Opinion: Pity Earth’s Creatures

AESOP, the fabulist and slave who, like Scheherazade, may have won his freedom by the magic of his tongue and who supposedly shared the Greek island of Samos with Pythagoras 2,500 years ago, nailed down our fellowship with other beasties of the animal kingdom. Yet we seem to have reached an apogee of separation since then. The problem is, we find ourselves quite ungovernable when operating solo, shredding our habitat, while hugging our dogs and cats as if for consolation and dieting on whole-food calories if we are affluent enough. Google Earth and genome games also lend us a fitful confidence that everything is under control. We have Facebook, GPS apps, cameras on any corner, week-ahead weather forecasts round-the-clock on-screen, repair crews ready to restore "power" if it ever flickers out.

Power to the people is a worldwide revolutionary slogan advancing democracy, but presupposes a more ancient meaning: the prehistoric conquest of every other vertebrate on earth. When I lived on Samos myself in 1965, I heard about perhaps the last wild leopard killed in Europe. It had swum across the strait from Mount Mycale in Turkey, only a mile or so away, presumably a bachelor seeking virgin territory, and when discovered and chased, had taken refuge in a cave, where the Samians promptly walled it in to die of thirst. Wouldn't you have done the same? I suspect that Aesop, however, might have advocated setting it free to garland the 27-mile long island (and thus Europe) for a few more years with a last whiff of the eons preceeding modernity.

Sadistic flicks, sea rise, assassination drones: are we up to playing God? A tectonic shift in civilization has never happened this fast before, and we're still part-chimpanzee with double Ph.D.'s in trial and error. Invent pesticides and see what they do to our organs, sell civilians assault rifles and count the schoolhouse shootings, experiment with longevity and economics, friendship and cellphoning. By our own account we're pigs, yet bearish, owly but mousy, catty and bovine. We beaver at work, hawk merchandise, and ape others by parroting them. We're lemmings, wolfish, snakes in the grass, weasels, bucks, hens, leonine or sharks. We're beaky or tigerish, doe-eyed, raven-haired, foxy, chicken-hearted, slow as a tortoise, meek as a dove, sheepish, dogged, old goats, goosey, sitting ducks or vultures. We butt in, bull ahead, change our stripes or spots, strut like a peacock, weep crocodile tears, ram through or swan about. We're rabbity, calf-eyed, we beat our chests like gorillas, buzz off, or act like a jellyfish.

Aesop would perk his ears, pick up a pen at this thicket of still current figures of speech. But what he, Aristotle, Linnaeus, Darwin, Emerson, Kipling would make of what's going on should give us pause. I don't mean whether they would like e-mail and "the cloud" so much as the price in demolitions paid, the dramatis personae wiped out. Even Isaac Newton, sitting in his apple orchard, might wonder, "what have you done with the birds?" — was it a fair trade? Will Robert Frost be the last great poet to notice that leaves are gold before they're green? And his beloved stars; where are they? Would Newton need to fly to Australia or the Andes to gaze at them as before — and feel the magic of the plane was worth it? So much of creation has gone up in smoke to produce glass skyscrapers flocks fly into, superhighways, on-demand electronics, seven billion people in flabbergasting densities, that it's anybody's guess what these luminaries would say. Would they prefer what used to be called "God's green earth?"

It's a steeplechase, hell-for-leather and exhilarating, for the highest stakes, but not knowing where we're going. Call it progress or metastasizing, what we have done as a race, a species or a civilization is dumbfounding. Every inch of the planet is ours, we claim, and elements of clear improvement are intertwined with cancerous excess: the two-car American dream empowering women's independence but engendering horrendous African droughts. Would Emerson and Aristotle find their hair standing on end, or would they grin so hard their mouth muscles finally wore out? And Darwin's reaction to the tsunami of discoveries succeeding his? A ride on the subway, a month of inquiries, a walk in the park? "Is there any nature left?" he might ask, without concluding if he was pleased. Planes high as the sky, kids with instant gratification from fingering a gizmo, and no gangrene. The seethe dizzies us, also (two billion people were alive when I was born), though we're acculturated to extraordinary amounts of disorientation — the steely shriek of wheels underground, hostile searches at airports, changing lanes in heavy traffic at a mile a minute, sudden bureaucratic notifications — without blowing a fuse. Strokes and heart attacks we postpone by surgery or pharmaceuticals, plus an evolving tolerance for stress.

Edward Hoagland is a longtime nature and travel writer, and the author of the forthcoming novel "Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse."

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Opinion: Pity Earth’s Creatures

Dengan url

http://opinimasyarakota.blogspot.com/2013/03/opinion-pity-earthas-creatures.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Opinion: Pity Earth’s Creatures

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Opinion: Pity Earth’s Creatures

sebagai sumbernya