women. If she was lucky, she typed one or two letters a day.

With privatisation, these non-jobs rapidly disappeared and the ranks of the unemployed grew. But Thatcher didn’t sack the employees; she simply created an environment where such blatant waste of resources was no longer tolerated. These companies now worked for the benefit of the ‘evil’ shareholders and chased ‘evil’ profit at the expense of jobs.

So how did things work before Thatcher’s privatisation? In simple terms, each company had a salary scale structure, a scale that increased with an employee’s responsibility. A manager employing twenty people had a more responsible job and therefore a higher salary than a manager employing ten people. A senior manager employing junior managers earned more if his or her junior managers employed more people. A CEO earned more because his or hers was a more responsible job given that his or her company was such a major employer.

The main message here is, be careful how you measure things, and remember that people will always cheat to achieve their goals. In simple terms, introduce a measure and you will get the result you are looking for.

Ask a surgeon and …

Ask a climate change scientist …

Ask a school to improve the education standard in schools …

Ask a computer programmer if your system needs updating for Y2K …

Now I realise that these previous examples demonstrate how managers in charge can corrupt the system.

Example 3: In 1988–89, my company built an office block and we found ourselves in need of a carpenter at the same time as a local deep coal mine was shutting down. To assuage the impact of major job losses, a ‘jobs club’ had been set up to find employment for the redundant coal miners. They provided us with a carpenter. At the end of this carpenter’s first days, it was apparent that his skill base was woefully inadequate for our needs, so we terminated his employment with us. He did open up to my chargehand about his working experience at the pit. He told us that he had worked with bricklayers who would lay a single concrete block down the pit in an eight-hour shift. All the shift workers started at the same time, but face workers took priority when it came to the lift access to the pit. Construction workers had to wait for an hour or more before travelling underground. When underground, construction workers were not allowed to use the train system, as this was reserved for production workers only.

The construction workers therefore had to walk what could be a distance of miles to the construction site, where, ‘Lordy, lordy, I’ve left my trowel on the surface. I’ll have to go back for it.’ A further wait to return to the surface followed the walk, and this in turn led to another wait on the surface before being allowed to return underground to begin the long walk again. Knock up some mortar, lay one concrete block in a wall, and then return via the waiting system to the surface so that you can clock off at the end of your shift.

Example 4. In January of 2015 I employed a man in his early 20s to sink a borehole in my garden. His previous recent job experience included working for the local authority on highway maintenance. The council had introduced a limited tracking device to their fleet of vehicles that recorded the start and finish time of the day’s work by recording when the vehicle was first started up and when it finished for the day. Trouble is, it didn’t record the vehicle’s location, so the old hands began work every day by firing up their council vehicle and leaving the engine running on the drive to their house, where they enjoyed a leisurely paid for breakfast.

The main message here is: be careful how you measure things, and remember that people will always cheat to achieve their goals. In simple terms, introduce a measure and you will get the result you are looking for. In this instance I would suggest that the clocking of the starting and stopping of the engine was to ensure that the workers were active for the full paid shift and didn’t use the vehicles outside working hours. (If only we knew when they were working?) But if you stop and think for a minute, you realise that it is the management who is once again at fault. Prioritising the pit lifts and underground train system created an environment for construction workers to legitimately avoid doing any work. Measuring the length of the working day by recording the starting up and turning off of the vehicle engines fails to measure the productivity of the worker.

Ask the minister for education how our schools and education system is working and you will probably receive an answer which includes ‘a record number of passes at x level or above in x number of subjects’ or ‘we are spending a record amount of money on the education budget’ or ‘a record number of schools are assessed by Ofsted as outstanding’ or ‘a record number of children are studying in classrooms of less than thirty pupils’. I think you get the picture.

Ask the prime minister how he assesses the performance of his education minister and you will probably receive an answer which includes, ‘Under his [or her] stewardship schoolchildren have achieved a record number of passes at x level or above in x number of subjects’ or … I think you get the picture.

Ask an employer of school-leavers what they think about our schools and education system and you will probably receive an answer along the lines of, ‘School-leavers today are woefully short of our requirements for employment’ or ‘They demand significant resources on our part to train them in the most basic requirements for employment’ or … I think you get the picture.

Ask a recently employed school-leaver what they think about employment and our schools and education system and you will probably receive an answer along the lines of, ‘This isn’t what I was prepared for’ or ‘It’s been such a steep learning curve’ or ‘I had no idea that you had to pay tax on your earnings. Why didn’t they teach me this at school?’

Ask a teacher what they think about our schools and education system and you may receive the answer I got, along the lines of, ‘I wonder what we are teaching our kids today? We get initiative after initiative down from the Department of Education which we keep having to incorporate into our teaching methods’ or ‘We are so target led, we have to achieve the exam results demanded from us’ or ‘I am sick to death of evaluations. Everything revolves around evaluations of students. And when I’ve finished doing them, I have to evaluate my evaluations’ or ‘We are frowned upon for teaching facts. These are all available on the Internet anyway, I know, but it would be nice to teach them something to think about’ or … I think you get the picture.

So why do we educate our children? What purpose does it serve?

Does it serve employers?

Does it serve parents?

Does it serve students?

Does it serve politicians?

Does it serve UK plc?

Does it keep children off the streets during the day?

The main message here is, be careful how you measure things, and remember that people will always cheat to achieve their goals. In simple terms, introduce a measure and you will get the result you are looking for.

What we have here is an education system that is pushed along by its own momentum, a momentum that overcomes and resists all attempts to steer it and fails to achieve its original aims. What were its original aims? Can anyone working in this field still remember? Whom does it serve?

Let me introduce you to Hannibal. No, not Lecter—the other one, with the elephants.

Hannibal

The following is a recently translated text recovered from a tomb near the site of Carthage. It appears to be the shorthand notes taken at arm’s length by Hannibal’s autobiographical ghostwriter, a chap called Hali To’sis.

‘How to Kill an Elephant’, or ‘Hannibal’s Thought Matrix

First of all catch and then train your elephant.

No, first of all train your elephant catchers.

Build your elephant training facility.

(I seem to remember reading about one in North Africa.)

Second, train new elephant catchers to replace the ones who got it wrong in the first place.

Rebuild your elephant training facility (to replace the old one, etc.).

No, the very first thing to do is ask why you need an elephant in the first instance.

No, the very, very first thing to do is to ask whether the elephant is really the solution to the problem and whether other alternatives are better employed.

So the very, very, very first thing to do is set up a committee to consider the role of the elephant on the battlefield. Thinking about this, you will need to decide on the committee chairman, the secretary, and other committee representatives first.

Then revise the committee membership to include warfare experts.

Then revise the committee membership to include animal behaviourists.

Then revise the committee membership to include animal behaviourists with knowledge broader than the herding instincts in goats.

Then set a date for the committee to hold its inaugural meeting.

Then set a date for the committee to hold its inaugural meeting that doesn’t clash with the chairman’s wedding anniversary.

Hold your inaugural meeting and do commission feasibility studies for catching elephants.

Hold your second meeting and do commission feasibility studies for training elephants.

Hold your third meeting and advise that Hannibal has made it quite clear that he just wants you to JFDI, OPOD (just fucking do it, on pain of death).

Catch some elephants.

Select some new volunteers and try to catch some more elephants.

Select some conscripts and try again.

Catch some elephants.

Rebuild your holding pen.

(The one I read about was built of stone.)

Catch some elephants.

Train your elephants.

Select some new volunteer elephant trainers.

Select some new conscript trainers and try again.

Parade your new trained elephants in front of Hannibal.

Urge the city council to authorise funds to rebuild the market and continue the slum clearance.

Retrain your elephants to cope with crowds.

Load your elephants on board a ship to cross the Mediterranean to Spain.

Design a new six-tonne-capacity loading ramp for your ship.

Design a new access ramp to the ship’s hold.

Design a new ship.

Build a new fleet of ships.

Evaluate what skills you have learnt in the transportation of elephants and how these skills could be transferred to other projects, such as hydroponics (you never know when your fields could be damaged by a sudden ingress of salt, for example) or the place of paper folding in warfare.

Sail to Spain.

Try in vain to find a cure for seasickness in elephants.

Arrive in Spain and disembark.

Design a new offloading ramp to the dock.

Build a new offloading ramp.

Disembark.

Re-evaluate what skills you have learnt in the transportation of elephants and whether this has had any knock-on effects on hydroponics or paper folding.

Assemble your army and march north towards Roman territory.

Overface a small contingent of Romans and watch as they withdraw in disarray.

Evaluate the first eyewitness accounts of elephants running amok when injured and causing more casualties to your own troops, and dismiss these as teething problems.

Follow the retreating Romans.

Cross the River Ebro.

Discover that elephants are really good swimmers.

Rebuild the Roman bridge over the Ebro so that your army can cross.

Have your NES interview a Roman prisoner to try to find out what the sign ‘Max IV T GVW’ on the approach to the bridge means.

Clash with the Romans again.

Evaluate the second eyewitness reports of injured and frightened elephants running amok and causing casualties to your own troops, dismiss these as ‘a failure to embrace the new technology’, and sack a divisional commander to underline this fact.

After the third eyewitness reports come in about your own troops being more frightened of the elephants than the Romans are, issue whistles to the elephant drivers, which they are to blow to warn your own troops of potential ‘amokery’. Don’t bother to evaluate.

Cross the Alps in hot pursuit.

Note with curiosity that your elephants have turned white. Put this down to the cold and altitude while crossing the Alps.

Decide to have some defeated generals’ wives knit some thermal blankets for your elephants’ return trip. Have these blankets decorated with battle scenes.

Meet some more Romans in battle.

Order the execution of all the whistle-blowers for lowering the morale of the troops.

Rescind this order when told, ‘There will be nobody left to drive the elephants.’

Promote the man who told you this to captain for using his initiative, and then have him executed for countermanding your order.

Have the elephant drivers line up and count to every twelfth man. Have numbers 11 and 13 kill number 12. The reason for this will not be apparent for two millennia, but rest assured that the BBC and Discovery Channel scriptwriters and narrators will struggle with dodecimation. They can’t cope with decimation: ‘Front line troops were decimated with over 35 per cent casualties,’ for Christ’s sake.¹

Enquire why the elephant drivers have a blue NHS emblem on their uniforms and flags. Discover that your senior regimental sergeant major commissioned them for the National Elephant Service. Decide against (a) telling him there is no H at the beginning of elephant, (b) having him executed for bad pronunciation and spelling, as he’s a distant relative on your wife’s side and you can do without that argument this decade, and (c) you already have a National Execution Service, (NES) albeit with a red badge.

Instruct your remaining divisional commanders that for best effect, the elephants should be used in tight formation to punch through the Roman lines and that your own troops should follow in close formation to exploit the opportunities created.

Meet all the Romans in battle.

Realise that it was a mistake not to train your white elephants not to panic when exposed to flames.

Realise that your white elephants are retreating headlong into your tightly packed forces held in tight formation to exploit any breakthroughs.

Realise that your white elephants are causing considerably more harm than good.

Wish you’d thought of how to kill an elephant.

Lose the battle.

Lose the war.

Flee the scene and return home to Carthage.

Receive an approach from W. E. Fillourpockets and Partners, Solicitors LLP.

Sue your employers for failing to offer sufficient training in how to exploit the use of elephants in battle and failing to advise about the potential pitfalls.

Claim damages for embarrassment, emotional distress at having been forced to watch the destruction of your own army, lack of further employment opportunities, and loss of office.

Remain on full pay on garden leave for two years while the tribunal deliberates.

Win your tribunal case—and costs.

Write your memoirs to warn others that they too will be shafted by the system.

Boast about your achievements.

Invest a small amount of money into humane methods of dispatching elephants.

When the Romans finally defeated the Carthaginians, it was not unknown for them to prevent the re-emergence of rivals by ruining the soil by spreading salt on it so that the city could never be reborn. History is silent as to whether the Carthaginians used hydroponics or not.

The translation has some glaring omissions, and it is fair to say that citing this text as historically accurate will not win you any prizes or exam grades.

I lied.

When Hannibal took his elephants into battle, his troops already knew how to kill an elephant. Each driver carried a bag with a hammer and a bolster (chisel, not long pillow) and would deliver a dislocating blow to the elephant’s neck vertebrae.

So even two millennia ago people had the sense to know how to kill an elephant before releasing it onto the battlefield. It is such a pity that our own rulers never considered how to kill the irresistible forces they have unleashed upon us. How do you stop the NHS, social security, the welfare state? Too radical for you? Consider this: the original aims of all of these enterprises, where we are now relative to these original aims, and what purpose they currently serve. Our modern-day elephants have their own inertia and are as irresistible as bull elephants in charge against unarmed civilians. You might as well attempt to halt the movement of Apollo 11 ten seconds after lift-off, by hand, on your own, than stop them.

I had thought it would better illustrate my point if indeed the Hannibal section were illustrated with pictures. My test readers suggested that the mental images created were clear enough and pictures were not required. Now that I think about it, however, I realise that this little tale has already received the Hollywood blockbuster treatment many times. You only have to consider humankind creating an unstoppable machine to solve a problem, only to have it bite back. Consider the Terminator and Matrix franchises as perfect examples of failing to fit an off switch.

Did Adam’s Descendants Learn Anything?

I spend a lot of time in northern Spain, specifically the Picos de Europa. This