We forget what it was like

[garote]

One afternoon in Tasmania, I remember stopping and thinking to myself,

"This is what it used to be like, back home. The trees are cacophonous with birdsong. The ground is electric with bugs. The rivers are jostling with life. You can't take three straight steps without blundering into the path of some new animal. Back home, the ground has been paved silent, the rivers have been fished empty, the trees echo, and you could walk all day without seeing a creature that isn't wearing clothes or blundering around in a domesticated fog."

Oakland has its appeal, and for all the danger and grime I actually enjoy living here. But I hear stories about bears wandering along the shores of San Francisco Bay and I have trouble picturing it. They were all long gone before I was even born, and it never even occurred to me that they had been there.

It makes me wonder. How much more can we lose, from generation to generation, and forget about, before we actually start to suffer, irrevocably, from the cumulative loss? Eventually we will reach a point where we will live our entire lives without ever seeing animals other than pets and livestock. The very idea of animals surviving independent of humans will seem absurd, since all the independence was bred out of them years ago.

What will we miss? Can it be described?

Comments

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

Something I discovered when I went treeplanting and lived in a tent in the bush for a few months was that humans aren't at all necessary for things to exist. There are plants and animals that are going along just fine without us.

[garote]

Of course there are. My question is, does the relative distance we must travel into "the bush", and what we find when we get there, affect on our quality of life, and perception of our place in the world? And if so, what are the consequences we face as that distance increases and that quality drops?

[lutin.livejournal.com]

speaking of: http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/

[rudetuesday.livejournal.com]

I think there would be some worrying place somewhere inside, if people had time to get quiet enough to pay attention. There might not be language for it by then, if such a state could be gained by people. There's so much rushing around, such a distrust of quiet "non-productivity", I'm not sure that's easily possible for most people.

[bluepapercup]

I think the only way to mental and spiritual health for our society (and I mean that in a COMPLETELY areligious way) is to purposely find exactly that "worrying place" inside and stare down that well of fear until we know it completely as a part of ourselves and can release it; turn that fear into conscious action.

We need to teach people to look in their own eyes in the mirror and ask: "Had enough yet?"