Quotes
From One of Our Most
Beloved and Treasured Teachers
The greatest danger to our future is apathy.
Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and
spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking,
imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born. . . . These cultural
mind prisons. . . . Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace.
So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group
membership than to the "global village" we would propagate prejudice
and ignorance.
It honestly didn't matter how we humans got to be
the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What
mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to
go on destroying God's creation, fighting each other, hurting the other
creatures of the His planet?
How can you stop yourself from yelling and
shouting and accusing everyone of cruelty? The easy answer is that the
aggressive approach simply doesn't work.
Most of us don't realize the difference we
could make. We love to shrug off our own responsibilities, to point fingers at
others. "Surely," we say, "the pollution, waste, and other ills
are not our fault. They are the fault of the industry, business, science. They
are the fault of the politicians." This leads to a destructive and
potentially deadly apathy.
There is a powerful
force unleashed when young people resolve to make a change.
You cannot get through a single day without having an impact
on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide
what kind of difference you want to make.
We have the choice to use the gift of our life to
make the world a better place — or
not to bother.
*****
Michael Pollan likens consumer choices to pulling single
threads out of a garment. We pull a thread from the garment when we refuse to
purchase eggs or meat from birds who were raised in confinement, whose beaks
were clipped so they could never once taste their natural diet of worms and
insects. We pull out a thread when we refuse to bring home a hormone-fattened
turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. We pull a thread when we refuse to buy meat or
dairy products from cows who were never allowed to chew grass, or breathe fresh
air, or feel the warm sun on their backs.
The more threads we pull, the more difficult it is for the industry to stay intact. You demand eggs and meat without hormones, and the industry will have to figure out how it can raise farm animals without them. Let the animals graze outside and it slows production. Eventually the whole thing will have to unravel.
If the factory farm does indeed unravel - and it must - then there is hope that we can, gradually, reverse the environmental damage it has caused. Once the animal feed operations have gone and livestock are once again able to graze, there will be a massive reduction in the agricultural chemicals currently used to grow grain for animals. And eventually, the horrendous contamination caused by animal waste can be cleaned up. None of this will be easy.
The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.
*****
We have so far to go to realize our human
potential for compassion, altruism, and love.
Here we are, the most clever species ever to have
lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?
Someday we shall
look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we
have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?
Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent
than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they
are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect.
And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who
say they "love" animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the
flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness
just to make more meat. Thousands of people who say they love animals sit down to
enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that
could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the
terror of the abattoirs.
If we do not do something to help these creatures, we make a
mockery of the whole concept of justice.
We have a responsibility toward the other
life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the
thoughtless behavior of our own human species.
And if we dare to look into those eyes, then we shall feel
their suffering in our hearts. More and more people have seen that appeal and
felt it in their hearts. All around the world there is an awakening of
understanding and compassion, and understanding that reaches out to help the
suffering animals in their vanishing homelands. That embraces hungry, sick, and
desperate human beings, people who are starving while the fortunate among us
have so much more than we need. And if, one by one, we help them, the hurting
animals, the desperate humans, then together we shall alleviate so much of the
hunger, fear, and pain in the world. Together we can bring change to the world,
gradually replacing fear and hatred with compassion and love. Love for all
living beings.
*****
We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise
the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down
considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.
Every individual
matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a
difference. Each one of us must
take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for
living things around us, especially each other.
It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion
and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often
cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we
torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are
also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behavior.
Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we
care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.
*****
I became totally absorbed into this forest
existence. It was an unparalleled period when aloneness was a way of life; a
perfect opportunity, it might seem, for meditating on the meaning of existence
and my role in it all. But I was far too busy learning about the
chimpanzees'lives to worry about the meaning of my own. I had gone to Gombe to accomplish
a specific goal, not to pursue my early preoccupation with philosophy and
religion. Nevertheless, those months at Gombe helped to shape the person I am
today-I would have been insensitive indeed if the wonder and the endless
fascination of my new world had not had a major impact on my thinking. All the
time I was getting closer to animals and nature, and as a result, closer to
myself and more and more in tune with the spiritual power that I felt all
around. For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there
is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words
of mine can even describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and
eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected. The beauty was always there,
but moments of true awareness were rare. They would come, unannounced; perhaps
when I was watching the pale flush preceding dawn; or looking up through the
rustling leaves of some giant forest tree into the greens and browns and the
black shadows and the occasionally ensured bright fleck of blue sky; or when I
stood, as darkness fell, with one hand on the still warm trunk of a tree and
looked at the sparkling of an early moon on the never still, softly sighing
water of Lake Tanganyika.
*****
There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we
can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that
life is nothing more than a “tale told by an idiot,” a purposeless emergence of
life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive
species that we call Homo sapiens—the “evolutionary goof.” Or we believe that,
as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “There is something afoot in the
universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.” In other words, a
plan, a purpose to it all.
Only when our clever brain and our human heart
work together in harmony can we achieve our true potential.
We still have a long way to go. But we are moving in the
right direction. If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with
love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral
and spiritual evolution—and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity.
So, let us move forward with faith in ourselves, in our
intelligence, in our indomitable spirit. Let us develop respect for all living
things. Let us try to replace violence and intolerance with understanding and
compassion and love.
*****
Trees are living beings. And they have their own
personalities... There are the young, eager saplings, all striving with each
other... If you put your cheek against one of those, you almost sense the sap
rising and the energy.
— Jane
Goodall
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