“Until
the lions have their own historians,
the
history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
-
Chinua Achebe
Corporations are the hunters glorifying themselves today. Modernity requires that we sever our connection to the natural world and pledge allegiance to the things that money can buy. We are told that the impoverishment of the soul that overcomes us can be healed by consuming the things that corporations make for us, including ‘buying’ the stories they tell us about Nature’s latest diminishment or the inevitability of the wars that profit them.
In recent years there has been a lot of talk about ecological ‘hot spots’ – pristine, endangered areas that conservationists seek to protect. The strategy is to identify places that are close to 90% degraded, then seek to protect the beleaguered remaining 10%. The assumption seems to be that this is all we can hope to achieve, that we’ll be lucky to attain even this meager success.
But when we’re talking about saving (as if it were up to us) the natural world, is it even correct to ‘strategize’? The definition of the word strategy derives from military activity: Strategy (Greek "στρατηγία"—stratēgia: from stratēg (ós) military commander, general (strat ( ós ) army + -ēgos noun derivative of ágein to lead); meaning, A high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty (Source: wikipedia). Secondary definitions refer to strategy in the context of business or games.
Do we really want to depend on a military approach to healing our relationship with the natural world? Saving small percentages of the whole does not necessarily save or even protect what remains. Even the most passionate and well-educated researchers do not know the environmental ‘tipping point’ that will cause Gaia’s demise, nor do we understand the deeper function of such things as oil, uranium, gold, diamonds, copper, and other buried substances that surely are not random or inconsequential and so must have a larger purpose, though we have not bothered to wonder what it is. Decisions and actions arising from short-term thinking do not consider long-range consequences nor do they perceive long-range possibilities. And none of us knows what resplendent restoration is possible if we set our hearts on it.
Now more than ever is the time for a wildly expansive, un-practical vision of a natural world fully restored, within an epochal, perhaps millennial time frame. Infinitely better to spend our creative energy initiating the first 500 years of an unabashedly passionate vision of full, unimpeded and uncompromised global ecological and cultural restoration and to offer ourselves to an inclusive global dialogue that will create a global vision of restoration to inform and sustain us through multiple generations of effort.
If we ‘surrender’ our vision of comprehensive global ecological restoration and settle instead for the struggle to protect tiny percentages of marine and terrestrial habitat, we allow corporations (and the culture which gives them primacy) to set the terms by which nature and nature lovers must abide. Remember that 100 years ago, commercial air travel, computers, and the Internet seemed impossible. Extinctions on the scale we’re seeing now seemed impossible, too. We’re talking here about the ‘surround’ upon which life depends. Do we really want to tell our children that the best we can manage is to save 10% or less of what remains of the intact natural world?
Within each of us is a passionate love for some place or some being in Nature that will open our throats once again to the daily cooing of gratitude for Life. Once found, that gratitude is our most reliable guide to right action. All is not lost. Let us sing the natural world within and around us back to its fullness.
