Hi Joyce –

I’ve come to the conclusion that we cannot speak about saving any species as an isolated act. Conservation is integrally linked with education on the value of our natural resources, economic development, income distribution, politics, war and peace. People are very short-sighted. Until we see that we humans are only one piece of the pie and that we’re shooting ourselves in the head (please excuse my mixed metaphors!) if we eat all the rest of the pie, we’ll continue on this self-destructive path. And that’s why, to paraphrase what you wrote, we’ve got to keep on keeping on trying to bring some sanity to this world!

Joyce, Amy, I couldn’t agree with you more. Maybe as a species, our brains are large, but studies have shown, we use only about 20% of our capaciy. Perhaps this helps to explain our collective stupidity. They say the better educated people are, this will reflect in their chosen leaders…well, need I say more on that. So, what explains the lack of compassion in society today, you don’t need a high IQ or college degree to feel the suffering of all creatures. Why this disconnect with nature? Just today, I read that there is a severe drought in Northern Uganda, troubling as it has been brought on by climate change, thousands are dying, mostly the very young and the elderly. Which leaves me to the crux of all these problems Joyce mentioned, too many people. Plain and simple. I tried a couple of months ago to raise awareness on this unpopular subject. Why people equate family planning with being antisocial, I’ll never understand. Until this #1 problem is addressed, climate change will only rapidly accelerate. Loss of habitat will increase, and water will be the most fought over resource on the planet.

That is so true what you said Joyce. I agree that if we can’t save the elephant, how on earth are we going to be able to save all the other species the elephant shares his/her habitat with? We need to understand that we are causing the extinction of thousands upon thousands of species and we are eventually going to cause our own extinction if we continue like this. We all need to wake up and take care of the only home we have, mother earth. It would be such a tragic loss to loose one of the earth most magnificent creatures, the elephant.

Joyce, what a fantastic article and great thoughts! I couldn’t agree more, especially in regards of our world population!! - Here is also another thought. I read an article this morning on BBC about a guy who did a documentary on how and why people still feel the need for big game hunting…after all the research he still couldn’t wrap his head around it and so can’t I! He ended his article with a great sentence…..”In the end, there may be no satisfactory answer to the urge to hunt. But the more profound lesson may be one about the nature of empathy - that no-one wants to hurt a creature that he’s got to know.”……..If humans would just get over themselvs and get a sense that ALL is connected and it isn’t always humans who are the most ‘intelligent’ ones!!

Amen, Joyce. In the last two years I’ve changed just about everything about the way I live in order to reduce my personal impact on my planet. But there’s more I can do and that’s one of the reasons I volunteer at the zoo - I figure if I can reach one person and get them thinking about how they live then perhaps it’ll snowball. But there are people like my Dad, whom I love dearly, who listen to me and say “But I want to live comfortably, I don’t want to be inconvenienced.” And there’s the rub, eh? All the information that Al Gore and others have been preaching to us for years is, pardon me, an inconvenient truth that few want to accept. I don’t feel any joy now when people at work or friends announce they’re having a baby - all I can thin k is that it’s insanely selfish to continue overpopulating and already stressed-to-the-max planet. As a good friend of mine says, “We’re the apes who are too smart for our own good.” I think what has happened to human animals in industrialized nations is that we’re completely disconnected from nature. There’s no balance. We see the natural world as something to exploit for our own comfort and there are so many who believe the earth will keep giving no matter how much we take. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails wrote these lyrics in a recent album and I think of them often: “Shame on us, doomed from the start, may God have mercy on our dirty little hearts. Shame on us, for all we have done, and all we ever were … just zeros and ones.”

s.

What else is there to say? Sheryl, Amy, Theresa, Marie, Siggi you all wrote so eloquently your thoughts on this subject. Thank you and I agree completely. In fact, Dipesh and I had thoughts on this same issue on the Mara blog and; Balemba has the same concern on his Virunga Youth Alliance blog. I found it difficult to put my thoughts into words because the issues are so overwhelming and interrelated to one another. It is simply not realistic to seperate humanitarian issues from environmental/conservation issues. Our planet depends on the circle of life; that requires all species to participate. PERIOD!!!! And Sheryl, this goes back to that probable teenage spammer on your site. People, simply do not want to be inconvenienced and it’s not just young teenagers, I have friends that turn the other cheek for convienance sake; and I’m not perfect in that regard by any means. It’s one step at a time. Together we can do this with open hearts and open minds. Lisa

Joyce, thank you for getting the conversation going. As a person on the frontlines, we depend on you to give us your thoughts, so that we may try to help in anyway that we can. Lisa

Thank you everyone for your input. This discussion has so many levels and we need to be so well informed to do good! Everything we do has a knock-on effect that we need to be aware of. It can be overwhelming trying to stay well informed! And the consequences of what you do are different depending upon where you live. What works one place may not work another.

Last night I started on a painting - one interpretation of Romain Gary’s quote, “The elephants were the last individuals” - Perhaps I’ll post it when its done….

Unfortunately, the over-population problem is something that most people ignore or don’t take seriously, even among many progressive thinkers. Some individuals are even claiming we need more people; to grow the economy or,in the US, to support retiring baby boomers. They seem only concerned with the immediate future, not the long term. Everyone talks about global warming and the desire for alternative energy sources, solar, wind (as long as the windmills don’t obstruct my view). Hybrid cars are popular and many of us recycle. We rarely hear anything about over-population though. As important as these conservation efforts are, in the long run, they won’t matter unless we can control our population. It will only delay the inevitable by a few decades. Barbara Walters did a TV special on aging a few nights ago. Those interviewed believed, through medical advances, human life spans could be increased to 150 years. One guy even said 1,000 years! (That seems more than a little far fetched) But whether that’s possible or not, the attitude seemed to be; “it would be a great if it could happen”. Not one person brought up the problems this would cause. Or more properly, exacerbate the problems we are already facing.

Something that’s off the topic that I wanted to comment on is about humans using only 20% of our brains. I often hear it as 10%, but either way, it’s not true. We do use most if not all of our brain capacity. Just not always with the long term interest of the planet in mind. An internet search for “Ten Percent of our Brains”, will bring up many sites that deal with this myth.

Hi Doug, so nice to see you here! I went to an intuitive paining course last weekend where we were encouraged to use that “90%” of brain power. So I am running on full power now (!) I am painting again today -yippee - started on one called Floppy-Running. I am thinking of doing a series of paintings of a selection of elephant behaviors. In any case, I totally agree with you about population. Somehow it has been ingrained in us that it is not politically correct to speak up front about human population control. We have to look at this demon head on - overcome the religious, cultural, racist, economic arguements. Of course it isn’t that simple, I know. But at least it is high time to leave the reticence behind.

Joyce — I hope you’ll post your paintings here. What a wonderful addition they would make to your blog!

Joyce, I’ll really be jealous, if you play a musical instrument too! And Doug, thanks for dashing my hopes that one day I’d be smarter if only I could utilize the left side of my brain more. Seriously though, Joyce is right about this problem. It doesn’t matter to me how rich or poor one is, the color of their skin, or what they call their God.

Hello Joyce, I understand how you feel and yes we all despair from time to time and unless the human population eventually start taking a collective responsibility for our environment and all the creatures it supports it we will head for an unknown future. Thinking about this issue I realise this must be the first time in any evolutionary terms on our earth that this dilemma has finally caught up with us, after all what we and all the other animals/organisms on this planet are programmed to do more then anything else is to reproduce. I think we need maybe 5% (or less) of our brain capacity for that specific task. But then again we come to this point in time due to our larger brains and with that we all have to take the collective responsibility that comes with it. And like Joyce says we need to set aside all the religious, cultural, racist, etc arguments that comes with this sensitive subject and unlike the female elephants that will stop there reproductive cycle when the correct environmental surroundings are not there to support her offspring the human female has not got the same viable option available to her in a large part of our world. In there I feel lays probably a cause for many of the issues we are and will face in the future like poverty, economic instability and so on. Finally the mind boggles when thinking about the evolutionary process of us humans that got us to where we are today but voices are being heard out there and they are getting louder and louder so there is a case for optimism and that we all will wake up to the facts and do something about the future we all will face together, after all there are so many people out there doing a fantastic job in not just conservation but also in educating the next generation.

Joyce - In this post, you express so succinctly what many of us feel…thank you for putting it down in words so concisely…
I find that, in my own mind, I have to face the world as it is with optimism - if we did not have hope, it would be difficult to carry on - for we are striving towards something better - so we must believe it is possible to achieve it, and - as Anna says in her comment - it’s important to educate the next generation too, so that they can pick up the mantle when it’s their turn…
I’m looking forward to seeing your paintings - will you be posting some of them here? (I didn’t know that your many talents extended to painting too… How exciting!)

It may be too late to respond to this post, but two items in last weeks WHAT’S NEW news letter by Robert L. Park (professor of physics at the University of Maryland) relate to this topic.

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday 25 Apr 08 Washington, DC

2. GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS: PANIC PUTS PRESSURE ON ETHANOL.
Seemingly without warning, an additional 100 million people have been
plunged into poverty by the abrupt increase in the price of food. Most of
the people on Earth could not dream of owning an automobile. For them the
doubling of the price of wheat and rice is vastly more serious than $4
gasoline. Contributing to the severity is hoarding, the high price of
fertilizer, a shortage of fresh water for irrigation, and yes, the
diversion of food crops into bio-fuels. It’s been thirty years since the
world faced a food crisis of this magnitude, but no one seems willing to
mention the Devil’s name. A recent BBC report on the Sudan captured the
crisis perfectly: “The reality is that there are more people in one
refugee camp in Darfur today than there were in the whole of Darfur and
Khordofan in the 1930’s!” The problem is not too little food, but too
many mouths. No matter what advances are made in the human condition,
they will eventually be lost if population is not constrained.

3. HUMAN RIGHTS: POPE BENEDICT XVI ADDRESSED THE UN.
Human rights, he said, “are based on the natural law inscribed on human
hearts,” and so indeed they are, although a scientist might prefer the
term “instinctive.” Natural law also leads to women bearing children in
refugee camps at a high rate in spite of crowding and suffering. “The
pill” offers a simple technology to prevent conception, however the Pope
also warned against science that violates “the order of creation,” which
includes contraception. In societies that grant equal rights to women,
however, including availability of the pill, the population stabilizes.

Archives of What’s New can be found at http://www.bobpark.org

Doug, not to late on the day the UN set up yet another emergency task force this time to tackle the looming food crisis. Needless to say I totally agree with your observations regarding last weeks Papal visit to the US and subsequent speeches that only confirms what is already known standpoints and highlight issues that will take a fundamental turnaround in thinking to ultimately help the people most desperate of help and in need of individual choices, choices that that like you said would benefit us all… so much more could be said on this subject..