https://youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_embedded
If you don’t like cynicism with your beauty, you may want to skip the balance of this post.
The beautiful description of how the thinning of the deer herd by the wolves leads to the enrichment of the natural environment inspires in me the observation that this must also apply to humanity. It’s a beautifully encapsulated lesson in how the overfilling of a niche by one species leads to damage to many other species. It leaves one wondering whether the great buffalo herds described by the Indians which they hunted might qualify as overfilling the niche …
I do not subscribe to the notion of the delicate balance of Nature; rather, as anyone who is aware of how predator and prey populations flux in response to each other, the only logical conclusion is to realize that Nature, in all its facets, is always changing.
But when species becomes dominant at the cost of the survival of nearly all other species in the geolocal ecology, you have to wonder if something is out of whack. In what we humans are so pleased to call Nature, adjustments are often a bloody business: the young, old, and infirm are brought down by opportunistic predators; plagues sweep through excessively high populations; and when the landscape is plucked clean, famine arrives on the winds and doesn’t leave until his due has been paid.
And oddly enough, humanity has its attendant ills: wars fought over ideologies that mask a simple need for land, even today; exotic plagues that worry the medical establishment; ecological damage that worries sober, serious scientists who look to the future and wonder how to feed all the mouths; and the attendant dangers of having a population of intelligent, dissatisfied people equipped with some serious firepower.
If we may stray into the area of morality, I believe a reading of this video will lead us to the conclusion that morality is, indeed, relative to circumstance. After all, consider: the dominant societies of today, however you wish to define them, are aggressive, even war-like creations, obsessed with carving out a spot to occupy and then … have … babies. Most sects have a natality tradition: that is, go forth and multiply and multiply and multiply. And, of course, this is what has kept those sects and their societies more or less intact … so one may consider that a tenet of their morality.
Until that society reaches the limits of growth. When the farm plots have been subdivided beyond reason, when the population pressure has reached the point where civil war occurs (with rats, they just eat each other, but it’s more or less the same thing), when the pressure to grow food results in soil that is exhausted, hillsides sliding down into cities because of deforestation that was necessary because of energy and structural needs …. then that tenet becomes a force for destruction.
And, of course, people understand this. Thus the existence of abortion reaching far back into history, as women understand that it takes more than a faith in God to help that child to survive … especially if you already have other responsibilities. Like other children.
But often, the pressure is relieved through invasion and war, which are never really moral (never mind what the religious leaders set to profit from them keep saying). And so we see how the natality tradition leads to immoral actions.
And yet, without them those societies would never have survived. I have occasionally considered whether the medical profession is moral, or immoral.
But if I admit that morality is relative, then I needn’t worry about condemning some of the most admirable people around. At least not until they’ve become so successful that we’re once again looking for another continent to fill up ….
