"If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop
breaking it…You are what you do, not what you say. What you do makes me cry at
night…Please make your actions reflect your words.”
-Severn Cullis-Suzuki
It has
been heartbreaking to come across so many dead wild animals on the highway
lately. It is sad to watch so many people racing on the highway without empathy
for the non-human animals who share the earth with us. The cruelty of such an
act is a reflection of the cruelty that exists on so many levels in our society.
These dead animals on the highway remind me of how cruel some human beings are
to others…
Seeing these animals in such a state of
neglect and abandonment is disheartening, and it prompted me to search for the
book Rewilding Our hearts by Marc Bekoff, which I meant to read years
ago, and I kept postponing the read until now.
Even though it was published eleven years
ago, Bekoff’s words continue to be relevant, inspiring and edifying.
Marc
Bekoff is a professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Boulder,
Colorado, and he has been a researcher of animal behavior for decades; Bekoff explains
that animals have complex emotions and social lives. Animals grieve and have
families, just like we do.
Many humans like to believe that only humans
have emotions and feelings, but this is not true. Besides, our human
“uniqueness” does not give us the right to destroy everything we touch. Basic ethical
principles should be taught to children in schools.
The
toxic attitude of believing that humans have the right to destroy everything
because they consider themselves more “intelligent” and have a right to do so has
become normalized in many people’s minds to the point that debating this has become
the starting point of irrational arguments to support irrational behaviors and
poor choices that do not align with values of respect and fairness.
Severn Cullis-Suzuki was only nine years old when she launched the ECO (Environmental Children’s Organization). When she was twelve years old, she and a group of her peers raised funds to attend the United Nation’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to urge world leaders to talk less and do more. Here’s her amazing speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJJGuIZVfLM
If we take a moment to reflect on the word
“eco”, we can awaken our awareness to the fact that both the words “economy” and
“ecology” share a common root: “eco” means “home” or “habitat” in Greek. With
this in mind, we should fully commit to make sustainable choices that make our
home --the earth-- the place where we can coexist respectfully with other beings,
where we must treat the water, air and soil with care and respect.
I can
summarize this idea by using a simple quote by Chogyam Trungpa:
“When human beings lose their connection to
nature, then they do not know how to nurture their environment or how to rule
the world—which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at
the same time that they destroy one another. From that perspective, healing our
society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with
the phenomenal world.”
Hope without action is just a word. Hope
requires actions that align with ethical choices and behaviors. Marc Bekoff’s
book helps us to understand the multiple ways in which we can make this
possible.
If you enjoyed this post, you can also visit
my writing on the following books:
Second Nature by Jonathan Balcombe
Why Dogs Hump and Bees get Depressed by Marc Bekoff.
Find ways of taking action here:
https://www.idausa.org/take-action/
