The Mouse's week-long birthday gala ended yesterday with a trip the the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, with her best friend along (I call them "the two mice").
Aside from the heat, what a fantastic day it was! We spent about 5 hours at the zoo, I pet a chicken, saw a Hummingbird (an actual bird, not just my wife), fed a giraffe, and came this close to selling my son to the primate exhibit. We ended the day with a short trip to Old Colorado City, where we stocked up on Honey from The Honey Cottage, and had a leisurely al fresco dinner at the Front Range Barbecue.
What does this have to do with geopolitics? To find out, let's return to the zoo...
One of the zoo's current attractions is Mahal, a baby Orangutan who didn't bond with his mother. The zookeepers are caring for the ape in shifts like a human baby, and are trying (with some success) to get the mother to accept the baby. For three hours a day Mahal's on display (behind one-way glass, I think) with one of his caretakers, where people can watch him interact and play surprisingly similar to a human toddler. Needless to say, the sounds of "ohos," "ahas," and , "he's SO cute!" fill the air.
Next to exhibit is a display depicting how the Orangutan has been reduced to a habitat territory roughly the size of Rhode Island (i.e. my backyard) thanks to agriculture (notably for palm oil), and that Orangutans will be extinct in the wild within 10 years unless we do something about it. For this reason the Hummingbird does not use Palm oil in her soap recipes. Other soapers scoff, asking "you're just one person. What difference does that make?" Her response? "If I'm that one person who saves one primate, or if I'm that one person who convinces another to stop using new-growth palm oil, then I've made a difference."
She also says she can't look into the human eyes of a Orangutan or Gorilla without calculating the cost of development.
Where does that leave me? I've said before I'm by no means a stereotypical tree-hugging, granola-eating yurt dweller, and if my survival depended on killing an endangered animal I'd start mixing up the marinade.
No, I'm just an average Joe who tries to do the right thing: I recycle, I have all my "always on" appliances on powerstrips so I can stop the juice from running when the appliance isn't in use, I monitor water usage, and do some local food purchasing (although that's more problematic the people might think: I just read last week "local" produce grown in the wrong biome can use up more resources than food shipped from a biome where the product flourishes. Can't find the damned article, though).
In short, I'm not perfect, but I do what I can.
My current course--geopolitics--is a mashup of geography and international relations, and my lesson tomorrow, ironically, is the introduction to the world's biomes. Over the next two lessons I'll be discussing how geography affects climate and thus agriculture, and then discuss the historic impact of said biomes on human history (you know: slavery, slash-and-burn agriculture, potato famines... the fun stuff).
One aspect of the lessons will be how nations view conservation. Remember the footstomp I make periodically: nations build their national security strategies base on their perceived threats and needs, regardless how irrational the strategy seems to the outside observer. That said, allow me to paraphrase a Brazilian officer: "to you the Amazon's a rain forest. To us it's a jungle, and we'll cut it down if we want to."
That's the geopolitics of conservation in a nutshell. Third-world nations point at US and European deforestation and extermination of flora and fauna and ask how dare we tell them what to do with their own resources. To us someone poaching a lowland gorilla for meat is inhumane, while for the hunter it's his survival. It's easy for us, with our high GDP and abundance of resources, to tell a landlocked tropical nation they're the environmental bogeyman, but it's hard to provide solutions given the poorer nation's constraints of climate, geography and population.
And why we're not doing more is beyond me.
That said, I'm not writing this to point fingers or offer international-level solutions (cutting the world population by 3 billion is a bit draconian, after all).
But here's what I can do: I can turn of one more light, put one more beer bottle in the toilet tank to cut down water flow (Lord knows I have plenty of beer bottles), walk more for small errands. I can be that "one more person" the Hummingbird influences.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Is It Just Me?, Rosemary's Thoughts, Big Dog's Weblog, Nuke's News & Views, Webloggin, Phastidio.net, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, , , Stageleft, Faultline USA, Walls of the City, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Two more of Pres. Bush's inner circle gone, within weeks (days?) of each other. Indeed, by the time some of my readers see this post tomorrow Rove will be driving his shrink-wrapped Jaguar out the front gates.
nationwide call Sunday for help tracking his movements. Jack McClellan (pictured at right), previously from the Snohomish County town of Arlington, in recent months had been living out of his car in Southern California. A judge there on Friday permanently barred him from going within 30 feet of places where children gather. "I have to leave the state, really. I can't live here under this Orwellian protocol," Jack McClellan told television station KABC for a report that aired Sunday. "It's nightmarish."