Heroes Not Zombies

You couldn’t have a better shaped beak than this to get to the nectar. You couldn’t have a better shaped flower than this to tempt these birds to pick up and share your pollen.

Isn’t it amazing when you see such a perfect fit – where the plant world and animal world help each other out so beautifully? The last Attenborough series was about plants (Green Planet) and time and again he showed such astonishing relationships between plants and insects, birds or animals. One scene which particularly amazed me was of a desert where there had been no rain for over twenty years. Not only was there a sudden explosion of flowering plants when the brief rain eventually appeared, something quite remarkable in its own right. But the exactly best adapted insects and birds to pollinate these flowers appeared too. Where did they come from? Where had they been for the last twenty years??

I know that competition, “the survival of the fittest”, and ideas like “the selfish gene” have dominated our culture and thinking for a long time now. But isn’t it clear that without cooperation, co-evolution, and what Kropotkin called “mutual aid”, Life just wouldn’t exist.

This thought came to me this morning after browsing my photos, seeing this striking bird, listening to the BBC podcast, “In our Time” episode about Kropotkin, remembering the Green Planet which I saw recently, and hearing the stories about Ukraine this week.

What the Russian government is doing is the worst of the competitive aggressive violent aspect of Life, but what ordinary people are doing is opening their houses, donating food and clothes, welcoming refugees and voicing their support for Ukrainians.

I heard someone say it’s the elites who behave so badly and the ordinary people who behave so well. Too black and white perhaps. But it was the same in the pandemic. People helped each other out, got shopping for the elderly and vulnerable, whilst the elite…..well they had parties and were granted exceptions to enable them to continue to travel and grabbed multimillion pound or dollar contracts to enrich themselves.

Mutual aid, generosity, co-adaptation and “interbeing”……maybe it’s time to change the dominant narrative.