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My cynicism:Many of the efforts to conserve the natural world - wild habitats, species, biodiversity - will be in vain so long as the human population continues to increase, & so long as people continue to practice aggressive, predatory economic systems.
It is a propensity of humans to destroy exuberance in the natural world: the schools of fish of the Grand Banks, the salmon migrations of the american northwest & northeast, the Bison herds of the american plains, the flocks of Passenger Pigeon, the elephant herds of Africa, and the list goes on.
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Quotes:"The strangest thing about seeing a living Ivory-billed Woodpecker was that it was just a bird, albeit a magnificent one, going about its life in the swamp. We humans tend to project our angst about the damage we have done to our natural world on icons of loss, like the ivorybill. Happily, the bird I saw was doing fine. He was cruising around a beautiful world, on a beautiful day, and although he may have been wondering if there was a female around, or how his little family was doing, he wasn't burdened with gloomy thoughts of extinction. That is our burden to bear."
Mary Scott
April 27, 2005
http://www.birdingamerica.com/ivorybilledwoodpecker.htm
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"Europe, so hard on men in uniform and women and children civilians, was easy on its birds. Through 2,000 years of settlement involving the wholesale conversion of primeval forest to farmland and cities, not a single species of bird was documented as lost to extinction. Soldiers fell by the million, but the endemic birds of England and the continent endured.
Across the Atlantic, the story was different. "In North America, within 200 years," writes John K. Terres in his Encyclopedia of North American Birds, "largely because of the growth of the human population, early market hunting of some species, and destruction of the environment, this continent compiled the worst record of any comparable land mass in the world for exterminating its birdlife."" -Edward Kanze, "September 1914 Point of No Return" Birdwatchers Digest October 1998: p49.
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When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.
--Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching
So we will consider your offer to buy our land.
If we decide to accept, I will make one condition - the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.
....
What is man without the beasts?
If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of the spirit.
For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man.
All things are connected.
-attributed to Chief Seattle
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The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.
-Chiksika, elder brother of the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, 1779
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Auguries of Innocence
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.
A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro' all its regions.
A dog starv'd at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A horse misus'd upon the road
Calls to Heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fight
Does the rising sun affright.
Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from Hell a Human soul.
The wild deer, wandering here and there,
Keeps the Human soul from care.
The lamb misus'd breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.
The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won't believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever's fright.
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov'd by men.
-William Blake
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Now, it never seems to occur to these far-seeing teachers that Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit -- the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilaization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned. This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever. Plants are credited with but dim and uncertain sensation, and minerals with positively none at all. But why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation of a kind that we in our blind exclusive perfection can have no manner of communication with?
-John Muir
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In remembrance of all our fellow creatures that have been driven into extinction at the hand (mind) of humankind (us).
Endangered & Threatened Species of Pennsylvania, PGC version (Comprehensive)
Endangered & Threatened Species of Pennsylvania, DCNR version
Endangered species
Electronic Zoo - Birds
Electronic Zoo
Some more thoughts...
Tim Vechter
for comments, additions, corrections, suggestions, etc.
This site started: August 1997
Home URL: http://www.westol.com/~towhee/redtail.htm
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