All and every thing is connected on Planet Earth.
I must share the feelings of millions of others across the world when I admit to going through periods of quiet despair about where ‘modern man’ has got himself. (I don’t intend to be gender specific!)
It goes way beyond the disbelief at some of the things happening today; way beyond the anger that is generated by so many examples of greed and corruption. It goes to a point where I just want to snuggle down with Jean, curl up with the dogs and kiss the rest of the world good-bye!
The expression that comes to mind is the one about the last person to leave the planet please switch the lights off!
(As if to demonstrate how sensitive dogs are to the feelings of us humans, Cleo just came into the room where I am writing this and laid her head across my left thigh. I stroked her head and then she wandered back to our bed next door – I then took the following photograph)
So what’s feeding my feelings?
Well, as many of you know yesterday and Sunday had posts about saving the Ecuadorian Jaguar and the African Lion. In the case of the former, it’s:
The president of Ecuador claims to stand for indigenous rights and the environment, but he has just come up with a new plan to bring oil speculators in to 4 million hectares of jungle. (That’s 9.9 million acres in old money!)
In the case of the African Lion, it’s:
In the past fifty years, the African lion population declined by as much as 90%. Many of the lion prides that do exist today are so genetically weak from being small and isolated by international borders that they can’t promise a future for African lions ….. two thirds of the African lions killed by trophy hunters end up in the U.S. That’s thousands of lions!
Last Friday I wrote about how community living for wolves and dogs had given those species “group survival and well-being“ that we humans couldn’t even dream about.
Then over at Liberated Way, Alex Jones recently wrote:
I attended a lecture at Essex University Colchester last Wednesday on the plight of indigenous indians in Canada, specifically those in Labrador. The Canadian government has embarked on a scheme to disenfranchise the indians of all their land, wipe out all their rights forever, and place them in perpetual bondage. Underlying this horror was what has happened to the indians themselves, a people tainted with mental illness, alcoholism and high suicide rates.
I asked the lecturer why it is that it appears all indigenous people across the globe share this common trait of high levels of abuse, mental illness, suicide and alcoholism. The answer given was that outsiders desired to force their alien world views upon these people destroying their sense of personal identity. For example many of these people see land as a shared resource, the capitalist ideas of land ownership is at odds with their world view. All Native American problem solving is through talking, and everyone has choice, whereas outsiders prefer to impose solutions and intellectualise with clever words.
Just read that last paragraph carefully again and note “outsiders desired to force their alien world views upon these people destroying their sense of personal identity.”
Back closer to home, the struggles of the North American Indians are well-known.
So no nice, neat solution to this place that I’m in just now other than to put down my pen and let the music from the following two videos wash over me.
If you read this far, thank you for suffering the ramblings of this silly old fart!
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Learning from Dogs 
“interconnectedness ” ….A Big yes ……………
everything on this beautiful planet is a beautiful web ………….
compassion to all ………. beautiful post ……
here is an instrumental i wrote in 2011 –
pretty much about the same thing 🙂
lovely post .
best …..
Cat
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Cat, your reply means a lot. Thank you. And found the instrumental inspiring.
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Like you I often despair about the way we treat our plant. I don’t exclude myself either although at least I do care and try to help not abuse. Trouble is we are all in a loop, needing this, needing that to live the lives we’ve been brought up to expect. Probably like me, you have noticed how in America so many trees are cut down and areas of beauty devastated in order to build the next shopping mall, whilst the old ones just get left to go derelict. Always building, building every where you look! When I see the beauty of the unspoilt areas over there, I realise what it must have looked like here in England once and it makes me so sad. England is still very beautiful but only if we make strides to keep it so.
America needs to wake up and realise that one day they won’t have all that space. It’s not replaceable.
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Your reply resonates so well with Alex’s reply below. As you are both saying, all we can do is to do our best and let Mother Nature follow the course that she always takes and, ultimately will.
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It is hard but a certain level of detachment is required. As an example of nature, swans sometimes build their nests in places that are bad, where the nest and eggs will be destroyed by flood waters. It is illegal in UK to interfere with nests of swans even if you have good intent of saving them, nature must take its course. The swan will grieve for the loss of its young, but it will learn through wisdom to build a nest in a different location in future.
The problem with humans is that they appear to be stupid, so it takes longer for lessons to sink in. It will require a huge spanking to get humanity to change its attitudes and behaviour, which may mean all the way to a full collapse of some of the energy systems civilisation takes for granted and depend upon.
Whilst there are still many opportunities for humanity to change course, even if they fail to do so and get practically obliterated, they will by choice or force come to the final reality that is healthy for humanity and the planet. All you can do is do your little actions that will send ripples of change into the world, but don’t let the darkness of the world crush your spirit.
You may have heard of the story of the boy and the starfish:
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Thanks Alex, Words of wisdom.
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get your point, you’re saying that people are destroying the ecosystem and in the process also affecting the lives of those animals and humans who used to stay in those natural habitats. you’re so kind to think of the plights of native Americans ! they’re a poor lot, whose ancestors were being forced out of their lands by European settlers!
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And thank you for your reflections.
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I live in Canada and have been deeply dismayed but what has been transpiring here. The plight of First Nations people is deeply troubling and the “solution” the Government of Canada is proposing is allowing people to sell off land that is held in trust. The Harper Government believes that more market-based options are a solution and that too much land is currently “locked up” by treaty. In other words, the old approach of forcing people to sell off their land to speculators is being revamped and naturally being presented as an “innovation.”
I won’t try and go on a soap box here because I know that there is much more than the Harper Government or any one political party to blame for this. I think the following sentences you quoted really do get to what I too believe is the heart of the matter:
“The answer given was that outsiders desired to force their alien world views upon these people destroying their sense of personal identity. For example many of these people see land as a shared resource, the capitalist ideas of land ownership is at odds with their world view. All Native American problem solving is through talking, and everyone has choice, whereas outsiders prefer to impose solutions and intellectualise with clever words.”
I wish that we could find a way to look at the land as a communal trust. I despair that the “solutions” offered are always some type of “market based” approach designed to maximize personal wealth at the expense of others. It is very sad to behold. But I do believe that what is happening in Canada now with the “Idle No More” movement is vitally important. I ignore what the media is saying about it -I do not expect the corporate newspapers and television outlets (including the government -funded CBC) to really grasp the heart of what is happening here.
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Jeremy, thank you for leaving such a long and detailed comment throwing light on yet another deep unfairness. Paul
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It is my pleasure, Paul. I hesitate to leave long comments because I don’t want to be perceived as “lecturing” anyone. I know people can form their own opinions.
Still, like you, these are very hard things to witness and I have seen people I know poke fun at and mock what is happening to Aboriginal people up here. They have no idea what is really going on.
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Jeremy, I hope you will consider this place as somewhere to speak the truth of your feelings, one word or one thousand words!
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I ignore what the media is saying about it -I do not expect the corporate newspapers and television outlets (including the government -funded CBC) to really grasp the heart of what is happening here.
You’re one step ahead of me, then. Here in the UK I’ve not seen or heard a dicky bird about it. Though you’re not specific about what is said, it’s clear enough that they’re not treating the matter seriously. White man still has a forked tongue, it seems.
It makes me sick.
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What I have encountered is that the media is more interested in exposing divisions within the Idle No More Movement, or alleging double-dealing and dishonesty on the part of movement spokespeople.
I just do not feel that I can find mainstream media outlets that are willing to look at the nature of Aboriginal demands. The media is quick to condemn Aboriginal leaders for the poverty of their people. In short, I don’t listen because I don’t see journalism that is willing to look at question of causality, which is what I think is so positive in this blog post.
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Merci bien Monsieur.
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Hi Paul. Just catching up after yet another day spent disconnected from the Interweb on a train.
The piece from Alex Jones caught my attention but is way too simplistic for my liking. However, the sentence that I want to focus on is this one: “For example many of these people see land as a shared resource, the capitalist ideas of land ownership is at odds with their world view.” Indigenous peoples all over the World may well see land as a shared resource and and capitalist ideas of land ownership may well be at odds with their world view but… are the two things actually connected?
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith espoused property ownership as the right of every free man (i.e. non slave). John Locke did pretty much the same; and still, today, property rights is seen as the solution to Garrett Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ – wherein he pictured the over-grazing of medieval common land as the inevitable consequence of individuals acting to maximise their personal gain.
Therefore, it is not the capitalist idea of land ownership that is the problem here: The problem is the pursuance of self interest despite the finite nature of our resources. Even where humans have managed to avoid the privatisation of our natural resources (e.g. fish in our oceans) we seem to struggle to exercise the “mutual restraint, mutually agreed upon” that Hardin said would be necessary to avoid his ‘Tragedy’. Somehow, indigenous peoples tend to recognise the need for collective restraint and they do not over-fish their seas (etc): They do not need a University education in order to understand the concepts of sustainable development and ecological carrying capacity.
[N.B. For the avoidance of any doubt, I am not saying that the capitalist idea of land ownership is not a problem; I am just saying it is not the problem in this instance.]
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Martin, thank you so much for that fabulous addition to the debate. You know, the reason I carry on with what must be 10-15 hours week of writing, etc., in connection with LfD is the feedback and ‘networking’ that comes as a result. Once again, thank you.
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All too many people seem to think that all problems can be cured once everything has an owner. I wonder, does that include the air that we breathe? Probably.
I used to be an avid science fiction reader (no time for it these days; too busy reading fact-based stuff). Did you ever read a story by Robert Heinlein called ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress‘? That could be re-worked now as ‘The Earth is a Harsh Mistress’, I think. I had ideas once about writing a screenplay for it, but gave up the idea once I found out that someone else — Tim Minear, an actual playwright, not a wannabe like me — was working on it. That was years ago, but the theme is even more relevant today.
(I did write a short story many moons ago which stole a main character from Heinlein’s yarn… still available online, but only via the wayback machine, if anyone’s interested.)
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I shall take a peek at that story of yours. But not today. One of those busy little days coming up.
Found the rest of your comment interesting; as I now expect from you!
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