Always a good read, a guest post from Gary Kline Let’s Make A Deal By Gary Kline My life’s path, as it passed through a strong affinity for nature and wildlife of every sort was influenced along that route by numerous people, but especially by my dad and grandma and certainly that interest was encouraged by my mother. My dad was an avid fisherman and, to a lesser extent a hunter, but he was sympathetic to the cause of conservation. He certainly understood that if we don’t protect and conserve fish and game we won’t have any to hunt or catch. We shared an appreciation for the need to look out for the fate of wildlife and their living conditions. We were conservationists. The word environmentalist had not acquired any particular significance or emphasis back in the 50s and 60s. We both shared in reading the monthly publication of The Iowa Conservationist. We went to see travelogs about nature in foreign lands and always took in the conservation exhibit at the Iowa state fair. My grandmother on my dad’s side loved to travel throughout the west and northwest. She was a great lover of the beauty of nature. I still have a thick collection of Arizona Highways magazines she passed on to me when she probably realized her journeying days were over. She knew I love beauty, maybe more than truth. Appreciation of beauty and beauty in nature, I think you accrue on your own. Shakespeare and Socrates taught me about truth and honesty. My pursuit of nature, be it birds, insects, frogs, rocks or whatever was at first self-initiated, then stimulated by involvement in Boy Scouts and then in the Audubon Society. I knew a lot about these things. You might say it was second nature for me. I don’t know how anyone can stand life without a connection to the beauty and awe of nature. I excelled in high school biology then went on to study biology in college and again wildlife management after getting out of the Air Force and having been to a number of places around the U.S. and in Asian countries. The thing about being a conservationist is that you go through life with a heavy heart as you see nature, wildlife and their environments losing out over and over again with few victories for your side. The assaults and insults are worldwide and you see the whole planet deteriorating at the hand of humans and their mostly heedless, destructive activities. I find humans a big disappointment. We are supposed to be the smart species. Indeed, our species’ very name, home sapiens means “wise man”, a title much undeserved. Wisdom is different from mere smarts. But in any case, we don’t act judiciously, even when we see we are putting ourselves in peril, never mind all the millions of other species entitled to share this once perfectly-suited planet for all the marvelous life forms that evolved over the eons to inhabit it. For that matter, never mind is what we humans, on the whole, do best. Although we claim it all for ourselves, our species is entitled to only a certain amount of room on the planet. It’s hard to know who or what to blame for the biggest blunder a species (us) ever made --- the invention of agriculture enabled us to invent another destructive, detrimental activity known as civilization with its accompanying and generally thoughtless feature of development. According to Albert Bates in The Biochar Solution (p.195): “Roughly one-third of the land surface of the planet is occupied by human settlement in various stages of development. Another third is forest, which is shrinking, and the remainder is desert, which is expanding. All of the world’s deserts at one time supported vegetation and would do so again if the freshwater and respite were available. Water has become critically important for our future, and to combat climate change, we will need to expand forests, which preserve fresh water, and to hold back the desert. That new knowledge can inspire us as we begin planting trees and making terra preta soils.” History is rife with civilizations unable or unwilling to recognize and rectify self-destructive tendencies. Ignorance and selfishness rule. A classic example is what happened on Easter Island. The pugnacious and quarreling inhabitants cut down every tree before thinking to leave some for canoes to evacuate when the island’s soils, resources and food supply ran out. Recognizing this and that we are outnumbered, we who are conservationists and environmentalists and who wish to see our species living lightly and compatibly with nature, the planet and its delicately comprised ecological systems, are unavoidably distressed and resigned to a losing battle when it comes to protecting and preserving nature. It’s not as if we can do without a well-functioning planetary ecosystem. Put it this way, neither I, nor you, built that. Humans have a proclivity to see everything in terms of their own interests and rights as coming first. What about nature and the millions of species in her custody? Does not nature have rights? This used to be a big world with lots of room and resources. It grows smaller every day. Our species, on the way to 8 billion and paying no serious attention to quelling that exponential rise, has become a menace to all of Earth’s precious life, including ourselves. How much land and resources, including the oceans (there’s really only one ocean), rightly should be given over to human use (and abuse, as I see much of it)? The reciprocal of that question is how much of the planet rightly should be given over to nature and left in as natural a state as possible. Until recently I had never thought to look at it that way. Looking at it cosmically, as if some all-knowing outside entity was making the call in the best interests of all species and for the integrity and longevity of the whole system, what would be fair and prudent to allot to nature? I don’t know who that cosmic judge would be, but I submit we somehow need to make that decision. Let’s make a deal. How about we split it 50/50? Lets accord nature half of all terrestrial and aquatic habitats. Let’s delineate and set aside, for all time, half of each major habitat type in an equitable manner that assures there is a fair consignment of high and of low value habitat or property to each side. Humans get half and nature gets half. Now, that’s settled! P.S – Either we make a sustainability plan such as this for survival or we might as well make a plan for extinction and get the funeral arrangements out of the way. GK © 2013 Gary L. Kline All Rights Reserved Addendum A quote from the guy who persuaded Franklin D. Roosevelt into building the atomic bomb that ended World War II. “Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.” Albert Einstein
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:08:46 +0000
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