Planning for the far future

Needless to say, animals are different to us. No hubris, no superiority and (mainly amongst wild animals) innate understanding about how dangerous humans can be. Their senses are impeccable. But they can’t judge everything about us because we are so very different to them. Unlike animals, we are aware of a future and we try to plan for it and improve things, and with that comes the violence of maintaining our position of dominance over nature and especially over animals. That’s what has brought us unstuck. The damage we’ve done has come from trying to improve things by wit, strength and cruelty. We’ve never learnt to ‘be content with our lot’. And now, at the eleventh hour, our manipulation and bullying have brought us to the brink of catastrophe. Now, some of us want to turn in a completely different direction. But it’s like steering an ocean liner 180 degrees. It has so much momentum that to swing it around is a slow process. So we have to see far ahead, beyond our own lifetime, to future generations of responsibility-takers who, we might hope, will be warriors of non-violence. For us here, today, our job is to set the ground work and try to solve the eternal conundrum – when is dynamic too aggressive and when is non-violence too ineffective?