Survival of Vulnerable Cultures, Species & the Biosphere
About
It would be most gratifying if someday soon this “About” section were to be describing the Origins and Extinctions Consortium which functioned in support of Origins and Extinctions Days and The World Center for Survival of Cultural and Biological Heritage. But for now, this section will be a bit more personal.
In late 2007 I first began thinking about Origins and Extinctions Days as a way to “change the world” and motivate us to thoughtfully and determinedly find ways to protect endangered species, but I realized quickly that we needed to take care of our own as well, that is, our endangered cultures. This realization was no surprise, given that I had been telling colleagues for decades that among my general education courses in college, the cultural and physical anthropology courses were the most mind-expanding and, as an evolutionary ecologist, they added much to my world view. Moreover, the two books in the early 1970’s that most deeply resonated with me were encountered in bookstores: E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Similarly, when I was in high school, I was changed utterly by Lerone Bennet Jr’s Before the Mayflower.
It may be useful to provide even more personal historical context for the impetus for the O & E website. My first revelation that adults were quite fallible was when I was in second grade, in Lutheran Sunday school, when I decided that the man leading the class and the bible to which we referred in class were both, in an uncharitable word, “stupid.” My other early memories that led me to conclude I was living in a poorly constructed adult world were the society-wide fear of nuclear war, the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy, the insanity of the Viet Nam War, the horrific assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and the sickening election of Richard Nixon with his racist subtexts, appealing to southern Democrats. It was all so troubling, but then so was the rapid expansion of suburbia, gobbling up farmland, and similarly the expanding farmlands which were spoiling the waters in which I fished and decimating the forests and woodlands and prairies in which I hunted.
In my early college years, when I read Aldo Leopold’s book, A Sand County Almanac, I spent a few days thinking about whether I could do what he did, amass sufficient wealth when young and then doing what I could to help the biota later in life when I had the leisure time. Moreover, Charles Darwin also seemed like a good role model for the value of unencumbered years to do important things. I was so sickened and horrified, however, by the indifference of the business world to the well-being of 1) the biota that I so cherished and 2) the downtrodden people in inner cities and in dying rural towns such that my plan of action was clear: become an academic and read and observe and think, with the intent of being useful.
I chose to be as close to a modern version of a naturalist as I could be, in an academic field I called “evolutionary autecology” which comprised only one practitioner…me. I decided on easy-to-study organisms in a relatively simple ecological system so that I could gain a more thorough understanding of cause-to-effect relationships with respect to a number of big questions in ecology. That is, I chose to study lizards in deserts. As a relatively untraveled college senior at the University of Minnesota, this was a bit eccentric, but I was fairly certain that I could find some sufficiently pristine locales in the deserts of the southwestern USA and accomplish what I intended. Driving across the country to grad school, I was sad to see so much of the landscape altered by European-American culture. Moreover, the virtual draining of the Colorado River for agricultural use and cities in the deserts made my study site search more challenging than I had expected. And frankly, for decades after, I was unclear about what I could possibly do to make much of a difference. Well, after a somewhat complicated and slowed professional timeline, in 2007, once I became a full professor, I began focusing on what I could do. I decided it was necessary to coalesce some of the most accomplished persons, veritable cynosures, that were not in government, and could be a collective guide for sufficient societal change to enable endangered cultures and endangered species to survive and thrive.
Although I naively had hoped two years would be enough to set this 3-day “working holiday” into motion by 2009 (in time to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the publication “Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin) it was obvious that I had much to learn about how to engage individuals from across the spectrum of culture. But I also needed to learn enough to judge whether erudite academics and public intellectuals were making sense when they were opining about the most beneficial ways humanity should move forward; this was a challenge that required much reading and listening. Outcomes of my efforts first manifested with this website a full decade later, in 2017, and included the proposals forOrigins and Extinctions Days and the World Center for Survival of Cultural and Biological Heritage, among other actions.
Just as important as the actual proposal document is “Our Ethical Imperative” which I developed as a catalyst for thought and discussion, in the hope that it can serve as a framework for obviating ideologies and allow us to proceed more deliberately toward a more sentient, compassionate culture. In so doing, I hoped we could overcome the chaotic societal inertia that is keeping us from being stewards of the biosphere.
Since 2017, I have made edits and additions intermittently on Our Ethical Imperative, and primarily on the section with suggestions for policies and procedures for the past two years, but also creating a philosophical basis over the past year as I have continued to read, watch, and think, and integrate knowledge from such broad academic fields as anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, biology and ecology. In preparing this for this website, I read about 1000 books and I examined about 10000 academic papers. My focus continues to be on identifying the many forces that cause harm to Humankind, Biota and the entire Biosphere, and on suggesting promising directions not just for diminishing the harms, but also for proceeding toward a better future together.
ORIGINS AND EXTINCTIONS 