g to profane the sacred symbol of Islam. An Israeli soldier's bullet in the back would be my deserved fate for scrawling graffiti upon the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Nor would I be long for this world if I were to defecate upon the floor of the Golden Temple of the Sikhs. Life would not be pleasant for me if I took a hammer to the Pieta in the Vatican, for we humans hold our creations dear, and we deal harshly with those who fail to share our reverence for old stone walls, meteorites, marble statues, icons, and architecture.

What we love, we protect. What we revere, we defend. What we value, we will die for - and of course not hesitate to kill for. Yet each and every day, humans enter the most sacred and reverential cathedrals of the natural world - the redwood forests of Northern California or the rain forests of Amazonia - and each and every day we profanely rape these great mysteries with chainsaws and bulldozers.

Where is the rage over the destruction of the rain forests? Where is the anger at those who foul the oceans? Where is the sorrow for the hundreds of species that humankind has condemed to the oblivion of extinction?

The natural world is an abstraction to a species that has too much heaven on its mind. We worship a creator molded in the image of Man and desecrate nature out of jealous anger for its independence from man.

We do not see whales; we see oil. We do not see trees; we see toilet paper or houses. We do not see rivers; we see hydro power. We do not see an ocean; we see a sewer.

Gone forever is the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the auk, and the Caroline parakeet. Never again will our planet be graced by the buffalo wolf, the Atlas bear, the Barbary lion, or the Steller's sea cow. No more shall grow the moth orchid, the wine palm, or the exotic hau kuahiwi. The realms of the insects, the mollusks, the amphibians, and the reptiles have fared no better - all victims of the arrogant ignorance of man.

Our brief and brutal reign has spanned such a minute period within the age of the Earth, yet our destructions have expunged species and habitats that graced the Earth for millions of years prior to our existence. We are generating the sixth extinction at a rate one thousand times greater than the previous five, the last being sixty-five million years ago.

We give it little thought, wiping out the very memory of extinct species as a mopping up maneuver to appease our conscience.

Into the future we dream of great conquests of planets. We create traveling public relations teams to present ourselves to ourselves as a moral and righteous species. In the name of our anthropocentric philosophies we can destroy anything and everything and call it progress.

The question is, How long can we continue this insanity of living in defiance of the laws of ecology?

If we ignore the law of biodiversity, our ecosystems will collapse further with the loss of each nonreplaced species. If we ignore the law of interdependence, we will find ourselves alone and abandoned, the final victims of our own arrogance. If we ignore the law of finite growth, we will find ourselves choking on our own filth as the value of human life diminishes in proportion to the increasing multitudes of our own spawn.

Maybe it is appropriate that man is a primate. When all has been said and done, at least our condemnation can be tempered by the simple biological fact that we are monkeys.

And like good little monkeys, we saw no evil, heard no evil, and spoke no evil as we basked in the glory of the fading empire of anthropocentrism, insulated from the pain of the myriad of vanquished and vanishing species, forgetting that we are a part of that which we mindlessly destroy and, as such, we will be our own last victims."

~~~~~~~~~by: Captain Paul Watson

Co-founder, Greenpeace,

and founder, Shepherd Conservation Society, California

from the book "Prayers for a Thousand Years", edited by

Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, editors of "Earth

Prayers"

In the spirit of peace and love for all our relations,

Sharon 444

*Sharon Pacione*

Wdestiny44@aol.com

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