Run For Your Life

Run For Your Life

I’m a runner. I try to run everyday for at least 15 minutes. Outside. No treadmills allowed.

And I have been a runner for about a year and a half. Well, a relatively regular runner for a year and a half now. When I started, it was just to try and get fit. Get healthy. Get those endorphins flowin’. Prove to myself that I can commit if not to boys, at least to exercise, to me. Running just kind of seemed like a good idea. Why not, right?

Commence phase one of becoming a healthier, cooler person.

And now please consider the following:

You are South Africa’s Sylvicapra grimmia, aka the common duiker. You are chomping down on some scrumptious Scelophysa trimeni (yes that’s a kind of insect…this is not the life for the picky eater). Enter Panthera leo, aka KOTJ, aka King of the Jungle. You, the common duiker, run away.

And now consider the following adjustment:

You are (still) South Africa’s Sylvicapra grimmia, aka the common duiker. You decide that for 15 minutes everyday you’re going to run to “get fit.” Off you go into the African bush. The headphones are in and you’re listening to NPR’s Morning Edition because you want to, you know, be in the know. Enter Panthera leo. Now you, having extinguished your precious energy for the noble (but really quite stupid) cause of getting fit, are a very dead Sylvicapra grimmia.

We too often forget. We forget how far we’ve removed ourselves from nature. When I run in New York City, weaving between a flamboyant gay man with a rainbow cloak and his pink-collared pug (true story), I’m nowhere close to the wild. The wild is a distant haven far, far away. Even when I run in Dean Perry’s property (an expansive (and private…well, not for me) forest with a white-pebbled road strewn with gentle curves, aka an Ohio runner’s Heaven), I’m still quite far from nature. I’m not scared of any Panthera leo.

Alright, fine, so we don’t have lions in Ohio, but even now that I’m in Africa where there are plenty of Panthera leo, I’ve never considered that running is anything but Sarah time. Running is not Sarah and lion time. Sarah’s not too found of Mr. Panthera leo, well she is, just not as a running partner.

So where does that leave us? The common duiker would gaze upon us with confusion and wonder. We humans like to think we’re so great and dandy, so far removed from the rules of nature. Defying gravity in sending Mr. Armstrong to the moon. Doing that whole feeling thing when we watch movies like The Wolf of Wallstreet. Slapping dear ol’ Mother Nature in the face when we run not from Panthera lep but to “get fit.” But what are we really? We’re the only species to have killed 60 million people (2.5% of our global population) in a worldwide war, AKA WWII. We’re the only species where there are 24,000 deaths each day that are attributed to lack of food and nutrition. We’re the only species that insert horrible fact about humanity (really, any will do). We’re terrifying. Far scarier than any lurking Panthera leo.

Nature has a pretty good system going for her, but what happens to us now that we have removed ourselves from that system? What happens when we add the equivalent of a city the size of San Francisco to the world population every three days (February 2000, The Houston Chronicle)? What happens when every year human activity destroys 29,157 square miles of forest (AKA the size of Panama) (National Geographic)? What happens when up to 28,000 species may go extinct due to deforestation in the next quarter century according to researcher W.V. Reid at Columbia University? I don’t know. But I don’t think Mother Nature is going to be too happy with her problem child— homo sapiens.

I think that we’re too far gone, that we’ve removed ourselves too completely from nature. We’re never going to be able to return to the system that Mother Nature champions. We’re never going to accept going back to a hunter-gatherer society having made so many so-called advancements. We humans like to make order out of seeming chaos. “All men are created equal,” right? But we forget that equality, like perfection, doesn’t exist. It can never exist. Mother Nature would laugh at our attempts to make the world “fair.” Her natural selection thrives off of inequality. The strong survive. The weak die out. She doesn’t try to save the weak in an effort to achieve fairness. Not at all. To her, fairness is natural selection. Fairness is evolution.

When I think about what’s to come for humanity, I’m frightened. We’ll inevitably have to try to curb our growth, but how? Human culling? Sterilization? Suddenly the realities that exist in stories like Clockwork Orange or The Matrix or The Hunger Games or Star Wars or 1986 seem so much closer. But what can we do? What can we do except run for our lives? Run from all the looming threats against humanity? Hide away in some Ohio cabin and stay there until returning to ashes and dust? Or run, sprint, hurtle towards overpopulation? Towards global warming? Towards deforestation? Instead of running away to save your life, run towards the threats we face to save our life, our species, our planet? Yes, run for your life. Run hard. Run fast. Run far. But will you run towards destruction or hide from it? Your choice.

– Sarah Doody

One thought on “Run For Your Life

  1. Cool that you’re thinking about this stuff…I agree we are far removed from the natural systems that make our Earth and in doing so we are working to destroy it (i also agree with other things in your email..but just one post)…the really tough part though isn’t asking the questions you have posed, but in actually identifying what the sources of our disconnect are. It is one thing to say by driving cars we are causing global warming, but one person stopping driving a car isn’t really going to do anything…nor will 100 people…the tough part is figuring out whose in charge, who makes it so that we have to drive cars, who makes it so that an electric car costs a bajillion dollars and a gas car does not…these things are really tough to see but our dangerous behaviors are controlled by the systems which make up our society and, hiding might take our impact away but it will remain the system intact…and in many ways we are passengers on the Titanic heading towards an iceberg…whether we hide or we continue on our current path we will crash, so the real question is how can we convince the captain to change his course? cool article 🙂

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