Post #4: Hope for Animals and Their World

I really enjoyed this reading by Jane Goodall, Gail Hudson and Thane Maynard. Their stories of restoration of wildlife is absolutely inspiring. This excerpt gives reality to the idea of must needed restoration all over the world. Not only do they provide the reader with heartfelt stories but also an idea of how to make it happen; repeating is easier than doing it the first time. Many times they spoke of the high cost of restoration, which is the reality of it. Restoration is extremely expensive but I think that  companies who destroy the land should be responsible for restoring it. One of my favorite stories was "The Man Who Restored Forests to a Mountain". In this story a young boy had a dream to restore the forest to Mountain that had lost all vegetation to an copper mine. After many years of dedicated work the man was able to get the Kennecott Company to clean up their mess. The Mountain now flourishes with trees and other vegetation single-handily planted by him and has brought back forest life. They went on with many stories of restoring life to fresh water sources such as lakes, rivers and streams. The dedication of the people involved in these stories has brought animal life back from near extinction. "The Amazing Return of the Coho Salmon" is a great example of how there is hope for these animals in the future, but that it is up to us to make it happen. When I read "Why Save the Endangered Species?" I'm not ashamed to say that I cried... numerous times. I guess what hit me the most was these peoples passion and dedication to the survival of these animals. How fulfilling their lives must be to experience what they have experienced and accomplish what they have accomplished thus far. It really makes your heart hurt reading these stories. How desperate these animals are for our help, and also how important their survival is for all walks of life. The more I read and the more I experience in this class, the more I cannot believe how disconnected I am to the earth and so connected to materialistic things. This class has really got me thinking how the majority of us live very shallow lives. I have to share the most heart wrenching words, by Rod Sayler, I found in this excerpt that really woke me up. "We are treading too harshly on the earth and consuming and degrading too much of the planet. If we allow extinctions to happen through ignorance and greed, then with the loss of each endangered species and unique population, our world becomes less diverse and strikingly less beautiful and mysterious. Our oceans, grasslands, and forests will echo with silence, and the human heart will know that something is missing- but it will be too late".