EcoHearth: Come Home to the Earth

Not too long ago, it was a given that the sun revolved around us Earthlings. All the cool kids in 1590 said so.

In much the same way, it’s a given these days that all species revolve around human needs and desires. If people want more space, food, comfort and entertainment; if people want to clear an apartment block, make a film set, have eight babies,dam a river or clear a forest, chop down an entire eco system or twenty… goodbye every other living thing! It’s been fab! You’ve been outsourced! Have a great death!

Wow. It can be lonely being a dweeb. Not fitting in with the popular group. Like Galileo Galilei, a huge nerd in his time for not subscribing to the earth-centric point of view, I, too, can’t quite get with the program. Those who deem humans as superior and all-deserving are, well, humans, right? Isn’t that a bit like a fox assigning dining protocol for the henhouse?

Or, better put by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel, “The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures.  Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse."

Let’s be honest here. In America, people with buckled hats made moral law: manifest destiny (accent on the man). Why on earth would anyone buckle their hat?

More intriguingly, why would we listen to them?

Perhaps, though, we have evolved. Unlike in Gallileo’s time, they don’t place those of us with dissenting opinions under house arrest until we die.

They just laugh at us. Make us seem ridiculous. Collectively our ideals could be played by, say, Goldie Hawn in a movie.

Here at the Rancho de Chihuahua, we’re pretty used to be laughed at and marginalized. We’re the Goldie Hawn of causes, without the money, beauty or fame. After all, we live with old, toothless, crazy and sick dogs. Many of them Chihuahuas.

Luckily we believe even Chihuahuas matter.

As a nerd, I wonder this: What’s so marginal about every other species besides human beings?

If every species has a say, who do you think will be voted off the island first?

Updated 2/20/10; originally posted 2/8/09.

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