RANCHERS/CEOS RULE THEIR OWN NATIONS

The Department of the Interior is taking away federal protection of wolves on August 1 to allow wholesale massacre. Here is my letter, probably never to be read by the secretary but thank you for reading it. Dear Secretary Salazar and colleagues in the Department of the Interior: Why propitiate wealthy ranchers by signing on for the mass murder of wolves? These ranchers in the cattle business are analogous to the oil companies – their goals are profit and all other considerations be damned. Corporations heads and cattle “barons” have been allowed by us and by our government to set themselves up in the same mode as the sovereign kings and emperors of olden days – considering their lands as royal domains -- in fact private nations -- and themselves as entitled to live outside the law and all considerations of the greater good of life itself. The most absolute power of a king was to order death as he wished. It is time to take away the absolute power that these self-appointed rulers have abrogated to themselves. Though they have boundaries, unfathomable wealth, private armies, and thousands of dependent laboring “citizens" – it is causing immeasurable harm to continue to allow them to live as separate nations within our nation, the United States of America. It’s time now for Americans to stop treating the very wealthy as royalty – think back to the Magna Carta -- are we really going to be the society which has revoked the Magna Carta in cases of the very wealthy? These "rulers" must be subject to the same laws and considerations as those in the larger society. As the Center for Biological Diversity said: “We can't let these intelligent, majestic animals be slaughtered to satisfy the whims of ranchers and politicians. Yet despite tens of thousands of letters and phone calls to save the wolves, Secretary Salazar will strip away their federal protection on August 31. Wyoming's plan will allow wolves to be indiscriminately killed outside Yellowstone National Park and a few other safe havens: 80 percent of the state will become a wolf-killing zone.” There are ways to live alongside “wild” animals without killing them. American and other western representatives continuously work with "emerging" companies to stop them from killing "wild life," to teach them the larger viewpoints of ecological living and the irreplaceable value of the “wild” as part of the travel and tourist industry, one of the richest sources of income on earth. Is wholesale murder of animals labeled as "wild" really the example we want to give to our children and to other societies? Wealthy ranchers have NO RIGHT to demand to live on lands or to be on adjacent lands where all "wildlife" must be killed, no matter how much money they give to politicians or lobbyists. They do not own the planet and the few remaining "wild" places. The human attitude has to change, for ourselves, for our descendants, and for the life of the planet. Knee jerk killing of other beings is not a viable reaction to human-identified problems. We must become guardians, not killers, in the web of life -- for the sake of our own lives and for the living earth, the largest of such beings and our only home. 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.

JOHNNY CARSON

Discussing the Johnny Carson film: I was a fan. To me stand-up comics are as necessary to our culture as artists. My favorites just now are Jon Stewart, Louis CK and Patton Oswalt. I like to watch Chelsea Handler, although I like her personality more than her comic bits. Being as she "is" is her most effective statement -- I think -- in terms of trying to find and live some kind of edge in the chaotic clutter of our ricky-ticky pop culture, with its commanding pervasiveness and the undertones of darkness always creeping in, sometimes taking over whole memes, trends, groups, bodies, similar to archetypical science fiction plots. I was profoundly affected by Richard Pryor, breathtakingly on the edge and beyond brilliant. I don't think he can be actually described, except by saying his name. To go back to Carson, long ago even when I knew little about him I saw him as not just a comic but a person who performed by putting on a carefully crafted persona, like an entire body suit. Part of the fascination was to enjoy the performance - more like a one-man show than a stand-up routine – and keep alert for the brief seconds when the other Johnny peered through the curtain of himself. Also fun to watch him watching and assessing himself, more and more as time went on...and he subtly let us in on the game, the irony, the dissonance, how odd life is. Incremental revelations about his contrasting private life confirmed what lots of us had intuited, without knowledge. He had a lively intelligence, with the gift of curiosity, keenly aware of the peculiarity of the place he had landed, practical in using the money thus earmed to construct co-lives, some comradely and comforting, one the life of a loner who made sure his hermitage was perfectly made for him, and well protected. I didn’t watch tv for many years, just Carson at night. His predecessors I had not seen except in clips. In contrast Carson was cool, as the film said, and classy with a core of what I'll call a well-honed quietness that strengthened and protected him -- AND his audience in a way. But the underlying awareness of the menace or darkness in life was never not there. You didn't worry when you were watching him. Of course, sometimes we need to be worried and brought to levels of sorrow and outrage and so on... I like that in comics and artists. Now I think about it, which of the essential 20th century visual artists would have expressed something akin to Carson... maybe The Scream as candidate, also Broadway Boogie Woogie, some paintings by Van Gogh. Musicians of course, lots of them, would have been and are Johnny-like. Too bad he didn't get to really know Bruce Springsteen -- or did he? Don't know -- holes in my memory.

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.