Sanctuary Movements, part 8

Farms vs. Animal Rights

In the U.K., the Government’s Chief scientific advisor, John Beddington, was characterized in Country Life as suggesting that “the amount of land available could only be increased through deforestation, which nobody wants.”²⁸

Together, between the projections of the U.K. and New Zealand, this scenario becomes reminiscent of the good Reverend Thomas Malthus, whose draconian predictions of mass starvation, did, in fact, take place, specifically in China and Ireland during the course of the 19th century. Moreover, in the absence of good population policies (see Dancing Star Foundation video) in nearly half of all countries, we have seen a continued trend towards more than two children per family worldwide, and a continuing increase that, as yet, has no food remedy, particularly in countries like New Zealand that have all but dashed the prospects for genetically modified foods to increase yields²⁹, not that anyone was looking to New Zealand to save the world from hunger. If anything, New Zealand’s statistics from its potent agricultural sector are the envy of most other nations. Consider the Rodale Institute report from 2003: since the demise of most subsidies in the country, New Zealand agriculture has grown aggressively in terms of its income generation for the nation’s GDP and farmers themselves; farm labor losses have been supplanted by gains from rural eco-tourism; productivity was up by nearly 6% per year between 1986 and 2003; while most of the world’s developed nations saw a 31% subsidy from their respective governments, New Zealand enjoyed a mere 1% advantage; and, most telling, 55% of all exports came from 90% of its agricultural production, whilst domestic consumption was almost entirely satisfied by that same domestic engine of rural output.³⁰ This would also suggest a very rosy tale but for the animal rights consideration underlying an otherwise impressive Act Locally mindset. But the telling mismatch between that rural energy (amplified by New Zealand’s and now most nations’ attempted embrace of the Clean, Green mantra) and the biological bottom-line is stark and confused.

Malthus’s projections were not limited to the 19th century. Most recently, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s measurement of global “undernutrition” cited 1.02 billion people deemed to be undernourished, a “sizable increase from its 2006 estimate of 854 million people.”³¹ Given the vast underpinnings of pollution, obesity, and cruelty arising from the exploitation of animals, and the ever increasing gap between well-fed individuals and those who are not, it is all too clear that there is much work ahead in the realms of compassion and basics of what it will take for any nation or community to come to terms with the biosphere and our humble role within it.

Part 7: The Farm Animal Conundrum
Part 1: Jaguar Sanctuaries: an example of dissension (the beginning)

28. ibid.
29. See “Media briefing — GMO debate,” 24 November 2008: “A media briefing on the GMO debate linked to the Ad hoc working group on the 24th of November and the Environment Council on the 4th of December 2008,”
30. See “Farming without subsidies?” by Laura Sayre, Rodale Institute, . Accessed 11/19/2009.
31. See “World hunger Facts 2009,”; See also “Resource Base Erosion and Sustainable Development in South Asia,” by Akmal Hussein, JSTOR: “Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 25, No. 33 (Aug. 18, 1990).

Excerpt from the forthcoming Dancing Star Foundation book, God’s Country: The New Zealand Factor, by Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison
©Dancing Star Foundation 2010

Sanctuary Movements, part 7

The Farm Animal Conundrum

We know that other species will not tolerate such behavior, not for a moment. Countless observations indicate that many animals, plants and insects will go to any length to protect one another. One pellucid example comes from the literature of the military. A gorgeous Labrador named Gunner used as a bomb-sniffer by the U.S. military in Afghanistan at Camp Leatherneck, “refused to associate with the Marines after seeing one serviceman shoot a feral Afghan dog.”²³

In a country that gave us Shakespeare and his eternal love of nature, how is it that today the English can vilify foxes and Muntjac deer, “Britain’s smallest deer species, cast, rightly, as a villain for its destruction of woodland floors.”²⁴ It might have easily pointed the finger at “American grey squirrels and Caribbean ring necked parrots,” two exotics that seem to have awakened some concerns at the 11-hectare Perivale Wood Forest Reserve in London, one of England’s oldest sanctuaries dominated by old oak, native grasses and a diminutive wetland.²⁵

The magazine just cited, Country Life is, indeed, a point in case with respect to contradictions. Among the most elegant and celebratory of publications anywhere in the world, a long-standing pillar of sensitivities to nature and the love and importance of rural life, it also offers a confounding study in the variety of perspectives that make any single vision or orientation with respect to biodiversity, human freedom, food, gardens and home-life, impossible to articulate. Nothing wrong with that, obviously. But what is fascinating is the magazine’s remarkable balancing act between those who would hunt and those who would not; those who would argue in favor of a “cathartic” milking process with respect to “house cow practicalities”²⁶ and those who see the exploitation of any animals for food a guaranteed disaster, both ethically and ecologically. In fact, the key editorial page of Country Life’s January 13, 2010 issue “Farming can’t just be left to old men” examines the agricultural requirements of a world in which the Earth might require as much as a 50% increase in food during the coming two decades to keep up with expanding human populations and what this might mean “if the public turns against methane-producing livestock as an inefficient form of protein conversion”. Notwithstanding the editorialist’s notion that as a species our “success” now threatens our “survival” we are “programmed to be optimistic.” Yet, in examining the case of New Zealand the writer, citing Dr Andrew West, CEO of AgResearch in New Zealand, states that while “traditionally reliant on sheep and dairy” New Zealand “will change dramatically, as forests are planted on hill country and crops are grown on flat land; but, at the most this will produce only enough food for 17 million people — negligible in relation to global requirements. Mass extinctions are inevitable.”²⁷

Part 6: Tigers: Wildlife Threatened
Part 8: Farms vs. Animal Rights

23. See “Even His Red Squeak Toy Can’t Get First Sgt. Gunner, USMC, to Fight,” by Michael M. Phillips, The Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2010, pp.A1 and A14.
24. See Country Life, “Muntjac menace” by SG, February 3, 2010, p.38.
25. See “Ancient Haven,” by Charles Hurford, Forest & Bird, Issue 335, February 2010, pp.38-39.
26. See Country Life, “When the cows come home,” by Susannah Glynn, February 17, 2010, pp.54-58
27. See Country Life, January 13, 2010, p.27.

Sanctuary Movements, part 6

Tigers: Wildlife Threatened

But one of the most iconic mammals in this threat category, the tiger, whose numbers across all eight subspecies in Asia have collapsed from at least 100,000 a century ago, to perhaps no more than 5,000-to-6,000 in the wild today,¹⁷ may find an unlikely source of at least partial genetic rejuvenation, namely, the estimated 6,000 captive tigers in China. It is believed that they may be able to produce nearly 1,000 offspring per year, despite there being no more than 50 or 60 in the wild in China.¹⁸

Finding viable habitat for such offspring, however, presents enormous hurdles. A recent WWF report states that “as few as 3,200 tigers exist in the wild in Asia” yet, in the United States, that number is exceeded by tigers kept in captivity. In the state of Texas alone, there are over 3,000 captive tigers.¹⁹ These contradictory reverberations do not offer easy reconciliations for scientists, students of nature, people on a spiritual quest, policy makers or the public at large. The guidelines utilized by international conservation agencies for determining the risk levels of species are neither singular nor universally captured in the legal fine print, let alone monitoring capacity of nations.²⁰

And while there have been any number of remarkable breakthroughs in the history of environmental sensibilities, we see more contradictions that ever before. One such breakthrough was the painting by the Italian Antonio Pisano, known as Pisanello (ca.1395-1455), “Vision of St Eustace,” ca.1440, Tempera on wood, 55 x 65 cm in the National Gallery of London. There is the Saint confronting a deer that might otherwise be hunted but for the fact the hunter on his horse sees a vision of the crucified Christ between the very horns of the stag and forever after becomes wedded to the patronage of wildlife, an archetype for conversion to non-violence (see Dancing Star Foundation video) and the reverence for nature.²¹

Obviously, the same pillar of revelatory transition from violence to non-violence can be studied in any number of great figures, like Mahavira, Buddha, Christ, Lao Tsu, Saint Francis, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Schweitzer and so forth. Yet, this bulwark of gentle genius has not effected the change nature seems to have openly and unwaveringly invited in our species. Why, for example, would an organism — Homo sapiens sapiens, capable of great art, endowed with a conscience, with remarkable acuities, find itself capable, as has been projected for the year 2050, of slaughtering a staggering “120 billion farm animals” every year.²² MacDonald’s figure is a projection based upon “current trends” as of Fall 2009.

Part 5: Sanctuary Needed: Animals under Threat
Part 7: The Farm Animal Conundrum

17. See Tigers Of The World, 1st Edition: The Biology, Biopolitics, Management And Conservation Of An Endangered Species (Noyes Series In Animal Behavior, Ecology, Conservation, And Management), by Ulysses Haber, edited by Ulysses S. Seal and Ronald Tilson,William Andrew Publishing, Norwich, New York, a Division of Elsevier 1988; See also “Corbett has maximum number of tigers,” Posted by TigerAngel, ; See also”Tigers Around the Globe, Type of Tigers Around the World,”
18. See “China says it has 6,000 captive tigers,” n.a. Yahoo! News, .
19. “Year of the Tiger Begins with Big Cats in Serious Trouble Around the World, Including Here in the U.S.,” Lee Poston, World Wildlife Fund, … See also .
20. See “Guidelines for Using the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria,” Version 7.0 (August 2008), Prepared by the Standards and Petitions Working Group of the IUCN SSC Biodiversity Assessments Sub-Committee in August 2008. . See also IUCN -Category 1a Strict Nature Reserve,” http:iucn.org/about/work/programmes/pa/pa_products/wcpa_categories/pa_catory1a/
21. See Pisanello. Painter to the Renaissance Court, by Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon, with Contributions by Susanna Avery-Quash, National Gallery, London, UK, 2001.
22. See “The Ecological Impacts Of Animal Agriculture,” by Mia MacDonald, Sanctuary Magazine, Fall 2009, pp.4-5. MacDonald’s figure is a projection based upon “current trends” as of Fall 2009.

Sanctuary Movements, part 5

Sanctuary Needed: Animals under Threat

In England, farmers and ecologists have adopted joint measures, for example, to help birds survive one of the most devastating winters in recent years throughout the U.K., namely, an initiative by farmers to leave up to 4% of their croplands fallow in the same spirit as the above referenced backyard nursery concept. Moreover, the British government has provided a “Farmland Bird Package” to compensate farmers who engage in this Campaign for the Farmed Environment.¹¹ Indeed, Pied Wagtails (Motacilla alba) have been seen venturing close to homes where they are “most likely to find insects due to the warmth”.¹²

Such examples should provide the beginnings of a blueprint for the nearly seven billion Homo sapiens, the majority of whom now live in cities, but must view themselves as in critical partnership with the billions of other people living in rural or wilderness areas, not to mention the more than 100 million other species multiplied by the millions of individuals per many of those species who all share and cohabit this sacred Earth with us.

Of course, a blueprint is a huge noun that leaves most to the imagination and cannot begin to redress the countless loopholes that all but savage the old adage, “Think Globally, Act Locally”; an exquisite injunction that presupposes that peoples’ thought can make a difference; that our actions are in fellowship. But if neither our thoughts nor our actions can be predicted, or relied upon to re-engineer gaping imbalances in the alleged natural order of things, then what? Even something as seemingly cut and dry as the banning of handguns in the city of Chicago, a notion predicated on the belief that handguns are inherently about violence and therefore do not fall under the normal guarantees of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, unleashed an avalanche of Supreme Court debates.¹³

In New Zealand the Little Spotted Kiwi, whose fate was discussed in Chapter One, was recently translocated closer to Auckland than ever. Transfers of the birds from Kapiti Island to Motuihe, in the Hauraki Gulf, an island open to the public, represents a major conservation achievement. The goal of the Motuihe Trust, according to its Chairman John Laurence, in collaboration with the Department of Conservation, is to relocate up to 40 of the Little Spotted Kiwis to the island.¹⁴

While more than 17,000 known species are globally in dire straits¹⁵ according to the 2010 Red List promulgated by the IUCN in Switzerland, and based upon a survey of 47,677 species of both plants and animals, hope emerges with an insistent message. Yes, “more than one in five of all known mammals, over a quarter of reptiles and 70 percent of plants are under threat.”¹⁶

Part 4: Scarce Habitat Areas: Ecological Danger
Part 6: Tigers: Wildlife Threatened

11. See Country Life, January 20, 2010, p.33. Indeed, Pied Wagtails (Motacilla alba) have been seen venturing close to homes where they are “most likely to find insects due to the warmth”.
12. ibid, “Keeping cheerful through the freeze,” by MH, p.36.
13. See “Supreme Court Weighs Chicago’s Strict Gun Ban,” by Ariane de Vogue, March 2, 2010, ABC NEWS/Politics,
14. See “Kiwi become Aucklanders,” n.a., ., in Forest & Bird, Number 332, May 2009, p.7.
15. See “Over 17,000 species threatened by extinction,” by Frank Jordans, AP writer, Yahoo! News, , November 3, 2010.
16. ibid.

Sanctuary Movements, part 4

Scarce Habitat Areas: Ecological Danger

Some albatross and terns can fly for thousands of miles without stopping (in fact, the Arctic tern has been known to fly 18,600 miles annually, stopping to catch fish along the way, but when they do stop to breed, they are exhausted, as one would expect, and they require safe havens, whether birds, turtles, ungulates or butterflies. To store up to 20% of their body weight as fat, birds become what is known as hyperphagic prior to their migrations, eating as much as possible, whether insects, or whatever other food supplies they depend upon, in a primordial and knowing anticipation of the metabolic output that will be required for their upcoming journeys. Along the way, many will stop to rest. Songbirds rest during the day and keep their altitudes to below 2000 feet, typically, whereas Bar-headed geese have been known to fly directly above Mount Everest, at over 29,000 feet. Songbirds fly at night. Those “stopover sites, or staging areas” as they are called⁹ are critical rejuvenation areas. Birds may spend weeks there, or just a day or two, depending on numerous factors. But what has recently emerged as an important factor in the success of these migrations are the increasingly scarce habitat areas suitable for their needs, that may be as small as 11,000 square feet, or about a quarter of an acre. Thus, backyard refugia have recently emerged in the scientific literature as life-saving spots across the planet. In a study of plant diversity, density and distribution within the most northerly of all neotropical parks, the rainforest of Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, scientists discovered that even according to a “standardized sample size” of “0.1 ha” or slightly less than a quarter acre, plant diversity can flourish, and similar findings for birds have been reported.¹⁰

If a backyard, even potted native plants on a balcony can help in the effort to restore some balance to the ecological tumult our species has precipitated, then the world is indeed watching and listening to our individual efforts. As James Cameron’s film “Avatar” magnificently points out to the popular audience, the Earth seeks balance, taking no sides. That said, compliance with said balance requires more than disinterest and neutrality. Neutrality will not save the destruction of rainforests, and while no one can claim understanding of the laws of nature, as science, bioethics, even religions debate, falter, flounder and test one hypothesis after another, opinions and test results, whether biased, divisive, or inconclusive, require effort. Effort, in turn, relies upon deeply invested convictions, whether they prove to be misguided, or spot on. Conviction is everything, even as it morphs and undergoes refinement. And because we are a young species relative to most others on the planet, we behave like restless adolescents, eager to make things happen; to unfold our wings. This collective energy can easily be harnessed, and that is the true message of hope. Examples from daily literature are legion.

Part 3: Endangered Species: Birds Around the World
Part 5: Sanctuary Needed: Animals under Threat

9. ibid., “Bird Migration Facts
10. See “Value of Small Patches in the Conservation of Plant-Species Diversity in Highly Fragmented Rainforest,” by Victor Arroyo-Rodriguez, Eduardo Pineda, Federico Escobar, and Julieta Benitez-Malvido, Conservation Biology, Volume 23, No.3, pp.734-735.

Sanctuary Movements, part 3

Endangered Species: Birds Around the World

What is important to realize in drawing such associations is the fact that songbirds (all vocally gymnastic members of the Passeriformes order), comprise some 4000 species, or nearly 40% of all known bird species in the world. To discover such attrition on one small island, is horrendous, but this is the state of the world now: global warming, poaching, utter disarray. Yet hope, which has also been thought of as the most logical conclusion to an illogical world, is our only common tool for jumpstarting some form of ecological redemption. Hence, Emily Dickinson’s extraordinary intuition and importance to the realms of ecological literacy, a phrase easily accessed in terms of many of its component parts and challenges by a singular review of the U.S. Department of Interiors “Facts” for example. Countless documents are accessible for the DOI, obviously, but what should arouse any student’s interest is the well-coordinated corpus of complex responsibilities as well as the inevitable compromises. For example, in delaying the listing of the Greater Sage Grouse as endangered (a flagship [indicator] species Centrocercus urophasianus, that has already lost at least half of its critical sagebrush habitat, with more loss projected) Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar declared “We must find common-sense ways of protecting, restoring and reconnecting the Western lands that are most important to the species’ survival, while responsibly developing much-needed energy resources.”⁵

The complexities are worth exploring in some depth because they rightly point the way, in each instance, to the same need for hope. In the case of avifauna, as of October, 2009, a known 1217 bird species were “deemed endangered or vulnerable to extinction. “New Zealand is in the path of one of eight major global migratory routes, the East Asian-Australasian Flyway that goes from the Arctic, passing through on average 19 nations before touching down in Australia and/or New Zealand.⁶

Given that New Zealand has already lost a known “32 per cent of land and freshwater birds and 18 per cent of sea birds” the pressing realities of bird losses come to our very backyards. But that, in turn, raises a different set of qualifiers, not all hopeless. Migrations of Caribou in Alaska and the Yukon, of Elk in Wyoming and Montana, Wildebeest in East Africa and — the longest of all known mammalian migrations, those of the Gray whales who travel up to 12,000 miles (roundtrip) from Baja California to the Arctic and back, feeding on increasingly-scarce amphipods on the ocean floors — all require places to rest along the way.⁷ A ruby-throated hummingbird weighing less than 5 grams “can use stored fat to fuel a non-stop, 24-hour flight across a 600-mile stretch of open water from the U.S. Gulf coast to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico!”⁸

Part 2: Songbird Migrations
Part 4: Scarce Habitat Areas: Ecological Danger

Footnotes
5. See “Protection is delayed for greater sage grouse,” by Jim Tankersley, Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2010, p.A12. See also www.doi.gov/
6. See “Alexander Gillespie: More effort needed in global strategy to protect birdlife,” October 13, 2009, nzherald.co.nz, …
7. op.cit.,
8. See “Bird Migration Facts,” by Kerry Scanlan, Vicki Piaskowski, Michelle Jacobi and Steve Mahler,” Zoological Society Of Milwaukee,

Sanctuary Movements, part 2

Songbird Migrations

Add to this the swirl of compromises, persuasions and guesswork — usually pertaining in some direct or indirect way to economic indicators — and it becomes quickly apparent that we are caught in a maze. Call it an ethical, financial, ecological, or political labyrinth. There is no light at the end of such tunnels other than that vague clamor in our hearts called hope, what poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) referred to as “the thing with feathers . . . “¹

That feather, and the hope it has always connoted, contrasts with “a Funeral in My Brain,” another one of her poems, drawing attention to her ineluctable solitude, and to the state of affairs that would see the last 22 years of her brief 56 years of life swamped by illness (eye and kidney problems) and the deaths of her father, her mother, several friends, and her nephew. The three existing Dickinson collections, a total of 1800 poems, many written in pencil, without titles, were gathered after her death by her sister Lavinia. During her lifetime, Dickinson published only seven such poems. Moreover, it was not until 1955 that the first complete set of the original poems were published together following the rediscovery of the original works by Thomas Johnson.²

Perhaps what stands out most poignantly in her three stanza poem about a bird are the last two lines, “Yet, never, in extremity/It asked a crumb of me.” It is this “crumb” that strikes at the heart, both as metaphor and reality. Crumb is one of the stranger words in etymological history, with roots dating back to Attic (ancient Greek) and becoming common before 1200 A.D., and encompassing German, English, French, Latin, Slovenian, Greek, Danish and Russian. In fact, the word seems to track with the migration of birds from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, which raises a host of contemporary provocations.

For example, the island of Cyprus is mid-way along the annual migratory route for millions of birds from Europe to North Africa, 90% of whom are endangered to various degrees. Yet, in the year 2008, poachers on Cyprus killed “over one million songbirds” that had stopped to rest, seek food and water, during their migration. The poachers killed them most likely for “culinary delicacies.”³

Such leaps — from a secluded poet buried at the West Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts — to the Mediterranean, are not rare exceptions. Songbirds have migrated from North America to Brazil for millions of years. In fact, in the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau was the first to make notes of the arriving songbirds to Concord, Massachusetts. Two later ornithologists chimed in with data extending well into the 20th century, William Brewster and Ludlow Griscom. Then, in 2008, the same year BirdLife Cyprus reported its statistics on poaching of songbirds, a study came out from Boston University that showed at least 24 species of songbirds arriving earlier in Concord than during Thoreau’s time.⁴

Part 1: Jaguar Sanctuaries
Part 3: Endangered Species: Birds Around the World

Footnotes
1. See “Emily Dickinson — Biography and Works”, www.online-literature.com/dickinson/
2. ibid. See also Poems. Edited by two of her friends, Mabel Loomis Todd & T. W. Higginson, Maggs Bros. Ltd. .. See The Poems Of Emily Dickinson, Including Variant Readings Critically Compared With All Known Manuscripts, Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 3 volumes, First Edition, 1955.
3. See “Animal Migrations May Be Moving Towards Extinction,” AWI Quarterly, Spring 2009, pp.17-18, n.a.
4. See “Are songbirds arriving earlier in Thoreau’s Concord as the climate warms?” by Libby Bacon and Richard B. Primack, Boston University, “OOS 20-2 — Shake-up in Timing in Ecological Communities: Understanding the Complexity and the Role of Citizen Science,” — See “Protection is delayed for greater sage grouse,” by Jim Tankersley, Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2010, p.A12. See also www.doi.gov/

Sanctuary Movements, part 1

Jaguar Sanctuaries: an example of dissension

Hope for a country, what does it mean, against the backdrop of a biologically-interdependent world? A nation is not one individual, but an idea held together by forces whose historical origins and continuing power-hold over state, provincial and regional governments, communities, indigenous stakeholders, neighborhoods, households and dwellers within offers solutions based upon compromises. Inevitably, for all of the chatter regarding ethics, water holes dry up, animals starve, are poached, or consumed; natural calamities tax the staying power of empathy, weariness works feverishly against the desire to do the right thing, and public shifts in sentiment and perception mirror economic fall-out, judicial perspectives and seismic shifts in the esteem that would, otherwise, lend force and pertinacity to the inspired visions of individuals.

When these tried and true fundaments of the human spirit are flattened, when reality backlashes, the power goes out, a piece of the world is inundated, even compromises are stretched to the breaking point. When debate rages over a sub-division — to protect x-number of acres — a compromise, hammered out by voters, developers, lawyers and biological opinions, or a single judge, again replicates the template of an imperfect process. There will always be end-losers and no spiritual tradition has offered much guidance, beyond faith and courage. Some argue that jaguars should be returned to the Southwest United States. Others declare that such critical habitat is not critical at all because jaguars never, in fact, occupied that region during previous millennia. There is a jaguar sanctuary in Belize, which provides geographical connectivity to thousands of other individual jaguars all the way into the Amazon, whereas Arizona, for example, is cut off, and might support all of a few individual animals. For jaguars, Arizona might simply mean a kind of zoo. But nobody knows for certain and neither Darwin nor Linneaus could have invoked any ethical imperative that should help resolve outstanding ambivalences. Darwin made much of the three endemic mockingbirds on Espanola Island in the Galapagos in 1835, but was in no position to draw ethical imperatives from their vulnerability, much less any “imperative” that might assuage today’s rapacious destruction of wildlife worldwide, in the guise of human consumption or ecological stupidity.

Part of the crisis that attends upon an individual’s perspective is the raft of data and opinion that is vulnerable to a myriad of personal or abused filtration mechanisms we have developed as organisms with personality, attitude, circumstances peculiar to each and every one of us, and genes. In other words, our pre-existing biases, desires and needs will necessarily alter any discussion or impression we are likely to glean from our perceptions of the state of the world on any given morning. But that alteration may or may not be helpful. If anything, it further addles the possibility of resolution. Resolution may be foreign to nature, generally speaking, particularly in light of the perpetual motion that are eco-dynamics. Botanists speak of climax forests, but these, too, reach the zenith of growth and die out, whilst the vast majority of a tree, unseen, provides hospice for a multiplicity of other organic activities which, in turn, offer plentiful empirical evidence for specialists, but no abiding maxims. All that can be adduced with some level of clarity is the fact mother-nature has spent over four billion years nurturing every quantum of life-fostering opportunities. By undermining those achievements, we act to destroy that which we don’t understand; much like an intransitive verb that defames and desecrates with no knowledge of the direct objects, let alone the (hopefully) received wisdom in the aftermaths of biological history involving our kind.

Part 2: Songbird Migrations

Thinking About Wilderness

Part 2: Animal rights and habitat protection

Back in November, 1979 author/naturalist John Fowles wrote a cover story for Harper’s Magazine entitled “Seeing Nature Whole” that began with a kind of heresy, as Fowles thought of it, namely, the realization that Carl von Linné, best remembered as Linnaeus, had exploded the unity of humanity and nature by forging ahead with a binomial nomenclature that would ensure a complete dissociation of feelings and needs, deep urgings and instincts from that which could be defined, and set in concrete: the natural world, and our place within it. Instead of a deep immersion in nature that could be described as metaphysical, Linnaeus had set about to define everything by a Latin, mechanistic hierarchy, as Darwin and scientific method would continue to do (and Cartesian thinkers had done up to that time). The Victorian work ethic, and its immense hegemony, abetted by iron and steel, coke ovens and steam engines, as well as the obsession with collecting specimens and stuffing them for museums, could not be more at odds with today’s realities. Fowles wrote, “I do not dispute the value of the tool he gave to natural science (speaking of Linneaus) — which was in itself no more than a shrewd extension of the Aristotelian system . . . but I have doubts about the lasting change it has effected in ordinary human consciousness.”

The question of consciousness begs an even deeper issue, namely, human conscience. For all of the practical antidotes that conservation biology and sustainability thinking have come up with to protect remaining habitat and species, the matrix of “pain” as a primary qualifier seems to have been lost in the scientific, political and economic shuffle. The pain to individuals meted out by ecologists and non-ecologists alike. By that we refer to the long-overdue recognition that an enormous gulf exists between animal rights considerations and those of large-scale habitat protection. Humans are somewhere caught out in the middle of this debate; a seasoned, churning cauldron that — for many — poses no interest or discussion whatsoever, but is self-evident. Whereas the majority of humans carry on as if they are the only species dwelling on the Earth, the others — perhaps 100 million species or more — being merely scientific white noise that occasionally delight our children seated in movie theaters or in front of their computers where a digitized lion, or shark or penguin can satisfy their thirst for entertainment, temporarily.

This is more than mere dilemma; it is core to the ethical basis of conservation that continues to elude us: how to minimize pain amongst individuals of all species whilst optimizing every hope of securing those safeguards necessary to ensure a free and future lineage of biodiversity.

By Michael Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison, Dancing Star Foundation
©2010, Dancing Star Foundation

Part 1: How much of the Earth is protected by sanctuaries?

Thinking About Wilderness

Part 1: How much of the Earth is protected by sanctuaries?

There was a time when people gave no thought to wilderness; when our orientation to the natural world was a guaranteed issue of food, shelter and avoidance of pain. Given our 120,000 odd years in the global coordination of species and the biological toll our behavior has collectively wrought, we have come a long way from that innocent past, as we approach the staggering 7 billion number of individuals. Typically, such numeric prodigiousness would be construed as a biological success, but we know it is not. As Marilyn Hempel, editor of the Population Press recently pointed out, “if fertility remains constant at the levels of 2005-2010, the population of the less developed regions will increase to 9.8 billion in 2050 instead of the 7.9 billion projected by assuming that fertility declines [those projected by the most recent United Nations Population Prospects publication].” Indeed, says Hempel, “without further reductions of fertility world population could increase by nearly twice as much as currently expected!”

Given that slightly less than 13% of the terrestrial planet and 1% of the world’s marine areas are so far protected under any of the more than thirty standard protection indicators, particularly those designated by the IUCN, this consumptive species of ours faces a daunting dilemma that every working conservationist is more than familiar with. The corridors and parks set aside for the sole benefit of the Other — Nature; or those areas explicitly recognized as protected for habitat, sustainability and development — often driven by the needs of indigenous human habitants, as well as the integrity of the ecosystems they are dependent upon — leaves much doubt as to our willingness or ability to concede something beyond ourselves, those of us who comprise the majority of human denizens, living in urban environments across the planet.

Factoring in the increasing levels of animal consumption by humans and the equation becomes yet more murky, in a world of dramatic climate shifts.

Part 2: Animal rights and habitat protection