The whaling industry is unquestionably cruel. But by outlawing that business, one promotes an expansion of the whale population leading to more incidents of schooners and sailing boats running into whales during the night hours and an increased mortality rate among sailors. Although the human deaths are a direct result of the well-intentioned efforts of the anti-whaling activists, the Green Peace pirate/warriors never, ever think of it that way.
Bags of rice flown to Ethiopia as a result of ads showing wide eyed starving children with bloated stomachs save many of these urchins who grow to breed and create a new generation of children of whom a large percentage surely will die of starvation. It can be shown with absolute certainty that funding these charitable contributions leads to the inevitable deaths of tens of thousands of next-gen humans, but those giving from the heart and the well-meaning charities themselves never think of it this way.
Anti-abortion ads help save countless unwanted babies in a world of seven billion humans that are inexorably squeezing out countless species of animals, some of them, like gorillas and elephants, arguably sentient as (or more) than humans. What an odd, backwards, cold way to look at a multiplication problem...the alternative, however, is to look the other way, that is, until every way you turn you're staring at another person staring back at you. War, of course, is a solution, but the choice between killing the unborn or killing them after they grow a little is tragic either way. Which is avoidable?
And if so, how?
So there's work to be done and hard choices to be made; it is not as simple as passing legislation to save the sand dab or the spotted owl, not accurate to believe we are simply saving the whales or the rain forests, not enough to act empathetically in the pretense of solving an immediate problem while neglecting a grim, looming future. If we are to be the custodians of the earth, we have to begin to accept the responsibilities of our so-called sentiency.
There are futurists who say not to worry, there are plenty planets in the universe that we can in turn overpopulate. Yes, but getting from here to there, that is the overriding problem. As my friend, the late football great David "Deacon" Jones used to say, "To play in the Superbowl, you've go to get to the Superbowl, and to get there you've got to win the playoffs." To which I might add, in the great bowl of life, we're not yet even to the finals.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
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