What I Learned in Ecuador:

Here’s a nifty fact. There are about 200,000 wolves on the earth, but 550 million dogs. Dogs are domestic wolves, bred by men for our own purposes. There are 20 thousand lions but 600 million house cats. In fact, as I am reading in a new book Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari only one of 11 animals of any size is of the wild, non domestic variety. Humans have raised cattle, sheep, chickens by the millions while naturally occurring animals like elephants, giraffes, large dogs and cats are dying out.

This hit home with me, after my recent trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos, animal paradise and the Amazon jungle. My aim was to see animals in the wild, reveling in numbers of species in their natural form, to follow the footsteps of my idols von Humboldt and Darwin (to my limited capacity.) The selling point of Ecuador is diversity in the natural world. We crept up close to mother sea lions nursing their babies. The moms were inured to tourists. These girls and their charges seemed not to care about being leered by all those who came to feel the oxytocin of the moment.

We found a lone baby shaded from the sun under some bushes. Our guide thought the mother had been killed and maybe wasn’t coming back. That’s the wisdom on nature, the death of the mother leads to death of her offspring. As we congratulated ourselves for not interfering, that baby etched a place in my personal memory. Sea lions sense their own by smell , and having failed to develop a communal kibbutz system, leave those who’ve lost their mother to a natural death. The daddy sea lion was yelping offshore menacing anyone who would interfere with his harem of ladies.

On a morning jaunt we floated off a little island to see shark nurseries. Due to the density of small or baby sharks we found there, the mothers sheltered among the over the water banyan roots to give birth. Other species, like turtles and fish seemed to do the same. Some sharks have live births while others are ovoviviparous birthing immature partly developed embryos in egg sacs with yolks but no placentas. But these nascent sharks promised populate the oceans.

Strikingly, large animal statistics show how much our human species dominates all life on our planet. 20 thousand lions, 100 thousand giraffes, zero woolly mammoths (human hunters very likely eliminated them.) now 7 B humans, 9 B projected by mid-century. But we have domesticates like chicks and cows by the hundreds of millions. Do animals and plants deserve our regard simply by virtue of economic value? Even wildest animals are used to existing at our pleasure. the lucky for our viewing pleasure in some safari, while the less fortunate on our dinner plate or in aphrodisiacs.

We travel to wild places such as the Western US , Africa, Australia, deluded into thinking they are untouched. Even in the so-called wild, people bring species of plant and animals and even disease to pollute and homogenize the living world. Little by little we stunt the planet’s ability to speciate and develop diverse biota. Pretty soon we will find the entire world in a completely unnatural state, East of Eden, product of intelligent human design. Our humanist goal of providing for food, and energy consumption for billions of humans, each wanting to be wealth and happiness for their selfish physical needs, makes it near impossible address natural requirements of man and beast.