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Not sure how I’ll wile away time here between now and the 20th-year July anniversary of the blog, with so little expectation of significant IBWO news to come. Maybe dabble in more politics, with the country barreling full-speed ahead toward the allure of fascism (and a significant portion of the populace seemingly quite enthused about it)😟. Won’t be at all surprised if Heir Orange Fuhrer chooses to shut down the USFWS or at least alter its mission…. maybe change it to the USGS (United States Golfing Service) for purposes of draining and clearcutting all those yucky, worthless southern swamplands and converting them to gorgeous, manicured, money-makin' golf courses for the super rich!… because one thing we surely lack in this country is enough golf courses... to bury our mistresses & ex-wives on… "Log, Baby, log" may soon carry the same rhetorical flourish as "Drill, Baby, drill," forests being worth a lot more logged, than maintained as habitat for creatures that no crony of Donald Chump would ever think worth seeing.
Anyway, for now, moving along, I'll just close out January with a couple of quotes... starting with this favorite rumination from Henry Beston that I've posted multiple times before:
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
And lastly, these poignant words that long-time Ivorybill enthusiast Mike Brown posted on Dwight Norris's IBWO FB page awhile back, quoting William Shatner who had flown into space on a Jeff Bezos rocket:
“I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things — that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film 'Contact,' when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, 'They should’ve sent a poet.' I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
Wish I could pass along something more positive, but I'm sympatico with Shatner in that mostly what I feel these days (for both the IBWO, and, my country) is grief and dread.....
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