I bet there are a lot of people who follow my posts and blogs and wonder if I can say anything nice about humans. Well, I do feel that I can. Let me give it a try.
Humans have the ability to be very compassionate. An example is www.humaneborders.org. They leave water along the routes most used by illegal immigrants going from Mexico to the US not because they want to encourage illegal immigration but because they don't want people dying of exposure and dehydration. www.doctorswithoutborders.org is another tremendously compassionate group of people willing to risk their lives to provide medical care for innocent people caught in the strife of war.
Yes humans have the ability to be extremely compassionate. That is wonderful. That also means that we have the ability to end hatred, war, violence, poverty, starvation, homelessness, etc., etc., etc. Yes, we are capable of doing these things. Isn't that wonderful?!
Being the new kid on the planet we have some advantages over the old-timers. One of the most important is that we have an expanded brain. This expanded brain not only gave us language capability but also the ability to abstract. The ability to abstract gives us expanded problem-solving skills. This means that we can see and identify problems like pollution and environmental destruction and come up with a solution. Couple language skills with our expanded problem-solving skills and add in our compassion, we are quite capable of working together to address the problems we have created and deal successfully with polution and environmental destruction.
Our ability to abstract also gives us greater creativity than our fellow creatures. This creativity comes not only in our artistic skills but in our ability to think outside the box and come up with ways of having a safe, comfortable and enjoyable life-style wthout destroying the world around us and the habitat of other species. For example, Arcosanti, a community in east-central Arizona, is an examle of one architect's dream of a city that is comfortable and enjoyable while living in harmony with the nature around it. www.arcosanti.org. When Pamela and I visited Arcosanti we were hosted by an architect student from Chili who came to study the ideas of Paolo Soleri, the founder of Arcosanti, and apply them to the housing shortage in Chili. I just saw an article about pleasant, comfortable and affordable public housing around the world. One of the examples, I believe, was Chili. I wonder whether that student had any influence.
A few years ago I listed to a Ted Talk by Dr. Yuval Harari, who is an Israeli historian and tenured professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. An authority on human history, Dr. Harari holds that if homo sapiens had not learned to cooperate we would now be extinct.
Of course we know that other species cooperate. The hunting skills of many animals is legendary. What most people don't realize that it isn't just big cats and canine - members of the same species cooperating. The grouper and eel cooperate in hunting. https://fishpain.com/cooperation-between-groupers-and-eels.htm. The advantage that we have is that we can communicate, we have compassion, we have the technical and creative skills to find a solution for all of the problems and destruction we have caused and make change.
Yes, humans are an amazing animal. Along with the above mentioned attributes we are intelligent and extremely adaptable. If we so desire, we can totally transform our lives and society to enjoy peaceful co-existence with each other as well as other creatures. If we so desire, we can use our ability to problem-solve, cooperate and create so that all humans have a comfortable place to live and enough food to eat. If we so desire, we have the skills and ability to create amazingly comfortable habitats for ourselves without destroying the environment and habitat of others.
Wow!
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