This piece is profound in its pointing out a big tragicomedy in life. Whenever we act without reflection, without understanding nature, the results take us further away from nature and create many more problems. And when we try to understand nature, most of the problems we face disappear, and those that remain have simple solutions.
In a chat with my father-in-law, he shared a story. Malaria is on the rise in India, and has increased after efforts to spray and destroy the parasites. It turns out that the sprays, instead of killing the mosquitoes carrying the parasite, ended up killing the fishes in the swamps where mosquitoes breed. If left alone, the fishes would be eating up mosquito larvae. So, with an intervention that did not try to understand what was so, matters became much worse. Tragicomedy abounds. Now, it turns out, using fish to control malaria was a traditional solution in India, until modern science brought with it DDT :). Worked temporarily, more expensive, and now the mosquitoes are resistant to DDT. We're going back to observing and harmonizing with nature, according to this BBC article.
It seems to me that understanding nature properly must be preceded or accomplished by understanding our own nature, for there doesn't seem to be two natures here. I believe Kimura learned more about himself as he learned more about the nature of raccoon dogs.
My takeaway is that if we make the spirit of abundance our starting point, then our mind might clear up to discover it in our universe, and we might get closer to our true nature, where boundaries don't reach.
On Nov 26, 2010 Somik Raha wrote :
This piece is profound in its pointing out a big tragicomedy in life. Whenever we act without reflection, without understanding nature, the results take us further away from nature and create many more problems. And when we try to understand nature, most of the problems we face disappear, and those that remain have simple solutions.
In a chat with my father-in-law, he shared a story. Malaria is on the rise in India, and has increased after efforts to spray and destroy the parasites. It turns out that the sprays, instead of killing the mosquitoes carrying the parasite, ended up killing the fishes in the swamps where mosquitoes breed. If left alone, the fishes would be eating up mosquito larvae. So, with an intervention that did not try to understand what was so, matters became much worse. Tragicomedy abounds. Now, it turns out, using fish to control malaria was a traditional solution in India, until modern science brought with it DDT :). Worked temporarily, more expensive, and now the mosquitoes are resistant to DDT. We're going back to observing and harmonizing with nature, according to this BBC article.
It seems to me that understanding nature properly must be preceded or accomplished by understanding our own nature, for there doesn't seem to be two natures here. I believe Kimura learned more about himself as he learned more about the nature of raccoon dogs.
My takeaway is that if we make the spirit of abundance our starting point, then our mind might clear up to discover it in our universe, and we might get closer to our true nature, where boundaries don't reach.