whale invasion - natural desaster or human misconception?
So here we go: first a fin whale dies in the Baltic Sea and gets carted off to the Japanese Embassy in Berlin to make a point (and certainly also to make a buck) for Greenpeace; then a bottlenose whale dies in the river Thames while a massive rescue attempt fails to transport it back to the sea.
What the appearance of these "whale tales" in the mainstream media represents is not so much a "natural desaster" as many reporters ad news editors would like to make you think; rather, it is underlining the fatal misunderstanding of "nature" being something incompatible, even alien, to people's everyday lives.
If you want to experience "nature", you pack a lunch box and the kids and drive up to a National Park where you can go on a "nature trail". Once you are done with nature for the day, or the National Park closes, you drive back to your ordinary "civilized" lives.
But if nature comes into these "civilized" lives and shows up, say in the shape of a whale having taken a wrong turn, everybody is surprised and startled, some people get emotional, and enormous resources are deployed to "reunite the poor creature with nature". Out of the civilized realm of central London, back into the "wild and untamed" North Sea!
Try to think like a whale for a moment: he/she certainly did not realize that this murky river water of the Thames is flowing through central London, and the idea that this was "unnatural" probably did not occur either. It just happened to be where he/she ended up, for reasons that may or or may not be related to pollutants affecting the whale's navigational capacities. Sure, it ended up there by accident, but this is certainly neither the first nor the last whale that has taken a wrong turn and got lost, and not more or less of a tragedy than a monkey in the jungle that jumped from one tree to the next - and missed.
If more people realized that we cannot draw such a distinction between "Nature" as being "pure and in perfect balance", another sphere "out there" that has to be fenced off and protected from us, and our everyday lives in the sphere of "Human Civilization", then such events would become more "natural" in more than one sense.
We are as much a part of nature as is a bottlenose whale, and we should start behaving accordingly again.
What the appearance of these "whale tales" in the mainstream media represents is not so much a "natural desaster" as many reporters ad news editors would like to make you think; rather, it is underlining the fatal misunderstanding of "nature" being something incompatible, even alien, to people's everyday lives.
If you want to experience "nature", you pack a lunch box and the kids and drive up to a National Park where you can go on a "nature trail". Once you are done with nature for the day, or the National Park closes, you drive back to your ordinary "civilized" lives.
But if nature comes into these "civilized" lives and shows up, say in the shape of a whale having taken a wrong turn, everybody is surprised and startled, some people get emotional, and enormous resources are deployed to "reunite the poor creature with nature". Out of the civilized realm of central London, back into the "wild and untamed" North Sea!
Try to think like a whale for a moment: he/she certainly did not realize that this murky river water of the Thames is flowing through central London, and the idea that this was "unnatural" probably did not occur either. It just happened to be where he/she ended up, for reasons that may or or may not be related to pollutants affecting the whale's navigational capacities. Sure, it ended up there by accident, but this is certainly neither the first nor the last whale that has taken a wrong turn and got lost, and not more or less of a tragedy than a monkey in the jungle that jumped from one tree to the next - and missed.
If more people realized that we cannot draw such a distinction between "Nature" as being "pure and in perfect balance", another sphere "out there" that has to be fenced off and protected from us, and our everyday lives in the sphere of "Human Civilization", then such events would become more "natural" in more than one sense.
We are as much a part of nature as is a bottlenose whale, and we should start behaving accordingly again.
Labels: Science Stuff
posted by leptonyx at 15:23
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