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News
Impeach George Bush and Dick
Cheney to prevent Wider War in the Middle East and Bring U.S. Forces
Home from Iraq with Professor Francis Boyle
a radio show transcript
Gary King: "We
Are All Constituents"
by Stephen Fox
The Hunting Fallacy
by Cyril Christo
Impeachment Limerick
Richard Arthure
What is a Culture of Peace?
by Louise Diamond
“Powerbrokers” (Legislative
Leadership and Lobbyists) in Control of Conference Committee
by Stephen Fox
NM Senate Joint Memorial
to Begin Process of Prohibiting Production of New Nuclear Weapons in
New Mexico
by Leland Lehrman
Newly Elected Las Cruces
Representative Jeff Steinborn Introduces Irrigation Fund Bill
by Stephen Fox
Native American Education
Act Vital to New Senator Lynda Lovejoy
by Stephen Fox
Legislature is a “Brain
Trust” to Accomplish All We Need in New Mexico
by Stephen Fox
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The
Hunting Fallacy
by Cyril Christo
The protection of nature is man’s most urgent task on earth. –Romain
Gary
We are, all of us still, living as inheritors of the Pleistocene.
We still engage as hunter gathering tribes, rampant killers upon the
surface of the earth. And many of us still hunt. But do we really need
to? And what purpose does it serve anymore?
Unlike our forebears, our hunting ways have brought
countless species to the brink of extinction and caused thousands to
disappear. Today we no longer need to hunt and those who hunt the great
game, the other predators, know not themselves nor the other. It was
Novalis, the great German Romantic poet, who said that… “nobody
knows himself, if he is only himself and not another at the same time.”
Among some of the more well-meaning of our civilization there
were those who honored the other; that in nature there is a sanctity
that gives us permission to be human, not inhuman.
The Bushmen of the Kalahari, the oldest genetic group on earth, the
oldest hunters on earth, who go back several thousand generations, revered
their prey and bowed before those antelopes who gave them life. By contrast,
the so-called Enlightenment, which gave us Immanuel Kant, proclaimed
that humans were the “titular lords of nature.” Recklessly,
barbarically, over the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution,
we have ravaged our life support system; some ask whether the 21st century
will be the final century.
The war raging inside the human species is an internecine
inner struggle between the reptilian brain, the limbic system, and the
frontal lobe where higher consciousness occurs. We hunt “the other”
today with bows and even high powered rifles, mercilessly obliterating
“the other” without compunction. To prove our true manhood,
canned hunts of fenced animals are normal.
The recent tragic destruction of a mountain lion
by a local New Mexico adolescent highlights how far we have departed
from our roots. The hunt today has become a vindication of our forlornness
and our depravity. We have lost our totemic fraternity with the other
and in the process lost wonder, magic and the mythic landscape.
For those who are too bored with war games and video distractions, the
need to obliterate the other is a sign that the heart of the hunter
which used to be about survival, has transformed into an all encompassing
heart of darkness. If our species is to survive and not obliterate itself
and the Other, it will not be enough to find poetry and the sensual
amidst that spell-binding world of the senses. The time has come to
split the atom once again, to regain the field of silence within the
psyche and to hunt for the marvelous with a heart of reverence, the
likes of which the human race has not had for millennia.
Cyril Christo is a poet and documentarian who was nominated for an
Academy Award for an anti-nuclear documentary in 1988, and is working
with his wife Marie on their second book on Africa. Their first book,
Lost Africa: The Eyes of Origin, was published by Assouline in 2004.
Their photographs may be viewed by private appointment: 986-1007
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