It took time for the little birds to try the new feeder, but clearly some like the taste of special bird peanut butter. I was worried it'd be a white elephant. They're smart enough though, especially the bright little tits, and I seem to hear more and more tweeting in the garden.
I had more to say when I was thinking about this earlier, but my mind has gone blank. I am cotton-woolly with tiredness.
Two things:
We think of ethics as what we should do as individuals to other individuals - give money, pull out of a pond, not kill, not inject with toxins. But the problem isn't a whole load of individuals doing there own thing, it's cultural and political. Do you change that one person at a time? Or top down? Or just optimistically wait for some benevolent process of osmosis?
People hate the climate protesters - because they cause traffic jams ('Which puts more CO2 in the air! Idiots!) But what they're trying to do is say STOP BEING BLIND! STOP IGNORING IT! PAY ATTENTION!!! Yet the attention turns on the protestors. 'Are they on the dole? Why aren't they at work? Why do I pay my taxes for people to cause disruption.' Oh God.
Did the suffragettes get this? I think they did. Now, they're heroes.
How do you change a zeitgeist?
The other is segregation. The idea that there is a should be a pristine natural wild state where all animals should be and that we humans should be in our own human realm. But this is crazy! We are animals and many animals co-evolved with us... what's changed is us thinking of ourselves as different and judging them by our standards.
I thought, 'Human culture was part of animal culture, now animal culture has to conform to human culture or be hermetically sealed in another realm.'
It's very complicated to think about and I can't do it while my brain is a peanut butter mush. But maybe, it we had the brains of tits, we could work it out.
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