The Elephants in Our Living Room, Part 3

Elephant Odyssey at the San Diego Zoo

Part Three of a Four-Part Post

A world without bees and butterflies, dancing flower to flower? It's happening.

Big Chem brews the dark magic that kills the weeds that kill the soil that kills the blooms that feed these tiny grace-notes. This is the house that Chem built.

Chemicals and escalating diseases and pests―and God knows what else―are the death of them.

There is no compensation for the demise of the honeybee. Or the Monarch, our king of butterflies, whose milkweed staple has been largely eradicated. Or, indeed, the great striped cat, pattern-perfect in its timeless life-rhythm. Or . . . in a lovely-strange, impossible sense, the elegant "caprice" that is a dolphin―so peculiarly akin to the lumbering grace of its brother, elephant. Immutable diversity, not a bone alike. But ah, such amazing tenderness; such wisdom . . . such humanness.

So unbelievably akin to us. Our shadow selves.

A frenzy of bees gone insane? A shark drowning in its own life-home-waters, fins hacked off for a few bowls of soup? The horns of a rhino ground for a useless tonic? This is a real insanity, a malignancy that metastasizes daily. The list goes on and on, swells and feeds and breeds. Different rationales, varying methods, one over-arcing mindset: Gain. Prospering. At any cost to environment and ultimately, life on earth.

Most of us, in our once-blessed LaLaLand, are not directly guilty. But by neglect we harbor the unconscionable among us―say, ivory dealers who, with virtual impunity (through native poachers) are steadily slaughtering earth's timeless herds―nearly a hundred a day, official estimate!* And what of those within our nation's boundaries who willfully trade with or provide transport for certain foreign fishing industries―despite their well-known brutality. Supporting the agonizing deaths of great fish―to stoke frivolous appetites far beyond our shores! Where is the anger at such desecration?

A forfeiture that too often comes with nothing more than a "Tsk!" or a woeful shake of head. The world is dying of Tsk!.

All this, and more―infinitely more―is transacted daily from our shores with our implied "consent." With our consent―us, enlightened America? The land of the free and the brave?

Where are the brave hiding out? God bless the burgeoning movements, the NGO's and enviro-activists, and others who carry their placards and call out our spineless ways. But they are too few, spread thin among the battlefields of this age's travesties.

We in the background of this legacy of death-based greed go on with our undeniably busy lives with little thought for such atrocities . . . offering little-to-no demand for reproach and restriction. It simply doesn't fit into the needs, the mindsets of our already complicated state of being. But by this unawareness, or passivity, or disengagement, we allow evil to triumph. And yes, our earth's historic die-off is largely that. A historic betrayal indeed.

Why the disconnect? Because we do not care enough to see enough to do enough? To say "STOP!"?         

To find a way to do "STOP!"?

to be continued...