For today’s post I have been wanting to write about ‘species coexistence’, a term that seems to come out very often in cultural events lately. Species coexistence is something that triggers many questions (what is it , what does it imply, where does it start/end ….) in my working life (restoration, moving species, farming, killing things for the sake of science (if they are invertebrates there are no ‘ethical’ rules and protocols…), and it’s also something that I am left wondering about in my daily life in general, even at night when you are trying to co-exist with mosquitoes (and sometimes they win the co-existence making you wish that morning comes quick so you can get up and finish the war.. I admit , I wanted to write about this because I felt that this topic was something often thrown out there, in a ‘this is fashionable now’ manner, but I was starting to be doubtful about the usefulness and feasibility of the approach. I started to think that if at some stage in the time period of Homo sapiens we invented methods to keep the insects away, for example, there must have been behind some kind of safety reason and evolutionary advantage, although I personally live somewhere without ‘deadly’ insects / spiders/ snakes/ marine life (etc..), I know some bites and stings can still be very very painful, and some of this carry diseases. After all, also in other animals societies cleanliness is deemed important, and includes removing parasites.. So the idea of overgrown grass in the cities ‘for the insects’ put me a little at unease. And I go around calling myself a hippie tree hugger and often i would go around barefoot, But having ants all over you as you do yoga on the beautiful grassy ground and having them bite you, it's not at all relaxing.. The problem lies with the fact that we are too many, we are occupying too much space, and so we must have areas of overgrown grass, with flowers, forests and high heterogeneity of habitats. Just maybe not in the 'everybody happy together' narrative that is getting pushed these days.. As I said, I was starting to feel this in a negative way, with the human as parasite that occupies way too much space rather than maybe being of a much more manageable number and concentrating in a few big cities (metropolis) which would have everything we need, in a self-sufficient manner, and the countryside, mountains, seas, left to their more rightful inhabitants. (And maybe a few ‘outcasts’ from the human society, as this happens also in the natural world, and we know there are some people who fare really well living the ‘wild life’ (but being truly wild, not out of outdoor lifestyle fashion)..
Then I ended up watching the movie ‘the big miracle’ , and while it is a classical US-made ‘feel good’ film. The plot of this movie is supposed to be taken from a real story, this said a lot of it was largely implausible. But it still made me think: maybe there is a way for humans to do some good. Since we have power to do big things, we invented machinery, maybe we should be putting this at the service of other species. Helping them adapt to the changes that we are bringing upon this world. We can lower perhaps some of the damage, but it's inevitable that we are doing damage. We have already done some pretty irreversibile things, we can't pretend to just adapt our species survival, we must make use of the knowledge we have to help everthing. We must start thinking of individuals of other species as individuals that are valuables. While I have to say I am not a big ‘vegan fanatic’ , waking up on morning with the van surrounded by cows was beautiful, and while the coexistence didn't go so well (she was a bit big and very curious, which wouldn't have been a problem but she wanted to take away my coffee, while the other really wanted to eat my window wipers.. ), I felt that i made some kind of connection, and maybe i will still eat meat sometimes but i will do thinking and appreciating where it came from. it's a wild wild world, and we all have to survive (although we can survive pretty well on a mostly vegan/vegetarian diet).. The movie was preeceded by a short film featuring many underwater video footing, with a voiceover that repeated many times how 'we are guests of the sea'. And maybe that's where co-existence should start; realising that we cannot be the ones with the highest power everywhere, and worse using this power without thinking of the implications it has on what has more rights than us to be there. We can defend our territories, provided they are small, and accepting some guests, while acting as guests in other areas that don't pertain to 'us'. Sharing space on Earth.
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