Not really much to report on the wildlife sightings front over the last few days as been busy with the paid kind of work. So might as well do a rare post on the paid work we do which is where our funding comes from to gawk at micro moths and birds. Paid work for most of us mortals is the worst kind of work, by it's nature of needing to compete profitably in the open market it needs to be something that is specialised, fine tuned and repetitive and has to scale to market conditions. There's some room to be creative and passionate but the market will generally clip the wings of that unless in top positions in top end exclusive markets.
The best kind of work is work where creativity and passion can fly anywhere it wants and in my experience, especially in the space of natural history/ecology which is undervalued by the market, that often means subsidy and funding is required. Labours of love are often costly rather than profitable.
I think to a large degree that nature of the GDP paradigm has set the global market on a crunch course as for the most part the market does not incentivise creativity and passion but rather repetition and over-specialisation. That repetition, which is dehumanising, then creates lots of societal problems and those problems create new markets in areas such therapists, psychologists, drug companies, think-tanks, NGOs etc which is arguably unsustainable or more importantly non-optimal.
That's all common knowledge and common sense and it's also common knowledge that alternative models such as centralised Socialism and Communism don't work any better and are arguably worse too.
Therefore when we set up Little Oak Group the idea was to create the best of both worlds with a commercial 'cash cow' department to our business that then funded creative birding and nature projects. In essence a repetitive and specialised department that funded experiments and adventure. Those birding and nature projects could then be developed to wipe their own faces (cover their own costs) or even make small profits and even losses if needed for the sake of creativity. I always thought that trying to make an actual living out of birding alone was like trying to milk a man boob and a two lane system seemed better, one highly profitable and the other highly fun.
I've never really understood why the model we have is not more popular but I presume it could be because we have a fortunate structure (trusted family and friends) and a comfortable profit margin and green space management is not over competitive (because its hard work, in fact the secret to profitable work is often unpopularity) so it means we can make enough profit in a short enough time to be able to do other things. Obviously personal spending and life style choices, i.e. not being over materialistic, enables bespoke resource allocation but I guess in a lot of cases there is social pressure to attain a certain materialistic status which could limit spending on creativity etc.
Effectively instead of appealing to 'leaders' for better standards or to change the system we just changed the system ourselves that we were in and live in our little world. We've also taken leadership roles to try and change things from other directions. In many ways, top down change could be quite elusive as for the most part the people at the top don't want change too much as they are the top doing well. I guess it comes from the top, middle and bottom and anyone at any level can 'change the system'. Seems like there are some enormous systemic pressures out there building up with likely global recession, cost of living crisis and the climate and ecological emergency- basically it's a great time for anybody to re-design the system around them. Equally so it's a great time for exploiters to make people feel hopeless and fearful and keep them locked in to the old system and squeeze them until their pips squeak.
After the global credit crunch in 2008, myself and many other people were very disappointed that the GDP paradigm was propped up by quantitative easing. Market forces weren't able to correct the market so ironically Global Capitalism was bailed out by state money- capitalism for the poor but socialism for the rich. The bubble wasn't allowed to burst and many feared that it would just blow up again into something even more ridiculous, risky and dangerous. It's possible that is what is going on now, in fact it is very likely that is what is going on and if that's true this is no time for business as usual, this is time for unusual business.
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