The Cover Letter Submission from Veli Albert Kallio to Detail Research Interests and Plans for the Fellowship: Thank you for recognizing my research proposal draft submission at the close of October 2019. I am now also enclosing my Curriculum Vitae and this cover letter. The Climate Crisis While talk about our need to care for the environment has received increasing attention from academia and the public alike, our actions have been both ineffective in addressing it and in many cases, actually gone in the very opposite direction. The result of this is seen in an acceleration of myriads of observed negative environmental variables. A few of these examples are: the melting of the Arctic ice caps, biodiversity losses, a steadily accelerating build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, constant growth of extractive fossil fuel industry, reduction in global forest cover, and sea water acidification. Most of the environmental improvements have been limited to the ‘local pocket’ issues. In other words, we are in a deepening environmental crisis – as it currently stands. Insight from indigenous people Humanity has always sought to seek a balance between environment and economic gains. In my research I have followed these developments during the last 8000 years. Indigenous people typically have a very strong sense of environmental ownership, although some of this can be proven to be attributed to a recent “Pizza effect”* where the western NGOs have successfully sold their own value systems and ideas dressed as ‘ancient indigenous ideals’ often appealing to indigenous peoples’ cravings for self esteem and recognition by the outsiders. A typical example of such a development is the sale of western NGO’s philosophies against climate geoengineering or genetic engineering (i.e. deextinction of species). In reality, both the long-term climate and shorter-term weather modification activities are historically integral parts of traditional indigenous value systems which embrace intervention techniques like rain dancing, ritual sacrifices or ball games that are carried out to induce a more desirable weather or climate. In that sense indigenous people with their ‘embryonic’ geoengineering are – actually – the very pioneers of geoengineering and as such cannot historically be its opponents as is often falsely claimed. Natural resource exhaustion – whether it is the overkill (the killing of Pleistocene - early Holocene megafauna) by ancient hunter-gatherer societies, or whether it is the over-exploitation of fossil fuel resources by our modern industrial societies – has always been an issue. My research is tracking how ethically questionable overexploitation practices have given rise to feelings of self-guilt and how these collective feelings have shaped themselves in the course of history to our changing challenges since the beginnings of the human societies. Humanity felt guilty already in situations such as when first the nomadic hunter-gatherers became increasingly congested on the land, which required settlement in sedentary agricultural communities. The burn-and-slash technology used to 1 clear the land of the forests to create agricultural monocultures and in particular the breaking of the ground in many indigenous communities’ traditions seems to be associated with a long period of repeated glaciations, formerly called ‘the Ice Ages’, which we today call the Pleistocene (a period before recent Holocene). The above is interesting because there may be valuable knowledge obtained from First Nations concerning the onset of the Ice Age glaciations and also for their duration and termination. The great South Asian historian, Sunetta, compiled a history of the Ice Ages known in India as the First Jhāna-Brahmā World Age – that of the ‘Great’ or ‘Large’ Earth era. Buddha then exhaustively cites it in the Tripiṭaka from the pre-Indo-Aryan (pre-Vedic) source. Sunetta’s version of the glaciation-associated sea level drop event records the emergence of Sundaland when the ocean retreats followed by the rise of extreme volcanism in Indonesia and this unstable period’s end. Indians recall the return of the warm and wet climate as the Prayāga, when the Pañca Mahānādī rivers Sarasvati, Yamuna, and Ganges returned as the Himalayan Ice Sheet melted. Some of these observations conflict with conventional scientific views in important ways. In other words, we are in a deepening scientific crisis – as it currently stands. The political crisis Environmental change has always occurred in part due to man’s greed. This is in large part why it is occurring now, and is likely to end in great disaster to humankind. Destructive climate change in another country has been put forward as a policy scenario, which could be realised as a result of nuclear retaliation for the destruction of another (e.g. Asian) country’s climate. Despite the direct threat to the West posed by Agni 4 & 5 and other Asian nuclear systems, they may unwittingly offer a potential brake on the impending climate disaster by giving impetus for the West to finally abandon its long love affair and addiction to fossil fuels and to see a rapid, enforced shift to a green economy with far less impact on the climate. The alternative is a catastrophic disappearance of Asia’s monsoon. We can expect further loss of life on a massive scale if the current Australian forest destruction and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef – by the changing climate – moves onto Asia’s rice bowl and fisheries that feed the billions of Asians. The population scientists quantify such eventualities as kilodeaths, megadeaths, or gigadeaths. In the above sense the recent burning and very rapid dieback of Australia’s forests and coral reefs may be seen as a welcome warning – a canary in a coal mine – before the climatic Hadley Cells expand to drop dry air over South Asia. Australian people can survive without their forests and agriculture, but Asia will not survive without its rice culture and fields. Should the Hadley Cell expansion reach South Asia and the ice-free Arctic Ocean to block the monsoonal airflows to the north, the profound climatic changes may precipitate a nuclear conflict with an enormous – if not a terminal – impact on the West. Will Asia’s god of fire, Agni, resurrect itself as a nuclear Armageddon in near future? Will Asia have to resort 2 to nuclear war to restore the monsoon via cooling effects of nuclear winter to refreeze the Arctic to re-start monsoon’s life-sustaining winds? In other words, we are in a deepening political crisis – as it currently stands. Literally, the potential end of our civilization as we know it, is on the horizon in a rapid retaliatory tumbledown: we must avoid such an unfortunate end at all cost. Credentials for grant Professor Sir Ghillean Prance, FRS – a world-renowned ethno-botanist – submitted my nomination for your 2016 grant, and I resubmitted my proposal completely rewritten and further detailed for your 2018 grant as self-nominated following a change in your guidelines. For 2020 grant your announcement was deferred and I contacted you querying in May, July, September and October and finally - as did not hear from you - submitted my then prepared draft research as October came to its end: this time focusing in a great detail to South Asia region in contrast to the earlier two proposals that looked at wider global connections. I have presented you a great deal of material because – despite of much interdisciplinary and broad inclusive talk about science – there are real barriers and prejudice to the recognition of ethnoclimatology as a new viable approach to understand humans’ relation to their environments in the past and the ways they observed, experienced, and interpreted these changing environments. Some of these past situations are so alien and exotic to ourselves that they are impossible to imagine having once occurred unless one sees evidence for it – i.e. It is likely that phenomena such as St Elmo’s fires (a mysterious glow of light from trees or even people) were much more common during Palaeolithic mega-eruptions and xeric climates with large static electricity build up in air. This then led to widespread idea of the axis mundi dissipating energy to its surroundings to form a mandala; henceforth, i.e. the idea of trees being an abode of mysteriously glowing tree spirits, just like the idea of volcanoes being seen as a realm of mountain or subterranean spirits that dissipate energy onto the surroundings. Proposed work My plan for the fellowship is to gain more attention to ethnoclimatology and its perspectives: looking at ancient climate change; trying to see how people understood it in the past and what did they actually experience; and to understand the ancient cultural milieu within its climate in a contextual Sitz im Leben of the book of nature. My project orientation attempts to dispel cultural illiteracy and prejudice against ancient and present indigenous cultures and is divided into three very broad categories like a set of traffic lights: the Green Horizon Projects, the Amber Horizon Projects, and the Red Horizon Projects. My grant application submissions to the VU Distinguished Senior Fellowship in Ethics of the Anthropocene focuses on the Amber Horizon category based on your stated intention of cultural inclusiveness and avoidance of cultural biases. 3 The Amber Horizon Projects deal with indigenous ideas not readily or easily accepted and understood amongst Western academia. I also continue to work on the Green Horizon Projects dealing with ideas readily acceptable with ease amongst Western academia and institutions, e.g. the British Parliament, the European Union, and the United Nations, and their various institutions. The Red Horizon Projects deal with deep physics. I have always enjoyed tackling the biggest possible challenges to expand our knowledge and advance science on terra incognita in ‘science-sphere’. My long draft for VU 2020 research, sent at the close of October 2019, aims to understand the Ice Ages cultures and phenomena - hopefully pushing back prehistory using extant memories. As a draft, it gives a rough but clear idea of proposed research. The 2020 VU Distinguished Senior Fellowship in Ethics of the Anthropocene would allow me access to the pay-walled periodicals and university library facilities. I offer perspective from the indigenous and ancient archaeological climate records beginning from ancient cave art and historical recollections such as that of Sunetta’s History of the Ice Ages in Asia as cited and preserved by Buddha in the Tripitaka. In this way, the award would help me to further develop my advocacy for the indigenous peoples and other non-European nations and also try to challenge the status quo in the debates from entirely new perspectives which will hopefully lead to new scientific insights. Please revisit my earlier grant application submissions for 2016, 2018, and 2020 draft text for my research to discover the breadth of ancient material I deal with and how I organise it. This should give you reassurance of a good product delivery and return for the funds committed. As there are no indigenous people’s universities, the discipline of ethnoclimatology is not currently taught as a university discipline anywhere in the world and this obviously may make you feel hesitant. On the other hand, I have been invited to submit many presentations to the British Parliament, the United Nations, and other institutions, and as aforesaid, I also developed a novel particle detector – which invention then later featured fairly prominently as a ½-page item on the news column ‘Physics’ at Science News. Yours sincerely, Veli Albert Kallio, FRGS Vice-President, Sea Research Society Environmental Affairs Department Copies to my VU Grant Nominators 2016 (2018, 2020): Professor Sir Ghillean Prance, FRS, Dr Steve Kadivar + Dr E Lee Spence (President of Sea Research Society) A Definition: * The Pizza Effect: Pizza was invented in Chigago, Michican, the USA and sold there locally as an Italian food. Then back in Italy the visiting American tourists asked bakers for the genuine ‘original pizza’ of homeland, Italy. Surely, the ‘original pizza’ was duly invented by the opportunistic entrepreneurs. Yet, the idea had no historic basis but was based on tourists’ assumption; the boomerang loop of an idea is “the Pizza effect”. 4 Contact Details and Internet Links: Postal Address: 119 Mount Pleasant Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 9EA ENGLAND Telephone: + 44 – 7794 – 981 238 E-mail: albert_kallio@hotmail.com Internet Links: Academia.edu: https://exploresrs.academia.edu/VeliKallio LinkedIn: 84b83114/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/veli-albert-kallio- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/albert.kallio YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSpCbn8JDvM Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Research_Society Arctic News: http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/08/future-of-arctic-ice-the-threeperspectives.html http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/11/portents-of-continental-scale-firesas-the-earth-warms.html Religion, Science & Environment (RSE) Symposia: http://www.rsesymposia.org/more.php?catid=170&pcatid=162 http://www.rsesymposia.org/hbmore.php?catid=164&pcatid=162&thehbid=27 5 The Green Horizon Projects: http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/environmental-auditcommittee/sustainable-seas/written/83150.pdf https://www.academia.edu/33000316/MPs_to_review_UKs_role_in_Arctic_sustainability_-_24th_April_2017.docx (The fully referenced text, readable on MS Word) https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/environmental-audit/ARC0003-Sea-Research-SocietyEnvironmental-Affairs-Department.pdf (The Parliament committee text version without referencing facility included) https://www.academia.edu/4299120/Kallio_Veli_A._and_Lappalainen_M._Preparing_the_Amazon_Ecosystems_for_the_Ch anging_Climate_pp._240-241 http://www.rsesymposia.org/hbmore.php?catid=164&pcatid=162&thehbid=27 https://www.academia.edu/4302181/Rowe_Mark_and_Kallio_Veli_A._Can_space_mirrors_save_the_planet_As_it_becomes_ev er_clearer_that_simply_cutting_back_on_carbon_emissions_isn_t_going_to_save_the_poles_ https://www.academia.edu/11783831/House_of_Commons_Science_and_Technology_Committee_Peer_review_in_scienti fic_publications_Eight_Report_of_Session_20102012_Volume_II._Additional_written_evidence_Ordered_by_the_House_of_Commons_to_be_published_16_23_and_30_Marc h_4_and_27_April_18_May_8_15_and_29_June_2011 (This Parliament evidence deals with the problems of cultural illiteracy and cross disciplinary prejudice in peer reviews.) The Amber Horizon Projects: https://unfccc.int/documents/65045 https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/122_United%20Nations%20General%20Assembly%20Motion%201012 92%20for%20UNFCCC's%20Talanoa%20Dialogue.pdf http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/08/future-of-arctic-ice-the-three-perspectives.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSpCbn8JDvM https://www.academia.edu/12267978/Looking_At_The_Eye_of_the_Volcano_-_SouthEast_Asian_Ethnogeography_From_Toba_to_Tambora (World Meteorological Organization / Swiss Science Academy funded poster) https://www.academia.edu/29473262/Looking_At_The_Forward_Running_Clocks__Carbon_Cycles_and_Time_From_Pleistocene_to_Present (Vietnam funded presentation at the British Museum) https://www.academia.edu/37356891/Comparison_of_Ancient_Climate_Reconstructions_in_Worlds_Ethnoclimatologies_ Sunettas_Seven_Suns_Ethnoclimatology_of_Asia_King_Chimalpopocas_Codex_on_Climate_The_Three_Sun_Ages_of_Amazo nia_UNGA101292_and_Sumerian_Kings_List (Vietnam funded presentation at the Climate Reconstruction and Impacts from the Archives of the Societies CRIAS Workshop at the University of Bern) https://www.academia.edu/37590365/Comparison_of_Ancient_Climate_Reconstructions_in_Worlds_Ethnoclimatologies_ Sunettas_Seven_Suns_Ethnoclimatology_of_Asia_King_Chimalpopocas_Codex_on_Climate_The_Three_Sun_Ages_of_Amazo nia_UNGA101292_and_Sumerian_Kings_List_Supplementary_Material_to_Conference_Poster_ (Rare and difficult to obtain references presented at the Climate Reconstruction and Impacts from the Archives of the Societies CRIAS Workshop at the University of Bern): Sunetta’s History of the Ice Ages in South Asia (the 1962 Edition by The Pali Society (UK) / Oxford University Press. The First Nations United Nations General Assembly Ethnoclimatology Motion 101292 (Hopi Nation and the Iroquois Confederation at the United Nations General Assembly). Codex Chimalpopoca: the 400 cold years (medieval Aztecs text, Mexico). Japanese History of the Ice Ages: the 799 Cold Autumns and Springs of Amaterasu (Royal Meteorological Society: The Weather periodical). No links to: The Indian History of the Ice Ages: Kali Yuga , nor to Sumerian Kings List where the 394 cold years begin after Alulim and end at Tammuz dynasty. The Red Horizon Projects: https://www.academia.edu/4299928/Scanning_Tunnelling_Microscope_Weber_Bar_Acoustic_Graviton_Resonance_Parti cle_Detector_-_youth_electronics_competition_entry_commendations_by_Gerd_Binnig 6 https://www.ivm.vu.nl/en/news-and-agenda/news/2019/okt-dec/call-forfellows-ethics-of-the-anthropocene.aspx ANTHROPOCENE: RELIGION, ETHICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE The VU Distinguished Senior Fellowship in Ethics of the Anthropocene 2020 is now open for applications (deadline: 20 November 2019, 18.00 CET). 10/29/2019 | 12:59 PM The VU Distinguished Senior Fellowship in Ethics of the Anthropocene is a grant that allows internationally prominent scientists to visit Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) for a period of three to six months. In order to allow for the engagement with different religious traditions and different schools of thought, fellowships will be granted only for one period and cannot be extended or renewed. The fellowship will be granted as a lump-sum payment. Office space and further office amenities at either the Faculty of Religion and Theology or the Institute for Environmental Studies of the Faculty Sciences will be made available. Please submit with your submission (a) a cover letter that details your research interests and plans for the Fellowship as well as (b) a complete curriculum vitae. For further information please contact either Professor Gijsbert van den Brink, head of Department of Beliefs & Practices at the Faculty of Religion and Theology (g.vanden.brink@vu.nl) or Professor Philipp Pattberg, head of the Department of Environmental Policy Analysis at the Institute for Environmental Studies, Faculty of Sciences (philipp.pattberg@vu.nl). See also the background document here. The Fellowship has been established as a joint initiative by the VU Faculty of Theology and the VU Institute for Environmental Studies of the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, with generous support by the board of VU Amsterdam. The fellowship is also supported by the Amsterdam Sustainability Institute (ASI). Applications can be submitted electronically by e-mail to Ms Marjolijn Staarink at marjolijn.staarink@vu.nl. Please mention ‘2020 VU Senior Fellowship in Ethics of the Anthropocene’ in the Subject title of your e-mail. The deadline for this application is 20 November before 18.00h. 7