Cabragh Wetlands Trust is beginning its series of Winter Talks, with a popular event next Tuesday (27th October) when well-known local naturalist Tom Gallagher will talk at 8.00pm on “Garden Birds and how to attract them”. This is a wonderful event for the whole family to attend, and will give you plenty of ideas about how to get more of our feathered friends into your gardens. Entry is free, as is a restorative cup of tea.
In an inspiring testament written in the mid-1850s the Native American Chief Seattle described people as “but a strand in the web of life”. In our time we are returning to this realization and learning to appreciate the world about us in a whole new way.
So much of what Chief Seattle intuitively understood, we now know to be true. Science has since confirmed that all of life is indeed related and springs from from one unbroken source. In this year of Darwin’s anniversary, we are surely in a position to understand better than any previous generation where man came from and what is his true place in the spectrum of life. We are able to join the indigenous wisdom of our ancestors and “undeveloped” people like Seattle, to the hard science of the anthropologists who painstakingly piece together bone fragments to demonstrate ever more clearly the stages by which modern man emerged.
For 30 years we have read about Lucy, over 3 million years old and ancestor of just about everyone on the planet. Now the scientists have come up with Ardi, from east Africa as well, but 100,000 generations before Lucy; 4.8 million years old, but bi-pedal (walking on two legs) like us today. The bone record is getting ever closer to identifying that famous missing link, the common ancestor of both humans and the great apes like chimpanzees and gorillas.
As a species modern man emerged from Africa about 80,000 years ago. A small band of people searching for food, pushed out into the Middle East. Over the millennia our ancestors spread around the world and increased in number. As a species we have been extremely successful, with almost seven billion people now occupying every habitable corner of the globe.
Over time many cultures and languages emerged offering amazing diversity and color. Each landscape and environment evokes its own particular flowering of the human spirit in response. We may have developed cultural and physical differences, but we are one people, all sharing common ancestors.
We exist and flourish within the context of the web of life on which we depend. We wouldn't draw our next breath but for the trees taking in our carbon dioxide and giving us life sustaining oxygen. Our food would not grow but for the earth worms, the billions of micro-organisms in the soil creating the conditions for the seed to germinate and grow.
Seattle recognized that we are entirely dependent on the interconnection of all life, that we are but a strand in a web of life. Like links in a chain, the web works because it all works together. Each piece of the web has a role to play for life to flourish. As a species humans are as dependant on the web as every other species. Damage the web, and we endanger all life, including ultimately ourselves.
The web of life is made up of many different life forms, from micro-organisms in the soil to the Blue Whale in the oceans, yet it is one community of life, and we are part of this amazing, complex, yet intimate community. Everything is related to everything else, even if you have to go back a billion generations to find the connection. At last even the politicians are waking up to these self-evident truths, with dire warnings about the consequences of failure at the Copenhagen climate talks in December. The web is under real and immediate threat.
At Cabragh Wetlands we are working to protect the children, the children of all species, so this wonderful web of life can remain healthy and sustainable for the foreseeable future.
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