Natural Philosophy
I’d like to take a moment to get real about myself, and my time here in South Africa. I’m 25 years old, which is special in no way, except for the fact that at this young age I have already lived and travelled in 25 countries. To be more specific, I have been employed or participated in academic programs: I have hiked to Machu Picchu, spent entire days at museums in Istanbul, volunteered in Croatia and worked in Mexico. I’ve enjoyed my freedom of movement thoroughly, and taken advantage of every opportunity to travel and see the world, when possibility did not conflict with responsibility. In recent years, however, even as my wanderlust has grown, my impressionability seems to have diminished. But there is something about this world, here, that is somehow all the more… breathtaking.
Here, far from cities, or even towns, I feel I have a certain privilege that I haven’t experienced before. This privilege is not found in some access to high society or to culture – the supposed source of all things grand – but in nature.
There is a secret in the bush, many in fact, but the one that I’m slowly decoding, and that I’d like to share, is this: we humans have a power that is secondary to the daily run of life. We observe the world around us, and sometimes we may even influence the course of things, but our mere existence is the byproduct of forces we can barely comprehend: in other words, evolution. It is unstoppable, and intractable. But if that is the case, why have some of us decided that some species no longer have a role to play in it? This indifference cannot be denied, for as each year passes, society grows and the human mind imagines new frontiers to explore and to settle; and it seems this manifest destiny cannot be fulfilled without displacing significant ecosystems and in many cases erasing key species from them.
For some, extinction has become passé. It is a topic for the dinner table, which provokes light banter but not deep thought – much preferable to politics or religion. Somehow we have become mentally separated from nature, to the extent that we discuss it without truly understanding that we are part of it. Yet we are bound to the same forces that shaped the slab-like head of a rhino and the deeply grooved skin of an elephant that hangs slack and heavy over a ribcage large enough to cover a Chevy engine.
For the first time in a long time I wonder, and have wonderment, every day. If the designs I see around me here were so accidental, some incident of the past that has no use in the present, why is it that these prehistoric products have lasted to this day? More importantly for me, how can I avoid participating in the pressures that threaten to wipe them off the slate, and off the earth? From a scientific standpoint I know that they have important roles in their ecosystems, and that they form significant relationships with the animals and plants that cohabitate that area. But from a philosophical perspective I have a different view: surely there must be some good in keeping animals like this around, that move someone as jaded as me to ask questions and grasp for the moon, knowing that it, and the answers, might never come within my reach.
– Clara Bowe