TO Ranchers -- Please think

As my last post of 2011, a copy of the email letter I just wrote to the California Cattlemen's Association,largest such group in the U.S.

California Cattlemen's Association
1221 H Street
Sacramento CA 95814

It's clear your industry has a history, a culture, a set of principles and ethics. It's clear that your lives and the lives of your families and loved ones are interwoven into your industry.

I am one of the people you probably hate because I question human killing of "wild" animals. I write on this last day of 2011 hoping to communicate as one good-hearted human to a special group of other good-hearted humans. I know you have much-repeated phrases and thoughts for those who oppose killing of wolves and coyotes by ranchers. But please think, even for a few seconds, beyond the familiar ideas and concepts.

Some people think a new crest of consciousness is arising among human beings, a realization that our most meaningful next evolutionary move will be to reconsider our attitudes and behavior toward the "wild," toward the animals and other living beings who are our co-inhabitants on earth, our only home. You may think of us as crazies or liberals or elitists, whatever -- I ask you for a moment to rise above such labels and I will try with all my heart to think of you not as focused wholly on profit and quick to kill as a kneejerk reaction to a "problem."

Is it right to kill animals because they are predators? We humans are the apex predators on the planet. Should we be killed because we kill? As our human domain expands, areas for other inhabitants continually shrink. Contact between our species increases. Certainly some of the cattlemen's meat animals may be killed by a "wild" predator.

Is mass killing of predator animals actually the best solution? Does any human being have the right to insist on living and working on lands, or to be on adjacent lands, where all "wildlife" must be killed, for convenience and profit? Is there a possibility "their" lives are as precious as ours? Is killing of "wild"animals the example we want to give to our children and to other societies? American representatives work continuously with "emerging" companies to stop them from killing "wild life," citing ecological and ethical reasons. Not one of us owns the planet; every one of us has a profound interest in what is done by us to the "wild" places of the planet.

Does it ultimately help human life to eliminate "wild" life? Our understanding and studies about the web of life are still in early stages. But we know it is this web to which we owe our existence and on which we must rely for our future. Who will be part of the change in thinking that will be essential for ourselves, for our descendants, and for the soul of the world?

If our co-inhabitants in life and on earth WITH us cannot live on this planet, then it will be true -- sooner than later -- that we cannot live here either. We thrash about in the web of life at our peril.

If you have read this far, I thank you with all the sincerity of my heart.

Very truly yours -- China Altman

Three Elephants Freed, One solitary to go -- in Canada

I wrote the following today to the Mayor and concillors of Edmondton, Canada where they have a solitary elephant Lucy. Toronto just consented to send their three elephants to a better environment in California.

Dear Mayor Mandel -- Thank you in advance for your thoughtful leadership in helping the Edmondton Zoo to do the best thing for Lucy the Elephant. Please consider the distress being caused her as she is kept alone as the sole member of her kind. I'm sure you know that elephants are among the most intelligent, social, and emotionally-sensitive mammals on earth. And think of the example being provided for children and adults -- they will know sooner or later that keeping Lucy in a kind of solitary confinement is not that far from doing it to a human being. The idea of imprisoning animals such as elephants so people can stare at them is outdated -- more and more it is seen as cruelty.

Now that we know, we can connect ourselves to the most forward-looking crest of thought, emerging ideas that tell us, unless we change our attitude to our co-inhabitants on earth, we will lose not just our souls but the future of humanity and that of the planet. We are in a transition of thought -- being "good" to animals is no longer just a random idea -- it's an issue that is becoming planetary.

I was so happy to hear about Toronto's enlightened action in agreeing to send the three elephants to a healthier and more appropriate life at PAWS. A new consciousness is arising as it becomes clear that humanity's role must be that of stewards of the web of life and of the earth. Thank you for reading this. China Altman

Defenders Oppose Big Oil

Defenders of Wildlife asked for voices and donations to join their stalwart opposition to Big Oil in the Arctic. I said:

"The non-destroyed parts of the earth are irreplaceable. It's an easy matter for humans to gauge, drill, set afire, flood, damage, violently extract from anywhere materials they wish to sell in order to make fortunes for themselves.

It is not easy -- and mostly is impossible -- for the earth to recover. While the destruction usually happens in a short time the recovery -- if possible -- would need eons.

There is a vision beyond that of individual men who wish to make themselves as rich as kings and emperors of former days.

No matter how much money they have it is unlikely that they or their descendants will be able to flee to another planet if this one is irrevocably ruined.

A new consciousness is arising. To continue to live -- and for our descendants to live -- humanity needs to reconsider the ideas of domination and endless "conquering" and begin to see the sense of another idea: taking care and become actual rather than sham stewards of the earth and of the web of life.

https://secure.defenders.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=2295&autologin=true&s_src=3WDE1201A1B11&s_subsrc=enews_donors&JServSessionIdr004=qlefb0to24.app226a

Revision of earlier post re elephants

This is another version of my post a few hours ago:

There was more news of poachers seizing elephants and scarcely minding whether they were dead before they began gouging their tusks from their faces. On Aug 9, 2011 I thought: If we continue to murder this world we murder our dreams, our future and our souls. Elephants are among the most visible exemplars of our co-inhabitants in our planetary home. Because we can kill them, we think they rank below us in life.

We human beings have rarely "seen" the lives of the infinitely variable non-humans, from microscopic to large. It is typical for each human to spend one hundred per cent of his energy and consciousness in providing for himself. Trillions of volumes, oceans of words collectively and individually spew continually out of our production facilities as we focus on our major goal: to understand ourselves. Alongside that, rare and random thoughts for them, our co-inhabitant non-humans. How strange that we have always thought of them as nothing more than food and use, to be murdered, tamed for work, or imprisoned for "study" and entertainment.

We look outward into space and think the "new" worlds lie there. The true new worlds lie around us, beneath and alongside us. We want to go "into the stars" when we have never except in rare cases traveled "In To" the world in which we live. We kill, label, capture, and experiment upon the other beings alive with us. We have never yet imagined the opportunity for what we could know, for how far we could reach, if we looked at the world of life outside of man as a great and sacred university, larger and deeper than our minds can grasp. There is no entry into that world unless we go there in a different approach than dominion, a different approach than domination.

The richness of knowledge and consciousness that we can learn from them can be described as infinite because we in our limited thoughts are stuck with denigrating and caricaturing them, stuck in our own concept of our "superiority." It is a commonplace in the world of science fiction and most other "fantastical" thought that we humans will "use up" this earth and flee "into the stars," leaving a lifeless toxic planet behind.

Rather than understanding, we will kill it. Nothing except dominion. Question: Will we remain the species we are, all matters solved by bringing death?

In the world of usual human life as it is now lived, the richness in the world we refuse to see can never come to us, the human animal, unless we make such an evolutionary turn as we have never made before. Unless we seek with intention and courage to see how to find pathways to the undiscovered richness of the world of the non-humans, the pathways to a communication that has never existed. Who can say what it would be like if we were able to look with truly new eyes upon them, our co-inhabitants, who share the brief days of life with us? Who can say that therein does not lie the chance we never yet imagined?

Francis Bacon said we should consider all questions in term of the "uses of life." He did not specify or mean "human life." He meant life itself. Life in the greater meaning that we see, if at all, in glimmers flickering from peripheral vision. The microbe, the elephant. We declaim and declare as if our much-vaunted intellects were bullhorns, louder and louder, as if to obliterate any slightest sound from where we have never been. Indeed our intellects are more like half-broken chimes on the porch of an abandoned house. We need to look outward far beyond our human eyes, our human brains, our cultures, to look outward from our bone-bound brains to life, to the parallel lives, to the lives we think of "other" and "below," to life as we have not seen it. There is more than we have ever known, worlds of wonder and wisdom so far away and separated from us by the tangle, crash and noise of egos and cultures that most of us doubt their existence.

We do not need to go there, to the unknown worlds, for sensation or distraction. We need to go there because we are lost.

Elephants Killed for Their Tusks

There was more news of poachers seizing elephants and scarcely minding whether they were dead before they began gouging their tusks from their faces. On Aug 9, 2011 I thought: If we continue to murder this world we murder our dreams, our future and our souls. Elephants are among the most visible exemplars of our co-inhabitants in our planetary home. Because we can kill them, we think they rank below us in life.

We human beings have rarely "seen" the lives of the infinitely variable non-humans, from microscopic to large. It is typical for each human to spend one hundred per cent of his energy and consciousness in providing for himself. Trillions of volumes, oceans of words collectively and individually spew continually out of our production facilities as we focus on our major goal: to understand ourselves. Alongside that, rare and random thoughts for them, our co-inhabitant non-humans. How strange that we have always thought of them as nothing more than food and use, to be murdered, tamed for work, or imprisoned for "study" and entertainment.

We look outward into space and think the "new" worlds lie there. The true new worlds lie around us, beneath and alongside us. We want to go "into the stars" when we have never except in rare cases traveled "In To" the world in which we live. We kill, label, capture, and experiment upon the other beings alive with us. We have never yet imagined the opportunity for what we could know, for how far we could reach, if we looked at the world of life outside of man as a great and sacred university, larger and deeper than our minds can grasp. There is no entry into that world unless we go there in a different approach than dominion, a different approach than domination.

The richness of knowledge and consciousness that we can learn from them can be described as infinite because we in our limited thoughts are stuck with denigrating and caricaturing them, stuck in our own concept of our "superiority." It is a commonplace in the world of science fiction and most other "fantastical" thought that we humans will "use up" this earth and flee "into the stars," leaving a lifeless toxic planet behind.

Rather than understanding, we will kill it. Nothing except dominion. Question: Will we remain the species we are, all matters solved by bringing death?

In the world of usual human life as it is now lived, the richness in the world we refuse to see can never come to us, the human animal, unless we make an evolutionary turn. Unless we can seek with intention and courage to see how to find pathways to the undiscovered richness of the world of the non-humans, the pathways to a communication that has never existed. Who can say what it would be like if we were able to look with truly new eyes upon them, our co-inhabitants, who share the brief days of life with us? Who can say that therein does not lie the chance we never yet imagined?

Francis Bacon said we should consider all questions in term of the "uses of life." He did not specify or mean "human life." He meant life itself. We need to look outward far beyond our human eyes, our human brains, our cultures, to look outward from our bone-bound brains to life, to the other parallel lives, to the lives we think of "other" and "below." Referring to the playwright, there are more things than we have ever known, worlds of wonder and wisdom we have never imagined. We do not need to go there for sensation or distraction. We need to go there because we are lost.

I Wrote Obama Again

Dear President Obama,

In many parts of the world our power as a nation is connected to a perception of us as killers, a perception that some of our policies re-enforce. When does the time come to step up to an actual morality in stead of the high-flown language?

Conducting war with its unthinkable killing is an activity that humanity in its most enlightened thinking has moved beyond. The question is in the air: Why stay in that primitive past? Have you thought about what it actually means that we conduct and encourage wholesale massacre of the “animals” that live on our American lands?

First, consider the other man-decided deaths, the ongoing decision to kill those who have no voice: the “animals” who are our co-inhabitants in America and on the earth. American representatives work in many parts of the world to encourage local peoples to stop killing local “animals” because such short-sightedness blocks their opportunity for tourism, one of the most effective forms of infusing money into their economies. In our country we think different rules apply. "They" should stop killing "wild" animals -- not us.

We, including you -- President Obama -- speak continually of our high ideals and our humanity. How can you reconcile these ideals with allowing the Interior Secretary to sit motionless during the murders of an entire wolf pack in one of our revered places, Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies? What was the wolves’ undoing? They ate a sheep. What is the cost of a sheep compared to killing an entire pack which had become known throughout our country and the world? One of the pack’s mothers was radio-collared. The wolf cubs have been left to die.

Who can say humanity is not now in its transition time of life on the planet -- live, die or stay as a remnant? That transition time is not arriving or coming in a distant future. It is here. Will we decide to live differently in the transition or cement our feet into the unknowing past? How do we measure, for instance, the interests of emperor-rich ranchers with those of our disastrously dwindling fellow creatures, such as wolves? According to a god, to science or to mysteries the planet exists as a living organism with its own life, necessities and essential patterns. Wiser ones talk about the tipping point for the planet and therefore for humanity. Why would we think the killing of fellow “animal” inhabitants does not figure into the question? Why would be think the web, the interconnectedness of all life, is not important?

Will we eventually use means other than killing to figure out how to exist with our fellow human beings? In as much as that is an honorable and perhaps necessary aspiration why would not the same thinking be used for our fellow inhabitants, “animals”? Why is it the case that all land on the globe is owned by humans or human-sourced entities that act, elementarily, with the power of long ago emperors or kings?

Does anyone think the planet can exist denuded of “animals” except for those imprisoned for food, those in laboratories, and those in places such as zoos and circuses as a source of commercial entertainment?

Is it the destiny of humanity to kill all life because the human mind can not do other than consider “animals” as a momentary or permanent obstacle to human power and aspiration?

Please.

Addition

My comment on the war in Aghanistan was posted to Obama.

UPSET BY UNENDING AMERICAN WAR

SHAME SHAME SHAME -- The Afghanistan war has disappointed me more than all your other missteps.

“You can’t just convince them through projects and goodwill,” a Marine officer said. “You have to show up at their door with two companies of Marines and start killing people. That’s how you start convincing them.” Comment by a Marine officer to the Washington Post for its April 16 story about “signs of progress” for President Obama’s surge strategy in southern Afghanistan.

“We started stacking bodies like cordwood,” said an officer in Sangin, who like other Marines asked for anonymity to speak frankly. “And they came to a point where they said, ‘Holy [expletive], there aren’t that many of us left.’ ”

SHAME. Though I still support you, it has changed to a position of "least worse of the worst." Your actions in Aghanistan are as disgraceful as anything by George Bush. I can think of no lower thing to say. Examine your conscience. Leave your "cool" for an hour or so and get a backbone and a renewed grip on morality.

River Monsters

I sent this to the Animal Planet channel about the River Monsters show.


"I am distressed about "River Monsters." First, no animals or living creatures are monsters. That is a sensationalized and ignorant term to allure the general public, already conditioned to be attracted to fear and anxiety. River Monsters represents an atavistic and primitive approach to other-than-human life as something to be captured, exploited and killed. I expect a more enlightened approach from Animal Planet. Thank you."

Japan Relentless In Whale Slaughter

Greenpeace and others have urged us to write letters about Japanese whaling. Here is a copy of the letter I sent to five newspapers today:

In our best version of ourselves, America has been a light to the
world. Can we now decide to take a different view of the oceans and the
inhabitants of the oceans? Can we become protectors and guardians for
these waters, the greatest source of life, the largest component in the
planetary web of life -- without which we humans cannot live. Let us
call for a stop to Japan's genocidal slaughter of whales. Only
questionable commerce motivates them. There are higher goals we all
must pursue at this critical time. Please ask President Obama to use
his highest level of persuasion to speak for us as caretakers of the
waters of life.

Needham Mass Decides to kill its beavers

The town of Needham MA decided to kill its beaver population because of the dam the beavers were building. It reminds me of a town in New Hampshire who made the same decision a few years ago. An official of that town said: "We have tried other things.They are very intelligent.You have to kill them."

I wrote to Needham and to the state parks commissioner:

"Dear Commissioner Sullivan -- In regard to Needham's decision to kill its beaver population,is it possible for those in the state office to suggest an alternative solution? Killing everything we decide is inconvenient hasn't worked so well for us human beings in the past. A new consciousness is forming that looks at the possibility of co-existence, a new thoughtfulness about the web of life in which we live -- that we still don't understand.

If we humans were as intelligent as we triumphantly tout ourselves to be we would find other ways to live with the beings who form as vital a part of this web as we do -- perhaps more so. I am ashamed of Needham's decision to murder rather than to think of other solutions for its "problem" with four-legged creatures who are simply trying to live. Such violence exists on a continuum that includes all the killing and destroying done by humanity in the present time and through most of its history. Has this kind of "problem-solving" really gotten any of us where we want to be?

Thank you for reading my comments. Very truly yours. "