Donna Rasplica, Miranda McLaws, Elizabeth Montgomery and Pat Mearns are to be commended for their expressions of anger, sorrow and disappointment at the insensitive removal of the Lakeshore willows (Sept.13 Observer).
Similarly, hats-off to Ian McTavish and Sherwood Inglis for their insightful critique of our culture’s arrogant, humans-above-all-else short-sightedness and its grotesquely atavistic grizzly hunt.
Both issues are all of a piece – that is, fundamentally linked in sharing our culture’s relentless, deeply-ingrained, historical position of undervaluing and abusing nature simply as our taken-for-granted, damn-the-torpedoes entitlement to do so with impunity.
Truly, the callous willow removal and grizzly hunt – among so many other abuses of nature, past, present and, sadly, new destructive impacts likely still ahead – are no more than the predictable playing out of our deluded belief that we’re superior to, and ‘separate’ from nature.
Consequently, though we may rightly feel anger and disappointment – even disbelief – at such abuses, we should by no means be surprised by them.
Such abuses are completely normal in our distorted view of how we are to relate to the natural world.
We fully expect it to be exclusively ours, existing solely as a resource and toy, nothing more – and certainly not deserving, first and foremost, existence for its own sake.
We need to reflect on this bizarre separate-ness mind-set that only humans have value, and that only we merit and deserve moral and ethical concern – perhaps when we next breathe (hopefully) clean air, drink(hopefully) unpolluted water and sit down (hopefully) to unmodified, however real food.
Tom Crowley