No Respect

The other day we went ice fishing. It was my dad, son, and I. And, for the first time, we took our chocolate lab out there. Before we left there was a concern that he would find something to roll in, perhaps a dead minnow or some fish guts. But I figured the chances were fairly slim that he would actually find something, so we took him anyway. Well, he found something to roll in right in the middle of the lake.

What was it? A dead racoon with tire tracks across it's back. During one of its evening hunts the racoon must have been out there eating dead minnows or fish that fisherman had thrown up on the ice. Unfortunately someone thought it might be fun to run it down and kill it. The first word that came to mind when I saw it was: cruel. And this quote that I came across in David Abram's Becoming Animal also came to mind:

"We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has been only a short time in this country and know very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught long ago by animals themselves. The white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their ways, and passed on this knowledge from one generation to another.[A Carrier Indian From British Columbia, pg.259, Becoming Animal]

Anxiety, Abram and Animism

I'm starting to understand why Daniel Quinn will not use the term nature in his work. In The Story of B he even titled a section Dynamiting Nature. In that section he talks about why using the term nature in any discussion can be decieving.

Anyway, back to another quote I dug up out of my notebook that speaks to my understanding.

"From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this disstress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by out civilization on the ecology of the planet, only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former." --David Abram, Pg.22, The Spell of the Sensuous

Perhaps what we do to the earth we do to ourselves.