and forty thousand elephants died
Published: Mon, 07/29/19
I recently watched an interesting TED talk by an Alan Savory who grew up in Africa and trained as an ecologist. In the 1950s Mr Savory took charge of creating national parks in what is now Zimbabwe. First they chased out the native herdsmen and their cattle. The new parks began to turn into deserts. So next they decided that there were too many wild elephants and forty thousand of these creatures were culled over the next few years. Still the desertification continued to worsen.
Further research in the USA where national parks had excluded domesticated animals for much longer than in Africa showed that desertification had been happening there too.
What is going wrong? Putting it very simply, the world’s grasslands developed along with huge numbers of grazing animals which moved around in vast herds. If domesticated animals are encouraged to live and graze in a manner which mimics the behaviour of the herds which created the grassland in the ancient past then the process of desertification can be reversed. At the same time much of the world’s hunger problem can be solved. Don’t take my word for it, I have linked the video from the bottom of the page so that you can watch it for yourself.
I am not necessarily convinced that Allan Savory has all the answers to the world’s food and climate problems (although he certainly does make a compelling case.) What interests me more is how ideas are adopted and then acted on with no regard for the actual consequences. We have the term ‘ideology’ which seems to mean acting on an idea regardless of the actual consequences. It was Allan Savory’s ideological position that the elephants were destroying the local environment and so he had forty thousand of them killed. Earlier in the 20th century Stalin and Mao Zedong killed millions of people by starvation due to their ideology of collective farming. We now have demands that ‘climate change’ be dealt with by a massive programme of de-carbonization. This may well mean giving up the internal combustion engine for which we have no satisfactory replacement. Electric motors are fine but battery technology is no where near advanced
enough to replace petrol or diesel as usable fuel. If we give up using the internal combustion engine then personal freedom and mobility we will revert to mid 19th if not 18th century levels. There are those who have an ideological position that all humans should be herded into mega cities and live on a vegan diet. Which will mean destroying the remainder of the world’s rain forests to grow genetically modified soy beans while the rest of the world is left to turn into dessert. I can see this doing more harm than good.
The future of the human race and the well being of our planet, will depend upon humans working together with all aspects of nature in a dynamic harmony. The planet is not served by removing human beings or any other life form from the life cycle of the environment. But we do need to know when enough has been taken and let renewal and regeneration happen in its own good time.
It isn’t that humans are incapable of living in harmony with the cycles of nature and all the other creatures with whom we share this planet. What we lack is the humility to admit that we don’t know everything. Action taken in ignorance is nearly always destructive. Humans also fail to see the line between a good idea and creating a dangerous ideology. Ideas drive the human race to its greatest achievements. Ideology has, killed tens of millions of living creatures including humans and Mr Savory’s forty thousand elephants.
Over the past couple of years I have been thinking a lot about how to use knowledge of runes to work with ideas without creating a dangerous ideology. Having a child on the way who could easily see the start of the 22nd century, is another imperative for finding tools to think clearly. Yes, think about it, a child born this year will just be 80 years old at the turn of the next century. What kind of world will they be living in?
One thing I have learned from Stav is that to develop our thinking we need to break free from certain structures of thought and expression. Words and writing are useful but they also trap us into particular paths of thought which limit our capacity for generating ideas. Runes, especially when used as bind runes, can provide a completely different structure of expression and thus liberate our capacity for ideas.
This summer I will be giving talks at three camps and my theme this year will be based on a bind rune I created a year or so ago which I call the philosopher, warrior and healer bind rune. I will see if I can record at least one of the talks and make it available online. Or , if you are going to be at one of the camps make sure you are there in person.
Here is link to the talk which inspired this post https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&feature=share
regards
Graham
PS Next year I intend to hold another retreat similar to the one we did at Mid summer this year. More on that soon. In the meantime events for this autumn are listed here http://iceandfire.org/calendar.html