Some two weeks under forest canopy and ocean fog on a current road trip through New England, a final three days of rain and mist and chill driving up the Maine coast…and despite the primordial beauty, I’m thinking, “Get me out of here!”
So, it’s not that bad. But I could never live here. My natural habitat is a prairie sunshine warm and windy, open woodlands and pasture, hills and valleys textured in light and shadow, skies open to the sun where where distant thunderheads roll. Give me Central Texas, East Tennessee, or almost anywhere in the south.
Yet, I have friends here who cherish the forest and fog, the ocean mists and endless wind, the cold and snow.
Such creatures we are!! We long for the familiar. We rebuild over and over on homesites destroyed by flood and fire. We feel comfortable in the known and shun change. Emigrants and refugees seek their own communities, even terrain and countryside like that from home.
Where did we get the idea that we are more than animals? I wish wildlife biologists and ethologists and ecologists wrote psychology textbooks. Maybe we’d would learn something useful.
When I was 3 or 4 years old, my Dad and I were out by the barn with farm animals all around. He said, “Now Michael, you need to watch these animals because much about animals and people is the same.” Oh, what a world of meaning and truth was in his words! We humans are in fact animals, very peculiar and grotesque, but animals just the same. We are much more alike than people are prepared to accept, but our innate sense of solidarity with them is evident in a multitude of ways.
Thanks. Michael. I wish we felt that solidarity. Our civilization might have evolved in a less incompatible way. As it is, by denying it, and in fact exploiting them (frequently to the point of extinction), we’ve doomed ourselves (or, more accurately, our civilization) to destruction.
The interesting thing, though, is that when it all comes crashing down around us, the survivors will in effect be brought down to the level of non-human animals. Maybe then we will, like aboriginal humans before, no longer perceive of a separation between us and them.