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