From its mouth comes a sweet odour, as if it were a mixture of every perfume. Other animals, hearing its voice, follow wherever it goes because of the sweetness of its scent. Only the dragon is seized by fear and flees into the caves beneath the earth.Under a lead sky in an old library I turned a page and saw what cannot be captured in print or on screen. The panther's breath shimmers in ribbed waves across the gold.
The beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time... I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. Once shared it -- just as excited bathers share shining seawater -- with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time's common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. [1]Nabokov, a conjuror, may be telling the truth as he remembers it. But are command of language and number really necessary for a sense of time? In the 1940s and 1950s when he was writing comparatively little was known about animal cognition. We now know that some great apes, cetaceans and corvids are self-aware. With this awareness may come some sense of time. But it seems sensible to suppose that only humans have the "unique ability to envision large vistas of past or future." [2]
Under the hazels I entered again into boyhood-- David Constantine (via AG)
Over a hurrying water.
The church clock dropped the quarters nearby
And from a little school
Children hallooed like enchanted animals
But I was watching a water that shipped the wild apples
With all the time in the world
Patient as a fisher bird
In the hazel light to learn to be a finder
Of life, its mark, on a black stone
Opened like a butterfly, a soul that water,
Swaling and swaling, had let be seen.
I think I've read that some data indicates suicide rates fall during war time. If true, this is interesting, and may be significant.I'd add that some (e.g. Richard Barry) claim that dolphins have deliberately committed suicide because they are being held captive by humans in conditions that they find unbearable. (Dolphin 'suicides' such as these may be a distinct, perhaps involuntary, phenomenon.)
There's a remarkable account by the late Australian philosopher Val Plumwood of being attacked and almost killed by a crocodile.
Another 'wild' animal that still kills humans is the elephant. The authorities in the Indian state of Orissa report 180 deaths by trampling in the last 5 years (humans had encroached on elephant territory with mining and other operations).
One commonly reads that fewer than a dozen people are killed each year by sharks. Humans, by contrast, slaughter tens of millions of sharks each year.
"ecocidal" patterns of consumption as addictive and self-destructive. Living like this is living at a less than properly human level – McIntosh suggests we may need therapy, what he describes as a "cultural psychotherapy" to liberate us. That liberation may or may not be enough to avert disaster. But what we do know – or should know – is that we are living inhumanly.Inhumanely, perhaps; but all too humanly.
Roasted lemurs and criminal gangs exporting precious hardwood: this is the sad state of affairs for Madagascar's legendary biodiversity. Since a military coup forced the president to resign in March, conservationists and biologists have watched as loggers have stripped the country's forests and killed its animals for bushmeat.-- Madagascar biodiversity under threat as gangs run wild.
Much of the foreign aid to Madagascar has been withdrawn and, without a stable government to enforce rules and laws, criminal organisations have been quick to exploit the unique animal and plant life of the country.
"It has been a gold rush for logging gangs and bushmeat hunters to do as much as they can before the government gets organised and puts a stop to it," says Edward Louis, a conservation biologist at the Omaha Zoo, who has been working in Madagascar for a decade.
In August, Conservation International reported that 15 bushmeat traders, contracted by a restaurant, were arrested carrying hundreds of endangered lemurs, which had been killed and roasted. "This happened in one of the country's best managed parks," says [ the conservation biologist Edward Louis]. "If it's happening there, I can't begin to imagine what is happening elsewhere.
The burrowing abilities [of toads] are pretty impressive: winter burrows used by hibernating European toads can sometimes extend as much as three metres below ground.-- via Darren Naish, who has much more.
Today we use less and we use more of our mental capacity than [did preliterate peoples]: and it is not exactly the same kind of mental capacity as it was either. For example we use considerably less of our sensory perceptions. When I was writing the first version of Mythologiques, I was confronted with a problem that which to me was extremely mysterious. It seems that there was a particular tribe which was able to see the planet Venus in full daylight, something which to me would be utterly impossible and incredible. I put the question to professional astronomers: they told me, of course, that we don't but, neverthelesss, when we know the amount of light emitted by the planet Venus in full daylight, it was not absolutely inconceivable that some people could. Later on I looked into old treatises on navigation belonging to our own civilization and it seems that sailors of old were perfectly able to see the planet in full daylight. Probably we could still see it if we had a trained eye.-- from Myth and Meaning by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
...It took both my hands to turn the wheel-- from Bathysphere by Don Paterson
Light cut the door; I put my weight to it
and took a small step down into the world
that was identical and wholly other.
When they ask me what I saw, they all expect
Some blissed-out excuse for my not saying,
but I know what I saw: I saw in everything
the germ and genius of its own ascent,
The fire of its increase; I saw the earth
put forth the trees, like a woman her dark hair;
I saw the sun's sun and the river's river,
I saw the whole abundant overflow;
I saw my own mind surge into the world
and close it all inside one human tear;
I saw how every man-made thing will turn
its lonely face up to us like a child's;
I saw that time is love, and time requires
of everything its full expenditure
that love might be conserved; and the I saw
that love is not what we mean by the word.
For some idea of it, choose a point
in the middle of a waterfall, and stare
for as long as you can stand. Now look around
see how every rock and tree flows upwards?
So the whole world blooms continually
within its true and hidden element,
a sea, a beautiful and lucid sea
through which it pilots, rising without end.
Crocodile dung can be used to enhance a person's beauty: the excrement (or the contents of the intestines) is smeared on the face and left there until sweat washes it off.-- The Medieval Bestiary
Elephants have killed more than 180 people in the past five years, say officials in the forest department in the state of Orissa.-- report
...[Fatal attacks] are increasing because industrial activities, mining for instance, are destroying elephant habitat, said Biswajit Mohanty, environmental activist and secretary of Wildlife Society of Orissa. An alumina refinery at Lanjigarh has obstructed the animal’s migratory route from Kandhamal to Karlapat forests in Kalahandi via Niyamgiri.
The Umbrella mouth gulper uses a whip-like tail for movement. The end of the tail bears a complex organ with numerous tentacles, which glows pink and gives off occasional bright red flashes. This is presumably a lure to attract prey, although its presence at the far end of the body from the mouth suggests that the eel may have to adopt an unusual posture to use it effectively...(from Wikipedia)
It grows to about 1 metre (3.3 ft) in length and is found in all tropical and subtropical seas at depths ranging from 900 to 8,000 meters (3,000 to 26,200 feet).
The images from our albatross-borne camera show at least four albatrosses (including the camera-mounted bird) actively following a killer whale while it was breaking the sea surface. Only a few previous studies have documented the association between albatrosses and killer whales, and these were mostly in shallow waters...doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007322
Although it is still difficult to quantify how often black-browed albatrosses associate with killer whales in the open ocean, our results, together with ship-based observations..., suggest that these associations may occur more frequently than previously anticipated and may be a part of foraging repertoire of albatrosses.
The fate of the sons of man and the fate of beasts is the same: as one dies, so the other. They all have the same breath and man has no advantage over the beast for all his vanity. All go to one place; all are from dust, and turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes downward to the Earth?-- Ecclesiastes (3.19-21) quoted in an essay on animal rights in Darwin’s Universe: Evolution from A to Z by Richard Milner.
How extraordinary, strange, and incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! The distorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes; the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to see which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind because they exhibit an absence of design. There is no idea in them.-- Richard Jefferies in The Story of My Heart (1883). Jefferies did not understand Darwin. The ‘design’, the ‘idea’ in all creatures, including those in the deep, is (it seems obvious to us) survival, and in this they obviously succeed.
....They are not inimical of intent towards man, not even the shark; but there the shark is, and that is enough. These miserably hideous things of the sea are not anti-human in the sense of persecution, they are outside, they are ultra and beyond. It is like looking into chaos, and it is vivid because these creatures, interred alive a hundred fathoms deep, are seldom seen; so that the mind sees them as if only that moment they had come into existence.
a great part, perhaps the whole, of nature and of the universe is distinctly anti-human. The term inhuman does not express my meaning, anti-human is better; outre-human, in the sense of beyond, outside, almost grotesque in its attitude towards, would nearly convey it.or as he writes a little earlier:
Those who have been in an open boat at sea without water have proved the mercies of the sun, and of the deity who did not give them one drop of rain, dying in misery under the same rays that smile so beautifully on the flowers.
...For the first few million years after an extinction the speciation rate actually falls. "That suggests to us a sort of wounded biosphere. Extinction events don't just remove organisms from an ecosystem, leaving lots of opportunity for new species to diversify. Instead, what we think happens is that the niches themselves collapse, so you won't have new organisms emerging to occupy them. The niches themselves don't exist any more," says [James] Kirchner.-- from Post-human Earth
Eventually, though, evolution wins the day, and after a few tens of millions of years biodiversity rebounds. Sometimes, as after the Ordovician mass extinction 440 million years ago, the new regime looks a lot like the old one. But more often a new world emerges. "You're not re-establishing the old chessboard, you're designing a whole new game," says [Doug] Erwin.
Many things in nature were not made for us or anyone else to look at so what’s going on? I think the answer lies in remarkable convergence between features of art that we value because they provide evidence of human skill and the features of natural things that have evolved and persisted because these features have given them staying power and survivability. That’s to say there’s a convergence between our sense of aesthetically good form and nature’s selection of evolutionarily stable form.-- from Beauty's Child: Sexual Selection, Nature Worship and the Love of God. Nicholas Humphrey on (Edge 300)
In the case of animals and plants part of the reason for this is the ordinary working of natural selection. That the whole body grows in an ordered and harmonious way just is the best way of building a complete machine. So even without the added stimulation of sexual selection good form would prove to be evolutionarily adaptive.
Why is being in the presence of beautiful things adaptive?
A. The things as such as are valuable to us
1. Beauty is a sign of something good (for us) about the object
2. Beauty is the thing that’s good for us about the object
B. The things as such have no value, but in approaching them we approach something else that has value
1. Safe environment
2. Good people.
