“On
Monday, President Obama made an unprecedented move in the fight against illegal
wildlife trafficking.” the Wildlife Conservation Society reported. “In a visit
to Tanzania, the President launched a poaching crackdown,
dedicating the United States to fighting back against poachers
and criminal wildlife traffickers.”
This touched and
surprised me. “Larger” planetary
concerns such as oil drilling and fracking are mired in layers of politics and
power. As to concerns about “wildlife” has President Obama taken any other action that
clearly speaks to the essential matter of wildlife as part of the evolving new
approach to human stewardship of the planet?
Consciousness grows
slowly as we see, learn and work to develop a different role in the wellbeing
of the planet. The lives of the “wild”
animals who are our co-inhabitants of the earth most often are not considered,
or they are placed in secondary or minor positions within the discussion.
The actual concept of
the web of life – and especially the reality that we humans live within
the web, not above or separate from it – still is thought in the main as poetic
or irrelevant or invalid. Business and commercial leaders, if considering the
concept at all, demonstrate that they regard the idea primarily as being obstructive
to their goals.
Any new approach to
planetary thinking has to consider the human position within the animal realm –
to which we belong. We are animals. How strange that we flaunt and praise our “civilization”
and “progress” while we wear the skins of our fellow beings, enslave them in “meat
industries,” trap and use them for experimentation and entertainment. In the case of elephant and rhino poachers
humans often shoot them with tranquilizer darts, then saw off their tusks while
they are alive and leave them to die long and horrible deaths – all that for what
is called “ivory” to be used for objects or adornments or ground up to sell as potions
for sexual potency.
Obama comes late, as
most people do, to the global plight of elephants. But most remarkable, he does not come at all
to the American equivalent: whole sale
federally funded massacre of wolves, coyotes, wild horses and other such “wild”
animals in the west of the country. There is an industry for rounding up and
killing wild horses for their meat. These and other killing actions are fueled
primarily by the political contributions and the subsequent power of ranchers
who abrogate unto themselves the kind of status formerly held by kings and
emperors. To increase, everlastingly,
the profits of the meat industries – America is business - they demand to kill
all animals who may encroach or compete from adjacent lands.
Since they are imperial,
they see no other options. Since they possess the power of one of the globe’s
most profitable businesses, they exist in private kingdoms within the United
States. They are no more interfered with than the leaders of other sovereign
nations.
Obama takes no stand
on the wholesale killing of wildlife in the American west.
Meanwhile, it’s worth
noting that American “advisors” routinely use campaigns of education and
various kinds of pleadings to convince those in “emerging” nations not to kill
the wild animals who are a part of their identity, their heritage, their
birthright – and not incidentally the foundation for profitable tourist and
travel enterprises that can profoundly affect the quality of their lives.
There are a few
organizations and voices who speak for the animals of the American west. {These “animals” are as American as you and
I!) However, in the overwhelming snarl
of distortions, omissions and lies that comprise so-called news and information
in the America that has come to be, they are voices in the wilderness.
