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How To Be An Earthling by Wes Nisker:
This is Earth care week. Group of Buddhists decided to take their bodies out the ___. To get out of the cushion, and become involved in what we are facing, which is the result of our actions, and our species behavior over the last few hundred years to understand what’s going on with here, and to see if we can find ways to heal it, share those ways, commit ourselves to it. So, I want to make some reflections, some remarks about that issue of our planet, and I’ll start with, with the report from the People’s Climate March in New York, which I attended. Along with over—yes, it was amazing.
And I was only sorry that the press didn’t pick it up more, and do more with it. It was sort of pushed into the background by the bombing of ISIS. It was that week, and there was rollover 300,000 people in the streets of New York. Almost as many as ___, you know.
And it wasn’t just tree ___. There were some tree ___ there, no doubt. But it was all sorts of organizations. Religious organizations. I marched with the Buddhists.
We had a big contingent from all the different Buddhist schools. ___ reunion people were there, they had a wonderful ___,– what were they playing? ___ Jones! They kept playing ___, life goes on. I saw several people dressed as dinosaurs, and they had signs saying “Ask me about climate change.”
And on the same block is the Buddhists group. We had a big float of Noah’s Ark. And you could go up and write down the name of the species you’d like to be included on the voyage to save your species from the flood. Of course, if you’re a single cell organism, bacteria, you only need one to go. There was a big tree of life, where people would write name of species in trouble or issues that they, you know, ___ deeply about.
Lots of people wearing the garb of other species wearing feathers, bark, skins. I saw one man dressed in a suit of bamboo. He kind of tinkled when he walked. He said bamboo represents the first music ever made on the planet, when the wind blew through bamboo. And of course all these happened in the streets of New York City, which is kind of a testament to a brilliant species.
And we’ve got to admit we are in genius, and we have done amazing things, and we’ve landed on that little orb around there, and walked around, so, this is interesting, you know, and we’ve built this great towers, and put the pyramids to shame, and we know what’s inside of matter. How things work. We’re really brilliant, and life on this planet has been so altered by our behavior over the last, you know, few hundred years. We really have to assess what we’re doing and how we can learn how to live more in harmony. The reason I went to New York is that I just felt like we’re at this moment and this is going to be a water-shed event because we’re at a very critical moment in the history of, not just the history of humans, but the history of life on this planet.
And, we’re in trouble. And we can read about it almost now, any day, in the newspaper. Another event, unusual weather, unusual storms, unusual temperatures, species in trouble, just a kind of level of dysfunction that is happening around the planet. I always find the most disturbing thing to be what’s going on with other species of life as you probably know, as the biologist, the world’s leading biologist, agree that we are now living through the fifth or sixth largest extinction spasm, that’s what they call it, in biological history.
That we are losing other species of life, at something like 10,000 times the standard rate of extinction. The tragic results can be found on endangered species list. And clearly, this cause our human herds, trampling across the planet, consuming everything in our path, and I won’t mention any names. And that is clearly what is causing the extinction spasm, is taking over of habitat, the altering of habitat. I think the endangered species list maybe in the future will be used as an ___.
An ___ of all of us for crimes against non-humanity. There’s a reason assessment of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The study found that following species are threatened. 21% of all known mammals, 30% of amphibians, 35% of invertebrates, 70% of plants. Maybe the statistics become more alive when we hear the names of those disappearing, such as the ___ Nevada red fox, and the ___ fox, and the last ___ for this fox, is might a specific pocket fox, and the last _ for this fox, is a specific pocket mouse.
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