(The Spokane Regional Health District is an arresting sight, inspired as it apparently was by the architecture of West and Central Africa. I can't remember seeing such a structure anywhere before. And I certainly wouldn't have expected to find one serving as a government building on the Gold Side of Washington – arid though it is. Hats off to an inspired county facilities committee.)
"I will do what I can, even when there is little chance of effect," is an unwritten subvow of my Rule.
I think of it often. I have to; my natural inclination in the face of unsurmountable opposition is to give up.
But surmounting things is not why we're here.
Now I find that internationally-recognised Kenyan academic, activist, Nobel laureate, and convicted uncontrollable woman Wangari Maathai also embraced this principle, though her interpretation was a little less… dour?
For even though hummingbirds aren't present in Africa (they're New World fauna), having known a great many of them, I'd say they are in fact the woodland creature most likely to employ such logic.
'Way back in January 2011 I wrote an article about walking sticks. In it I posited that this oldest of purpose-made tools was quintessentially – and uniquely – human. "When," I asked, "was the last time you saw a lion, or a kangaroo, or even a chimpanzee, walk with a stick?"
Well, as it happens, the universe loves knocking over cocky eejits, and now I learn that 'way backer in 2005, scientists in the Republic of Congo documented the crap out of several lowland gorillas doing exactly that. Not only did they carry their walking sticks just like humans (see photo), they used them to steady themselves on erratic surfaces and to probe streambeds for footworthiness. And that’s not all: they also mindfully collected their stick blanks and specifically and systematically crafted them into useful tools. Hell, they did everything but rub them with trinity tar. (At least, they haven't been observed doing it. Yet.)
So there we have it, oh-so-brilliant humanity. That sound we hear behind us is dependent co-arising, dependently co-arising.
(Photo courtesy of PLOS Biology and Wikimedia Commmons.)
