Before We had The Vote or an Environmental or Forestry Policy
This photo is about the westward ho! pioneers (settlers, military, gold seekers, and more) of the late 19th and early 20th century who slaughtered the buffalo nearly to extinction, shooting them from railroad cars, from horseback, whilst on foot… leaving the meat to rot, taking the skulls, piling them as monuments memorializing the humans’ excesses, rages, acts beneath even the most beleaguered souls.
The photo shows only one of the absurdist piles of offal and skulls that some were so proud about.
In my book Women Who Run With the Wolves, I note that wolves only kill more than they can eat when they have been lived through a rare, severe and longlasting famine. That then they may kill for several days and become what we call ‘meat drunk’ from overeating their kills. But they will not cache the uneaten meat from their kills, as they usually do when prey is availible on a regular basis in their very wide territories. Within a few days this pattern reaction to starvation will aright itself, and the wolves who hunt will go back to taking prey in moderation.
In any age, there also can be a severe, untended to, unarighted and ongoing famine of the human soul. This seems often to cause over-kill just to kill… in many directions, metaphoric and actual.
If anyone asked me, I’d say, for our time, intervene as you can, with voice, attending, money… by engaging with, by joining groups already engaged. Most of all, I think of a phrase in the holy works that belong to major religions, in which is a passage, saying those enslaved are not enslaved by kings, but by the weakness in spirit to even raise their arms against wrong.
I think we are all made of finer stuff. Ever.
Choice to act or not, but rather to be effective or not… seems at the heart of the matter of pushback or pull forward, either one.
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Well-timed and even better written
I’ve never understood why conservation and environmentally responsible behavior weren’t the bedrock of the major religions. And if not there, at least as shared and sacred societal priorities built into our collective conscience. I know people have tried to make this so, but the bulk of humanity seems dense, short-sighted, and dedicated to consuming and exploiting without regard for the consequences. Sorry to say, I don’t think we deserved this beautiful planet, this garden of Eden. Our reach has exceeded our grasp in terrible ways.
There are those that ask the question, “What would you rather have, clean air or a job.”
Well, I was born & raised Catholic, and I was definitely taught to respect all God’s creations. My church supported the Boy Scouts, of which I was a member, where I was taught respect & preservation of the environment.
As usual, however, people use religion to justify any action they want to justify, whether it’s hate, or war, or genocide, or environmental damage.
“One or the other” is a false equivalency. There’s no reason you can’t have both. You simply put it into the “mission statement” and build your business accordingly. True, retrofitting is hard & expensive, but it can still be done as you move forward. It just takes imagination and ingenuity.
“What would you rather have, clean air or a job”
make that … a job and black lung.
Perhaps you have seen the charts, or some video demonstration, of the distribution of wealth/use of raw materials throughout the world. Any one of us reading this column, and having computer/electricity/learning/roof/water/plumbing…we are as those men in the photo as far as getting our UNfair share of stuff from the planet.
Those one percent demonstrations of the past year…Everyone at those demonstrations was a one-percenter. Given the times of this photo, hunting for one’s own food was part of surviving, meat needed for army and railroad construction crews, skinned for hides for blankets…and the thrill or relief of bagging a big meat animal … riding a train through vast vast herds of these huge animals…the passengers’ thrill of picking off a few as the train zoomed through the vast herds.
The bones were ground for fertilizer, and this is probably the pile, not trophy. This page has history of buffalo hunting, including quote that the great herds (50-60 million before civilization) had to be wiped out before civilization could take root. http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-buffalohunters.html
Barky, I think you meant to say false dichotomy. We try to use that other phrase no more than is absolutely necessary.
this photo was taken and the slaughters referred to here, enacted long after the railroads were built. To gain an accurate history, I find speaking to native americans who hold the oral history, helpful…
especially Comanche, White Mountain Apache, Southern Utes, Cree, Nez Perce, Blackfoot, Crow, Navajo, Lakota, Sioux, certain clans of the Cherokee… any Plains and Southwestern and Montana, and Dakota tribes.
The buffalo slaughters, and trapping to near extinction too, from their points of view are very different than those found in written history. But then, the buffalo meant something very different to native americans than it did to settlers, military and scions from the East who made their millions by defrauding First People.
I was just reading the history of a lake tribal group from Wisconsin, a new book, detailing the egregious exploitation and theft of land, animals and resources from First People. It is shameful. And very clearly stated. The people of modern times and times past, never anticipated, apparently, educated Native Americans who research, hold law degrees and can decipher easily the various bogus treaties and agreements written by the US presidents, the falsified reports written by ‘scouts’ of the US government claiming turmoil and uprising by Native Americans where there was none, but wanting to call down murder-by-military upon the tribal groups in order to be rid of them and their ‘sacred’ animals so they could take their lands.
There is much much more to say. Including the sincerity of tribal groups in saying, ‘do not kill our sacred animals.’ As today, money wills out over life itself in many instances. It was not ok then, and it is not alright now.
There were already entire civilizations on the land; what the whites called ‘civilized’ was actually usurpation of creatures, water and trees and range belonging to others. They were hardly a civilization. They were as in Mexico and the Americas, plunderers, invaders, squatters.
To read the words of the native chiefs at the convening of government treaty signings is to weep at their naivete, their faith, their believing the most low-down sidewinding dishonest men from the gov’mint. The shame and condemnation will always fall to those who purposely deceived the naive, and those amongst them who knew these matters were shams but did not speak to protect the vulnerable.
spelling correction: it is Blackfoot tribe
Zephyr, I stand humbly corrected.
Carol. GREAT point!
Carol, while you are correct that there are a billion people in china living far worse than we, that still does not justify the rabid unfairness we now see in the western world. Everything is relative.