Heroes Not Zombies

I’m reading “A Sand County Almanac”, by Aldo Leopold, published back in 1949. It’s a delightful series of small essays on Nature, conservation and life on a farm in Wisconsin. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to the proclamations of today’s politicians, and a wholly different set of values, and seem to see the natural world as something to be plundered.

Early in the book, Leopold muses about the return of the geese from their winter migration. And he says this – “It is an irony of history that the great powers should have discovered the unity of nations at Cairo in 1943. The geese of the world have had that notion for a longer time, and each March they stake their lives on its essential truth”

Isn’t it amazing that the “essential truth” is we all share this one small planet, and that borders are totally artificial phenomena created by human beings to either try to grab a part of geography, or to exert power over others, creating a basic feeling of “us and them”. There are those who are included within a border, and there are those who are not – “aliens”, “foreigners”, “migrants” – any title other than fellow human beings.

Life moves around planet Earth.

We see it clearly in migrating creatures, not least the birds who spend part of the year in one hemisphere and part in another. But we only have to look back over a pretty short period of human history to see that we humans too, migrate. There have been great waves of migration in the past (not least to America from Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries) and constant flows in between. Yet the powers that be seem to promote the us and them idea and think people should be judged and treated differently according to where they happened to have been born, or where their parents happened to have been born.

I think this is a kind of madness. It’s a delusion to think we can divide the human species up into all these separate, invented categories, and cruel to treat others according to where they, or their parents, happened to have been born. Who chooses where they want to be born?

I’ve long thought the problems of our modern societies are not caused by migration, but by greed, selfishness and inequality. Until we reverse the current trend of the rich getting richer while life becomes harder and less secure for the rest, politicians will seek “others” to blame – and, to often, those “others” are those who “were not born here”. Targeting those “aliens” or “foreigners” is a convenient way for keeping the Public attention away from those who are really causing the problems – the elites who grab and hoard more and more wealth, and are in the process of passing it on to their children through inheritance, enabling the next generations of the rich to become even richer, without having to do a single thing to do so.

This current system isn’t working. It’s not good for families. It’s not good for society. It’s not good for Nature. It’s not good for the planet. So who is it good for? Well, I think we know. But the trouble this, those profiting from it are a tiny minority of the human beings sharing this one little planet.