Nature Does Not See the Changes

Birds, bears, and bunnies, in their lifetimes, know not of the past. A bird who flies into a window, breaking its neck on its migration, does not know that that the building was erected right in its flight path only twenty years ago. It does not know that the gray smog filled skies over China, and may industrial cities is not normal. A bear does not know that the garbage dump is not a natural source of food. A wild bunny does not know you put the garden there, a domestic bunny does not realize that life in a 2 ft x 3 ft cage is not normal.

Humans know the past, we know that we didn’t always have cures for some diseases, we know that smog is not natural, and certainly not healthy, or normal. Some of us have seen these changes in our lifetimes, cities where forests, fields, and swamps, use to be. We know that a sky should be blue, not gray. We know that former wildlife tracts are now human habitation.

photo source  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pigeon_on_Tube_Seat_-_Hammersmith_%26_City_Line.jpg

When you see birds flying, darting in and out of tree branches, do they think to themselves that this is any more or less “normal” than flying around houses, cars, and telephone poles. Does it occur to them that anything is wrong?

Some would argue that other animals do not have the intelligence we do, and therefore cannot know that something is right or wrong. At the same time though, we also say children born to poverty, or to a warring nation, know nothing different. We say that people living in smog covered nations do not know any different until we show them pictures of what it use to be like, or what it should be like.

photo source http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pushkar-bear_and_handler.jpg

We only know something is wrong, or has changed, if somebody tells us. Kids grow up thinking technology has been around forever, until we tell them it was not so.

Perhaps they are blessed, the birds, the bears, and the bunnies, who are not aware of what people have done to the planet. Or perhaps we are blessed that they have not united to take back their space. After all we mostly kill them if they happen to wonder onto what was their space, that we have now claimed as ours. We call them “pests”, or “dangerous wild animals”.

Sure we have done tiny good things, putting out bird feeders, and bird houses, but it barely compensates for the damage already done, introducing non-native species, poisoning insects, destroying habitat.

photosource http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rabbit_in_cage.JPG

Other animals don’t know any different, but we do! We can change things. We know how, but we still do not do it. We could drive less, we could consume less, we could stop buying things made overseas where pollution laws are lax. But we don’t. Maybe we are waiting for somebody else to make the changes, or because we did not see it happen we are not touched by it, the same way the bird who does not know that flying among the telephone poles is any more unnatural than flying among tree trunks.

If we do not act now, our children will be like the birds, bears, and bunnies, they will grow up thinking that stress is normal, that crowded streets are to be tolerated, that humans have the right to be anywhere on the planet at anytime, and can kill anything that gets in their way. Our children won’t know what a blue sky is, nor will they know what a natural forest looks like, they will not be able to be 24 hours without their cell phones.

We can show our children what the past was like, we can hint that some of the things in the “simpler times” were good when compared to our high-tech, high-stress lifestyle. Unlike birds, bears, and bunnies, we remember the past, we record it, we should not let it die to become unfamiliar to our children as it has to other animals who will never know what the lives of their ancestors was like.

Other Links on how Humans have Changed the Shape of Nature

How An Entire Sea has been Lost

The Holocene Extinction Event

What is Killing Pigeon Lake?

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