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	August 3, 2003

HUMILITY (Cartoon from Patrick McDonnell's 'Mutts') We humans are so dim-witted, so ridiculous. To wit: At least one of the huge out-of-control forest fires now devastating Western Canada was actually set deliberately by the Canadian forestry 'service' as a 'prescribed fire' to try to clear what they thought was excessive forest floor debris. Oops! The Bush regime, Different Strings tells us this week citing the Washington Post, has now decided its goal in the Mideast is to imbue Mideastern countries with American values, 'as we did so successfully in Europe in the years following WW2'. I'm sure this will come as a big surprise to most Europeans, and its staggering arrogance and ignorance shows why, to most people outside the sheltered US neocon community, neocon expansionism is a greater threat to world peace than all the Mideastern terrorists and tyrants combined. The recent obsession with privatizing everything, which Blog Baby has been following, our uniquely human perception that our species (and more specifically the elite 1% of our species that has acquired more than half the world's 'property') 'owns' everything and every creature on the planet and allows small nature preserves to remain only as long as it's expedient, is now out of control, as Bush and his corporate buddies declare war on nature and the very concept of shared, public, common property. We think we're the Crown of Creation, the pinnacle of evolution. But as Stephen Jay Gould shows in Full House, we are a mere pimple on the evolutionary tree of life, a very recent and unexceptional species very poorly suited to living in harmony with the rest of the species on this planet. So because we were such pathetic losers in the game of life on Earth we decided 30,000 years ago (so recently that on a mile-long histogram of life on the planet, it would show as a single dot at the right end) to quit playing and start our own game with our own rules. And thanks to our stupidity, our belief that somehow we can live 'apart' and independent from all other life on Earth, we have destroyed the planet, eliminated most of the other species of life, we are choking in the mess of pollution and overpopulation we have created, and our unsustainable and absurd separation has made us all mentally ill, consumed with fear of nature's 'hostility'. Bruce Cockburn, in his wonderful song Gavin's Woodpile says 'I'm left to conclude there's no human answer near'. It's a perceptive, ironic statement. The point of my short story The Light Creatures was to show that we, humans, need to learn humility. Millions of creatures coped happily and cleverly with living on Earth before we newbies arrived and messed things all up. We need to study the way geese, beavers, wolves, frogs and other humble species have learned to coexist so well with the rest of life on Earth. I despair at the prospect of us learning it in time. We are not nearly smart enough. We haven't got a clue. 12:20:39 PM  trackback []  comment []

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