I believe MAN is the saddest creature on Earth.  Why?  No other creature works so hard to destroy itself.  MAN rarely thinks his own thoughts, which is a potential mental capacity he lets atrophy.  He thinks other’s thoughts.  He rarely tries to see things all-the-way-through in an effort to learn the consequences for his actions.  He rarely learns from his mistakes, and so he continues to repeat them, and has done so for millennia.  He rarely tries to educate himself about the world in order to perceive the world through his own eyes, and so he can only perceive the world through other’s eyes.  And all the while he thinks of himself as a free soul.  The delusion is complete.

Specie after specie of animals and plants die off around him and he hardly notices.  He learns about these extinctions - many of which may, according to many biological scientists, contain medical properties he's currently ignorant about - second hand via the evening news.  Like learning about the polar bear being added to the endangered specie list.  “Hey Marge, what do make a that?”  “I don’t know.  Something about melting ice or something.”

Seeing the Polar Bear Before They’re Extinct

Only a day or two into the notice that the Bush Administration has decided to put the polar bear on the endangered species list, the tourists are lining up to see them.  "People want to see them while they are still there," said Frank Cregor of Tennessee-based Cregor Adventures.  "For companies like us, it's a sad thing, but it's almost free advertising.  The tours truly sell themselves."

Cregor books trips to the little town of Churchill in Manitoba.  He’s sold twice as many trips this year as last year.  "We have a huge number of clients from Great Britain and Australia, likely due to the [weak] dollar," says Cregpr.  They’re flocking to Churchill, a town about six blocks long, to see the bears.  They get in the buggies and peer at the animals through specially designed safety windows - without even so much as setting foot on the tundra.

The polar bears try to ignore the buggies and the human oglers inside.  They hunt their seals, eat, and sleep.  I can’t help wondering what they may think about these sad beings who just paid 7 grand apiece to come all the way to Manitoba to see them kill, eat, and sleep.  There are other companies running tours to Spitsbergen, Norway.  But you can’t get as close to the bears as you can in Manitoba.  There you can even see mothers protecting their cubs.  In Norway you can only see them from boats, and you’re not guaranteed you’ll get a “good sighting.”  Yet the tourists still come - and stare and stare and stare.

I leave you with a William Stafford poem titled Roll Call:

Red Wolf came, and Passenger Pigeon,
the Dodo Bird, all the gone or endangered
came and crowded around in a circle, the Bison, the Irish Elk,
waited silent, the Great White Bear, fluid and strong,
sliding from the sea, streaming and creeping
in the gathering darkness, nose down, bowing to earth
its tapered head, where the Black-footed Ferret, paws folded,
stood in the center surveying the multitude
and spoke for us all: “Dearly beloved,” it said.