When I was meditating a couple of mornings ago, I saw myself as a Siberian tiger walking through the forest. 

     Suddenly I was startled by a visceral sense of the tiger’s distress.  The forest in which I moved was not particularly healthy;  it was just a corner of its once vast self.  Not only was there little space in which to live and find food, but the forest was an impoverished ecosystem.  Many of the species that had once thrived there were gone or greatly reduced in number.  I too was diminished, one of just a handful of my kind left in that forest, in the entire world.  I was lonely, and life felt very hard.

      I am often haunted by the words of the environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, who said recently that we live in a time when “every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating.”  In a couple of decades, will we remember our current time as “the good old days?”  Will we yearn for this time when trees still lived and grew in health, when newts and salamanders could be spotted in the woods, when we heard birds singing every day?

     As I watch and listen to the birds around me, I sometimes wonder what their lives are like.  Is their day-to-day existence affected by the factors that are causing their decline?  Is food harder to find?  Are fewer of their babies surviving?  Are rising temperatures making them less comfortable?   I don’t know anything about how stressors, beyond the ones birds have evolved to deal with, might be affecting them. 

     And how about the animals who are more similar to us?  What is life like for mammals who are in decline, who have seen their habitat shrink, their food and water sources disappear?  I grieve the shrinking numbers of African and Asian elephants, blue whales and right whales, gorillas, cougars, and so many more.  Are the remaining animals physically weakened by the stress of a life that is becoming more difficult?  Do they sense that their kind is losing out to changing conditions around them?  Are they depressed?  Do they grieve?  

     Two species I know a little about–whales and gorillas–certainly have evidenced stress caused by humans.  Whales, for centuries now, have had to navigate their lives under a threat of being hunted down, choosing to go hungry rather than spend ‘too much’ time at feeding grounds where hunters may be waiting for them.  And scientists report major differences in gorilla behavior when observers carry a weapon and when they don’t.  The gorillas are not able to live naturally when they know they could be shot.

       So I wonder what many of our fellow creatures are feeling as they become one of a smaller and smaller number.  I grieve for them, and for us.–April Moore

Siberian tiger

a mother and baby gorilla

a young Florida cougar

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 5:52 am and is filed under Celebrating our beautiful Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.