Created; < 6/2011 Changed; 29/03/2020, 30/03/2020
Old this webpage; http://ww1.andrew-lohmann.me.uk/perspective/motive-and-change/example-from-nature-salmon/
WiP
Previous page Empathy Toughness and Hierarchy of motives
Add pictures of Salmon leaping at the Falls of Shin, taken by John Lohmann
As a child I observed salmon leap at the Falls of Shin, Inverness, Scotland. A salmon leaped from a pool of angry fish now and then jumped a height of say five meters, which was still not quite height enough. The fish then swam with a considerable amount of power up a trickle of water falling gaining height slow only to drop back. There surely is northing in engineering that comes anywere near that power, the power range, and also the energy storage efficiency as they conserve energy by fasting whilst going up river ultimately to spawn and die.
It seems cruel to cage such wonderful creatures in a fish farm. I understand that seal are killed because they break the cages releasing salmon and eating some. I have stopped eating farmed salmon. Ultimately none of the fish, we observed jump in the hours we stood watching, made it to the top of the falls.
There is a similarity between the example of people living with nature in the Amazons, the easy living that the missionary’s observed in Africa, and the salmon above in that the amount of effort used to live is the minimum necessary, and is sustainable. Clearly the Salmon has to put an immensely more effort into living than we do, but some of the people in the Amazons and in Africa put a lot less work into living than we do, but the difference is that our way is based on insatiable growth, and our wars kill people on a vast scale. In nature growth is limited by resources or parsites which grow faster in a large population of hosts, Or by periodic catastrophe. See link below;
http://www.impossiblehamster.org/
In small comunities of people or animals a strategy of making a mess then moving on then make another mess can be sustainable in that nature usually populates the mess with organisms, and foraging creatures that clean up and recycle. To some extend you see this occur with disused post-industrial revolution sites. Badger move out of an outlying set when the sets become infested by flees, then subsequently foxes may move into the set.
But even cleaning up oil after a tanker ship or oil well disaster might be better if it were not done with chemically, or by clearing it and moving it else where making another mess, as nature may do a better job if left to it. The only way to minimise damage to a sustainable level is to consume less. Face saving embarrassment needs to be directed to learning from see the space shuttle disasters http://kn.theiet.org/magazine/member-news/22/professional-ethics.cfm (link does not work) - but if anything was learnt about human nature was the lesson applied?
Next page Children’s fairy tails