World's Tallest Man
So anyone hear about this? It's all over the internet.
My favorite ones, though are this one and this one. The latter points out how cruel and awful it is to keep dolphins in captivity (along with all other animals, I'd say). The former points out just how much denial this culture is in by providing a dose of reality:
Meanwhile, an international expedition declared on Wednesday that a rare, nearly blind species of white dolphin is effectively extinct...
The baiji will be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction, since hunting and over fishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s...
A naturalist who organised the expedition said one or two of the dolphins may still be alive - but the species was effectively extinct.
We're fucking up so bad, and if not you and I, this awful death-obsessed culture.
It's so hard to think about atrocities outside of our "monkey sphere," but reading about individuals makes the situation more comprehensible. Killing a species- almost too hard to imagine. Being one of the last one or two baiji? Heart-wrenchingly imagine-able.
Can you think about that? Being the last white dolphin, (and probably knowing it), and being able to do almost nothing about it.
It makes me hope that one indigenous undertanding of extinction, (that species don't necessarily leave forever, but leave until the conditions are right for their return) is right. But it probably won't be in my lifetime, and damn this system for it.
My favorite ones, though are this one and this one. The latter points out how cruel and awful it is to keep dolphins in captivity (along with all other animals, I'd say). The former points out just how much denial this culture is in by providing a dose of reality:
Meanwhile, an international expedition declared on Wednesday that a rare, nearly blind species of white dolphin is effectively extinct...
The baiji will be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction, since hunting and over fishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s...
A naturalist who organised the expedition said one or two of the dolphins may still be alive - but the species was effectively extinct.
We're fucking up so bad, and if not you and I, this awful death-obsessed culture.
It's so hard to think about atrocities outside of our "monkey sphere," but reading about individuals makes the situation more comprehensible. Killing a species- almost too hard to imagine. Being one of the last one or two baiji? Heart-wrenchingly imagine-able.
Can you think about that? Being the last white dolphin, (and probably knowing it), and being able to do almost nothing about it.
It makes me hope that one indigenous undertanding of extinction, (that species don't necessarily leave forever, but leave until the conditions are right for their return) is right. But it probably won't be in my lifetime, and damn this system for it.
posted by Archangel at 10:17 AM
5 Comments:
The only "last" thing about which I eagerly anticipate reading is the last politician.
The day the elephant goes extinct is the day I kill myself.
Hey Frank,
Agreed, but maybe a few other lasts in that list? Like the last traces of dioxin from breast milk, the last bits of radioactive waste, the last acres of oceanic dead zone, etc.
Hey Marcy,
Did you see the great article about elephants on Anthropik from a little while ago? Here's the link: http://anthropik.com/2006/10/elephant-men/
I didn't know they mourned their dead in ways so similar to us.
This reminds me of I think Ward Churchill or someone else writing about how the buffalo nickel came around about the same time as the actual buffalo were just about gone.
Kind of like the polar bears and Coca-cola's caapitalization of them (I read that somewhere recently- apologies to whomever I'm not crediting for that observation).
i read a story about Tamarack Song's experiences with wolves, when he was younger. i believe he said that the conditions in the UP or where ever he was talking about had changed, and so some wolves magically came back. pretty cool. it doesn't appear to be on the site anymore, though
werebrock,
That's cool! Too bad it's not around anymore.
Post a Comment
<< Home