Mankind, Nature and Dogs

We are all connected – The biological interconnectedness of all conscious life.

I sit here writing the draft of this book in the Summer of 2014, a stone’s throw from the small community of Merlin in Southern Oregon where my wife and I and numerous animals, including nine dogs and four horses, live in thirteen acres of very rural countryside. Just a few miles away from us is a place known as Wildlife Images, or to give them their full name Wildlife Images Rehabilitation and Education Center. As their website declares, “The facility was created in order to provide for the care and treatment of sick, injured and orphaned wildlife.”

We visit Wildlife Images frequently, especially when we have guests staying with us.

There is an enclosure for the otters and on one of the surrounding glass screens is engraved a Native American Proverb: “We will be forever known by the tracks we leave.”

The first time I stood and read the words I was struck by something very profound, yet something that struggled to surface in my mind as a clearly articulated idea. Part of me embraced the irony of a race of people, the many tribes of the ancient North American Indians, that history suggests lived very much in harmony with the land, leaving a message to another race of people, modern man, who not only subjugated those native Indians but proceeded to despoil much of the vastness of what we today call the United States of America.

Granted, that word ‘despoil’ is a bit harsh in the direct sense that millions of acres of this continent remain as open, unspoilt countryside, but when one thinks about what Americans have exported in terms of technology and culture right across the planet then, maybe, despoil isn’t being too unfair. Exported, of course, to millions of eager recipients in dozens of other countries. This is a failure of modern man, not of any one country.

Returning to my reactions to that glass-engraved proverb, the only other thought that surfaced was that we, as in all of humanity, are living in such very strange times, times in which the tracks that we have been leaving over the last, say sixty years, indicate a path towards a future oblivion.

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In July, 2014, Stanford Biology Professor, Rodolfo Dirzo, and his colleagues, issued a warning that the present rate of what he called “defaunation” could have harmful downstream effects on human health. Professor Dirzo explained that despite the “planet’s current biodiversity, the product of 3.5 billion years of evolutionary trial and error being the highest in the history of life” we may have reached a tipping point.

The warning explained that more than 320 terrestrial vertebrates had become extinct since the year 1500 and that, since then, “Populations of the remaining species show a 25 percent average decline in abundance. The situation is similarly dire for invertebrate animal life.”

Professor Dirzo further went on to explain that “while previous extinctions have been driven by natural planetary transformations or catastrophic asteroid strikes, the current die-off can be associated to human activity.” He even gave this era a name: the era of the “Anthropocene defaunation.”

“The current die-off can be associated to human activity”. Surely, this is the irony of all ironies. By that I mean the die-off of modern man being a direct consequence of the actions directly associated with modern man. Wow!

It seems to me that whichever way we look, the interconnectedness of all conscious life is staring at us full in the face. Of course we are all interconnected. Not just all of mankind but all of conscious life. Ergo, the destruction of natural habitats, the loss of every species, even the unwarranted killing of a wild animal is, in a very real and tangible way, the destruction of our own habitat, the loss of the species that is us, and the unwarranted killing of future generations of that same species: homo sapiens.

Now it would be perfectly reasonable to see this as a temporary distraction that has affected, or should the word be infected, mankind since the end of the Second World War, a relatively modern example of a new-style madness of our species. Some may claim that our continuing destruction of our habitat is an ingrained characteristic; a blindness beyond comprehension to the consequences of our actions. I see it in clearer terms. That the relative peace and prosperity of these last seven decades, the incredible gains in terms of medical science and human life-span, and above all our global population, have combined to bring about a growth in the demands on our planet that has taken us to a point where our consumption is now way beyond that which is sustainable. That millions of people who live comparatively comfortable lives have lost their connection with the planet, or more properly put, their connection with the laws of nature of the planet.

To further reinforce the argument that we are beyond a point of living sustainably on the only planet we can call home, consider the figures regarding the growth of the human population.

The first billion inhabitants of this planet did not occur until 1800. The next billion was clocked up one hundred and twenty-seven years later, in 1927. The third billion arrived in 1960, just thirty-three years after 1927. Since 1960 we have been increasing our presence on our planet by a billion people every fourteen years or so. Now fifty years or so after 1960 we have a global population of over seven billion: 7.183 billion[1] to be precise.

Several recent studies[2] show that Planet Earth’s resources are enough to sustain only about two billion people, at a European standard of living that is, so the global population of over seven billion is already two to three times higher than what is sustainable, stably so, over any period of time. That’s even before we consider that the typical European, on average, consumes only about half the planet’s resources of the typical American.

Yet despite the drama of these numbers, despite the daily headlines all over the world offering examples of our collective madness, so many do not sense the peril of our ways. It is almost as though we have become immune to some form of potential global suicide.

The global population of over seven billion people, from the top to the bottom in terms of living standards, are using about fifty percent more resources than our planet Earth is capable of producing. Or to put it another way: If we take the past twelve months, you and I and the rest of the 7.2 billion of us, have consumed the resources that it took the planet about eighteen months to produce. We are consuming our own resource base.

No, that previous sentence, about consuming our own resource base, despite the truth of the statement, comes over as too bland, too unemotional, to my way of thinking. Let me turn to E. F. Schumacher and one of his quotes: “Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.” That says it much better!

It could be argued, and frequently is so argued, that these are the end times for mankind, the end of the era of materialism and consumption, that we are past a number of critical tipping-points, past any chance of saving mankind from massive and widespread extinction. I would admit to being drawn to this ‘end of the world’ chant because whichever way one looks the challenges and problems far outweigh the solutions. But there’s another quote that frequently tickles my consciousness, the one that goes, “Never underestimate the power of the unintended consequence”. I have no idea who penned it but that doesn’t weaken the power of the quotation.

What I sense, in some barely-conscious manner, is that the interconnectedness of all living things, and I use the term interconnectedness in the broadest way possible, is the power-house, the engine, of huge unintended consequences that will illustrate the unarguable logic of Mr. Schumacher’s quotation. Because soon nature will remind mankind that we are part of nature, not in charge of nature. Nature will not only offer the solution to our present massive imbalance with our planet, but will enforce it.

Of course, I have no idea what nature’s solution will mean to me and my loved ones. Maybe being born a 1944 baby, I will not live sufficiently long to see the future clearly. However, of one thing I am clear. The sooner every human being starts living a life of balance with the planet, starts learning the way to live from all of nature including our nearest companions, our dogs, then the sooner the power of interconnectedness redeems us all.

It takes an ancient proverb from a people that lived in harmony with the planet to speak the truth. We ignore it at our peril.


[1] Estimate as of 2013 by the United States Census Bureau (USCB.
[2] WorldPopulation.org website

1,484 words Copyright © 2014 Paul Handover

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