>I found something very disturbing today on this E-mail list. A NANFA
>member related a story about he could not explain to another person why
>saving a little fish (Devils Hole pupfish) was important.
Brian, I just looked at it as Martin being fatalistic :-)
Your points are excellent. You are preaching to the choir. At least the
choir that some of us are in. Unfortunately, we share this world with
fearful ignorant people. Even some people on this list think this planet
is a human playground. Those of us who have been on this list for any
significant time know that nothing really gets settled here. If you bring
up an important issue involving environmental protection, then you've got
to sit back and listen to the prattle about individual rights and
government intervention and regulation. It's like "It ain't worth
protecting unless you can eat it, sell it, or drive a 4x4 over it". Until
we can get away from our brainless ego-driven mentality and admit we can
have a negative impact on earth systems; value all other life forms as
important, exquisite and irreplaceable; develop a worldly environmental
ethic; and work towards common solutions, we are destined to continue
losing more pieces to our shared unique-in-the-cosmos home. Extinction is
forever and it doesn't look good on a resume.
A quote by Alan Watts:
"I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is
really a hallucination. What we really are is, first of all, the whole of
our body. And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can
differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a
certain kind of natural environment. Obviously a body requires air, and the
air must within a certain temperature range. The body also requires certain
kinds of nutrition. So in order to occur the body must be on a mild and
nutritive planet with just enough oxygen in the atmosphere spinning
regularly around in a harmonious and rhythmical way near a certain kind of
warm star. That arrangement is just as essential to the existence of my
body as my heart, my lungs, and my brain. So to describe myself in a
scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings... However we do not
normally feel that way because we have constructed in thought an abstract
idea of our self."
-- Jay DeLong Olympia, WA
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