The selfish specie on the top of the rank

The nature is extremely important to us. It gives us everything we really need, but at the same time we are about to destroy it. Not only the woods and the sea, but the animals as well. Can we do something about it? In all the time of our existing, we humans have acted like we rule the world, as if the world was created only for us to live on. Therefore, it’s easy to forget our responsibility in taking care of the trees, the animals and the seas, which we cannot live without. We produce rubbish, hurt animals for fun and cut down a lot of trees to make tons of stupid things we don’t even need. The way people live in industrial countries today is unfair, meaning that we need three earths to accomplish that everyone can live this way. The earth can’t handle our selfishness, and this is what I’d like to focus on in this blog. - By hurting the nature, and everything that belongs to it, we can also hurt ourselves. That is what the deep ecology is all about.

Everyone and everything has a value. You can for instance look at the animals, who have the exact same right as we have to be on earth. They can also feel pain as much as happiness, and if we can try to imagine how they also can suffer, we would not dear to hurt them. Shankara, a philosophe from India, wrote this in the 800th century. I believe he had a really good point. At that time, people hunted animals to survive. They killed animals, and ate everything inside of them. They made use of the fur, as well as the hooves and intestines. They had to kill, because there was no other way to get enough food. Today, everything is different. We hunt, not only to feed ourselves; we also do it for fun. We like to kill. We hunt the animals, shoot them down, and then, when they’re dead, we brag about it. We take a photo and show it to someone else as we say something like “Look at this beautiful creature I just caught!” –Is this fear? Can we call a dead animal beautiful? In my opinion, and I’m sure many people agree with me, they look better when they’re alive. Free, in the nature where they belong.

By recycling the Sunday edition of the New York Times, 75 000 trees could be spared. In the world today, there are a lot of similar cases. It’s unbelievable how easy it is to make an effort.  But on the other side, it’s even easier to think that others will do it for you. That you don’t have to, because there are so many others who recycle, compost their food and reuse things at home. A naive thought, because this is definitely not the reality. We all have the same responsibility, and if one person doesn’t care, he or she will probably not be alone. It is important to live in the moment, but sometimes you also have to think of the consequences of what you do, and what you don’t do.

To drive the car instead of taking the bus can be very tempting and comfortable sometimes. You don’t have to bring money with you, and you don’t need to walk to a station far away from your home. An average family in an industrial country, like for instance Norway, has at least one car. Many of these families use their car(s) mostly to get to and back from work. Even if bus departures are regular, they drive instead, alone in their car with no other passengers. This is waste. If many people could travel by bus (or other public vehicles), the nature would be spared for enormous amounts of Co2. There is also a solution if there is no possibility to go by bus. You can for instance ride your bike to work, that would make you both stronger and spare the environment. Nothing is so bad, that it isn’t good for anything. We humans have learned to take the easiest way out of our problems, but if you really want to achieve something big; you have to work harder for it.

In my opinion, many of us are extremely careless. We don’t have any laws that emphasize the animal’s rights, neither the woods’, waterfalls’ or mountains’ rights. If a human got killed because of its ugliness, everyone would have reacted. If an animal got killed by the same reason, no one would care. We can learn a lot from the deep ecology, hopefully something that will make us think twice before we harm the nature, and every creature in it. As already said, three earths would be needed if everyone should live the way we do in industrial countries. In other words; the humans needs for a comfortable life destroys the nature. We are just the selfish specie on the top of the rank, which we have created.

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, one of the deep ecology founders, once said that that the idea of our standard of living today include a lot that is not needed. We need to accept a lower standard of living, with a quality of life that is as high as or perhaps even higher because we learn to appreciate other values. This might take some time, but it is the way we need to go.


Sources:
Horisonter 10-Gunnar Holth og Kjell Arne Kallevik
Searching 10- Anne- Brit Fenner og Geir Nordal Pedersen


Photo: http://khonjtheeternalsearch.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-future-beholds.html