The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) told us this week that in terms of abundance, wild animal populations have lost 73% of their individuals in 50 years.
This information was disclosed as part of COP16 held in Colombia. The study comes from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), an organization that tracks a total of 5,500 vertebrates, including mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians.
These animals are distributed in 35,000 people around the world. Every two years, this variable is updated by a scientific program called the Living Planet Index.
Without being immune to criticism, this assessment has the advantage of putting numbers around a reality that we all know is indisputable. Will this bell resonate with global political decision-makers? Uncertain, because the fate assigned to the monarch butterfly does not make the vast majority of voters vote.
However, The King is a magnificent painting that was created over tens of millions of years. It is a painting of unparalleled sheer spectacle, one that took natural selection more than 3.5 billion years of creativity to create.
To develop another way of thinking, I believe it is time to replace humanity with ecology in the teachings we provide to our children.
Ecology has the added benefit of extending inclusion to the rest of the organisms that share the planet with us, the biodiversity that we benefit from being included in our extended family.
I was raised by peasant parents who celebrated their place in the biosphere in this way. My late mother claimed to be from the elephant clan. In question, the largest glider was far and away part of his patriarchal clan's totem. Thanks to this interbreeding of species, ancient people around the world have contributed to the blurring of the boundaries that separate humanity from animals and plants.
Unfortunately, this interspecies brotherhood has taken a turn for the worse since our species has rejected its animality to better focus on its navel.Homo sapiens (A wise man). This name is also a prima facie witness to our tendency toward anthropocentrism and self-exaltation.
The man who classifies the living decided to call himself the “wise man.” As Grandpa Gaspé says, he doesn't think he's really petty.
Our species' lack of discernment has accelerated since we abandoned nature and expelled the element of mystery in our understanding of the world and our relationship with the rest of creation.
The example that comes to mind here is the relationship that the Maasai once had with large herds of herbivores so famous in wildlife documentaries. These semi-nomadic pastoralists who now inhabit southwestern Kenya and northern Tanzania regard the large herds of herbivores that roam the Serengeti plains as “God’s cattle.”
They believed that these animals were under the supervision of the Creator and that they should leave them alone. The Masai revered elephants and attributed spirits to them. This poetic representation of the animal world mixing nature and spirituality was corrupted by contact with Europeans and their highly utilitarian view of nature.
Also, when the Industrial Revolution arrived, elephant ivory unfortunately found a place in their factories. In order to better reduce these large elephant teeth to the rank of simple goods, they were given the name “ivory.”
The life-embodying strategy allows humans to kill and pull out the large teeth of these magnificent animals without lighting up the sympathetic neurons in their brains.
In fact, it is less guilt-inducing to consider yourself an ivory hunter than an elephant killer.
These fangs will turn into car steering wheels, gears, toothpicks, boxes, buttons, billiard balls, tea and coffee pot handles, piano keys, and many other commercial items. To produce all these goods, more and more elephants had to be slaughtered.
Even the Maasai who once saw the divine in these chick skins succumbed to the lure of ivory after British colonization.
Biologist Carl Safina says that since Roman times, Africa has lost 99% of its elephant population. The fate of lions, rhinos and other large mammals was equally sad. Suppose that the Creator was not a good shepherd of his livestock. Unless he prefers a bipedal predator who says the Lord is also his shepherd.
In moving away from religion, secular human societies have never developed greater compassion for the animal world. On the contrary, by removing superstition from natural phenomena, humanity fell into naturalism.
Here, divine power has been replaced by the power of reason. Nature then became a simple object of observation and rationality. Welcome also to the era of humanity!
Here is a chosen being who exalts himself and raises his feelings to the level of worship. However, when we consider ourselves the star at the top of the family tree of creation, it is important not to highlight our lack of discernment.
This lack of wisdom in our species, the famous great leader of the Lakota tribe who lived on the great prairies of western America, Sitting Bull, Tatanka by his real name, already expressed it poignantly in 1875: “Look, my brothers, the spring has come, and the earth has received the warm embrace of The sun and we will soon see the fruits of their union. Every awakened seed and every living animal we too owe our existence to this mysterious force and for this reason we give our loved ones, and even our animal neighbors, as much right to live on this earth as we do.
“However, listen to me, my brothers, we must now reckon with another race that was small and weak when our fathers first encountered them. And today it has become a tyrant.” […] They claim we are all safe. They want the land for themselves and fortify themselves against their neighbors. They disfigure the earth with their buildings and waste. “This nation is like a torrent of melting snow coming out of its bed and destroying everything in its path…”
It is unfortunate that this drift, which the leader condemned, has spread and become the norm throughout the world, with disastrous consequences for living beings.
When humans kill the last animal, chop down the last tree, and pollute the last drop of water, they will finally understand that money is inedible. This is what the original wisdom said differently to warn us of this disaster that is approaching us at high speed.
