The Elephants in Our Living Room, Part 1

Photo Courtesy of the World Wildlife Fund

Part One of a Four-Part Post

They are here, shoving against the sofa, blocking the doorway, rattling the window shades. Keening. Grieving.

From my bedroom, huddled under blankets suddenly gone heavy, I hear them, feel them. Maybe one is sitting on me, like that nauseating commercial with its endless parade of elephant-exploitation. The breath of life in these mammals is fading fast.

My sister called from Northern California. The elephants have also found her; her heart is breaking too. She lives in a lovely senior residence--a labyrinth of small apartments stacked in five connected high-rise buildings, zig-zagged around a leafy commons. These behemoths can weave their way through any jungle, seeking shelter.

But . . . but they left their tusks in San Francisco: a lament that catches in our throats. In certain mazes of the nearby city, ivory is Big Business, ivory is King. Every elephant is Dumbo, a lumbering, floppy-eared source of trinkets and ornaments.

On my back deck, a tiger huddles under our large glass-topped table. Its muzzle is nearly visible, quivering silently beneath the fringe of a winter drape.

This kitty doesn't purr.

There are no lairs safe enough to nest in, on the pampas where the big cats once stalked freely, sinews taut with propulsion. These hunters long ago became the hunted. The haunted. Bred to be killed. Killed to be bled. Tigers are a rare prize now, a trophy that goads rigorous stalking by profit-crazed poachers. Their various parts are bought and sold avidly on the road to extinction. They are nearly at the end of the road.

"This land is your land, This land is my land...from California...to the Gulf Stream waters."

Off our Gulf Coast, some beaches and marshes and wetlands are still leached with a deep, dark fringe, like blackstrap molasses spilt. The odor is nauseating. The seas are noxious, half-or-more dead―and deadly―for endless stretches, permeated with toxic effluvia that erupted from beneath them. A sudden cataclysm.

There are dolphins in my bathtub, circling tightly. They are very quiet. They have nowhere to go.

No "alternate universe" lies conveniently at hand, no pristine waters around the next bend of beach. And now the seismic drumbeat of our search for sub-sea oil is set to become our heartbeat? Their death knell.

The losses there, and yes, off the coast of Alaska and elsewhere, are uncountable. Unaccountable―both in marine life and the once-viable communities dependent upon them. Irresolvable.

Woody Guthrie never lived to see what today's exponential greed-power-indifference would do to "this land." The great trifecta that has infected everything . . . everything.

This land is not our land at all. The exploiters have taken over.

This earth is no longer our earth (although it never really was, of course; we merely  have custody of it, which is the problem we face), and soon it will be no more an elephant/tiger/rhino/great-fish/you-name-it earth. The zoos and laboratories alone will keep them from extinction.

But the earth that bred them is their only habitat: Nothing can replace the irreplaceable.

And my home is haunted by the dwindling ghosts of these stricken animals, and the countless others falling off the chain of life. My heart can hold them all. Our hearts can.

to be continued....