Clear-cutting urban sprawl is despoiling the Gig Harbor Peninsula despite at least fifteen years of pleadings for restraint in approving permits for development.  Many Peninsula aquifers are now threatened from a combination of salt-water intrusion and over consumption.  The Gig Harbor Peninsula is central to Puget Sound.  The fate of The Peninsula and Puget Sound–and our own, is probably linked.  We have reached a tipping point.  How could it have come to this?  Where and how did we go so wrong with each other and with the world around us?  Is it anger, or fear, or ignorance, or sheer stupidity?

Consider the first Earth Day, 1970. A little known act of Congress, SR 6558, “The Ocean Mammal Protection Act,” was introduced into the Senate.  SR6558 called for a total moratorium on the “taking” of all marine mammals. There was reportedly unprecedented public support for this landmark legislation; a watershed event in our relationship to the land, the water and with non-human beings.  This included the killer whales of Puget Sound, with massive, complex brains and cognitive horizons beyond our imagination.  We love the orcas now, but like their terrestrial counterparts, the elephants, many of us still fear them, including biologists and “trainers.”  Orca means Serpent Devil.  The Ocean Mammal Protection Act threatened an alliance of self-serving administrators, hunters, biologists, circuses, zoos, and dolphinariums alike.  President Nixon assigned Henry Kissinger to kill SR 6558 for him.

A compromise bill, HR 10420, “The Marine Mammal Protection Act,” was then introduced without the protective language of SR 6558.  Public outrage resulted.  Senator Hollings convened a conference committee.  During the committee’s hearings, the psychologist Dr. Herbert Greenberg addressed the disconnection between our moral instincts and the illusions consistent with our egotistical self-interests.  These illusions separate from us from nature and foster many destructive consequences—like clear-cutting development of the land, toxic waste dumping into the waters and teaching our children that it is perfectly acceptable to abuse nature, enslave other beings and torture little “animals” to death.  After all, Rene? Descartes did it for science in 1600.  Dr. Greenberg testified that there is no psychological difference between those patterns of behaviors.  With our advanced technologies, we have reduced ourselves to a race of lemmings.

My mentor at Evergreen, a Lummi elder, sadly lamented to me not long before she died that “we simply haven’t learned to be humane with each other… we might have well been the lowest form of mental life.”  She did not live to see this dying sea around us.  The Chinook salmon and the orcas are on the endangered species list and they may be harbingers of our own futures.  We simply haven’t learned to be humane with each other and to revere this living world we share.  This is the ground we have reaped for our children—and their future...

The Lakota Sioux leader Russell Means, “The Last Of The Mohicans,” admonished our anti-aesthetic Western worldview that we inherited primarily from Aristotle, whose bivalent, adversarial logic of being reduced nature to a disconnected, soul-less “it.”  Women appeared to him as deformed.  Aristotle’s rationality embraced the “Great Chain Of Being,” a “logical” hierarchy of life—forever without a psychic connection to us or to God.  Aristotle’s influence can be found in the zoos, dolphinariums and public land use hearings around Puget Sound today.