About a week ago on RTE radio someone was quoting Chief Seattle, but only a fragment was heard. He came to mind when reading in the paper that last year we had seven hundred fish kills in our rivers and lakes. Seven hundred.
Are we getting worse? Possibly not, just more caring about what we do with the world around us, which is not ours, the Chief reminds us. It was probably much worse when the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century was working its way through the North, in particular. When dye works and engineering works and all sorts of manufacturing was pouring its byproducts of waste into the rivers.
What damage, for instance, the linen trade must have wreaked, when the water from the retting dams or lint holes poured into the innocent trout streams. One big difference. In those days, you did not have the organised, local, democratic angling clubs we know today, nor the equivalent of our fisheries boards. In those days the locals may have fished in some numbers, but real anglers, i.e. rich anglers, went off for their sport to the pollution free west of Ireland or to Scotland or maybe Norway.
Anyway, to Chief Seattle. He pointed out that while the white man slaughters beasts for sport or just in a spirit of destructiveness, "we kill only to stay alive". He was referring particularly to a thousand rotting buffalos, shot from a passing train.
"What is man without the beasts?
If the beasts were gone, men would die from a great
Loneliness of spirit. For what-
ever happens to the beasts
Soon happens to man. All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth be-
falls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself
Earlier in this particular extract from the Chief's famous testimony delivered when the Government of the United States, in 1854, sought to buy a huge tract of land from one of the western Indian tribes, the Chief sought to lay down guidelines to the Government. This above is an extract from his reply. One line in particular remains in the mind. "I am a savage and do not understand any other way."