Shame on us

For the record, the ambiguous title of this blog could also be read as "Shame on the US."  I could not bring myself to publish this short blog for the last 5 long months, but here it is. The dual nightmare of tRump and his Jan 6, 2021, brutal insurrection, that prompted me to start writing is gone.  But otherwise little has changed. We are still the same completely confused, mostly blind and illiterate animals that call themselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens (Wise wise man!).  My cat has more common sense and sees nature around him more acutely than most of us.

May 28, 2021. According to my friend Brian, some dudes in Nevada got curious about a bristle cone pine tree. It was really big. They cut it down. It was the oldest formerly alive tree in the world, ca. 6000 years. This tree was older than the oldest recorded dynasty in Egypt. It was older by at least 1000 years than the oldest surviving wood structure inside of an Egyptian pyramid. Eighteen years ago, that wooden structure led me to propose an operational definition of eternity for a human civilization (5000 years). And a few criminally stupid hominids (human-like apes) with chain saws murdered it. Just like that.  Within a few hours of their empty worthless lives that will be swallowed by time without a single ripple. As if though these disgusting creatures never existed.  Now California can lay claim to the oldest living tree. These, I am sorry to say, Nevadans are still peeved. Well, around 13 of them are.  I propose to rename our species to Homo Stultus Stultus or Homo Praedator Incinerātor.

Although Sudan was the last male white rhino, he was not, actually, the last of his kind. He still had two living descendants, both female: Najin, a daughter, and Fatu, a granddaughter. As Sudan declined, these two stood grazing in a nearby field. They would live out their days in a strange existential twilight — a state of limbo that scientists call, with heartbreaking dryness, “functional extinction.” Their subspecies was no longer viable. Two females, all by themselves, would not be able to save it. 

Najin (left) and her daughter, Fatu, the last two Northern White Rhinos on the Earth.
Credit:Jack Davison for The New York Times

My friend, Rex Weyler, just sent me these words from his recently deceased friend, Barry Lopez: “We are pattern makers, and if our patterns are beautiful and full of grace, they will be able to bring a person for whom the world has become broken and disorganized up off his knees and back to life.” Also: “For some people, who they imagine they are does not end where the boundary of the skin meets the world. It continues with the reach of their senses out into the land. If the land in which they live is summarily disfigured or reorganized by industrial development, it causes them psychological pain.”  

Pain, a heart-ripping ache is what I feel writing these words. I hope that you too can weep for these magnificent gentle rhinos, and pray for them and for our ravaged planet Earth.  When I say, "pray, " I mean it in the spiritual sense, not necessarily as a religious ritual. 

Which leads me to wanting to answer in more detail this question John S. asked in a comment to the previous blog: "Professor Patzek, why would any rational human try to live in harmony with nature if that human believed God was a construct invented out of emotional necessity? Would not the human reasonably choose to grab everything for itself?"  My answer is, and why not!?

Let me start from an anecdote.  A friend of mine reported that his partner just spoke to her 87-year old mother, who exclaimed: "I'm sick of praying; it's time for someone to act!" So how can we act to leave only the beautiful ripples across a blink of time that is given to us on the Earth?

How many times have you heard this tired cliché: "Our thought and prayers go to those who just tragically died."  (In yet another (1/9/2021) murderous rampage, while the bodies of the victims are still warm)?  Well, are merely our thoughts and prayers with the dying rhinos?  With the Earth under siege? Or should we do something?  If so, what are our main motivations?