Isn’t the Dodo just a fun loving bird? The Dodo was just chilling in Mauritius, with abundant food and no natural enemies, over centuries it actually ‘forgot’ how to fly. It is a very trusting bird as well, seeing as it was never exposed to natural enemies.
Then came the humans… 80 years later and the Dodo was gone. Fineto. Dead. Extinct.
The Dodo was long believed to be myth, as it left very little traces of its prior existence. Today we know more about the animal through science, we know that it is no myth.
Does all of this sound familiar? Even vaguely so? Yes it does! It is the same old thing over history. Ecology is in certain harmony, it is in a beautiful balance. Then man exhorts a certain shock to the system, always underestimating their influence, and within years, within the lifetime of a single person everything changes. Afterwards humans realise the magnitude of their influence… but then we always forget and do it again.
The Dodo was only one species influenced by a couple of Dutch sailors. Today? Well today is on a whole different scale, it is the world; the ecology as a whole influence by over seven billion people. And yet it is the same as the poor Dodo, a lot of the seven billion people claim to not believe in global warming or climate change like you would choose not to believe a myth. A lot of the seven billion underestimate their influence on the ecology: ‘how can we change the earth?’. And the most scary? Our attitude is the same as the Dutch sailors, who shrugged at the loss of the Dodo and moved on… unfortunately there is no such luck for us.
Maybe grandparents will tell their grandchildren of the beautiful earth with snow capped mountains, clear rivers and a diverse ecosystem, blue skies and schools of fish swirling in the sea, the cry of a fish eagle and the blow of a whale. They will think back to flowers blooming out of the cracks in rocks or a majestic tiger or the long necks of giraffe’s tower over the savanna.
The children will listen intensely but will probably not believe the myth.
