Amid the terrible economic news there was a bright spot in the economic collapse. A beaver was sighted in the Detroit River for the first time in 75 Years.
The economic news just keeps getting worse. GM may need another 30 billion to stay out of bankruptcy. About 400 banks throughout the US have received a government hand out. The Dow is tanking. California is an economic basket case and now the collapse has even hit Kansas, where they recently found they could not pay their bills. Things are so bad that even Republicans are considering bank nationalization.
But amid the terrible economic news there was a bright spot in the economic collapse. A beaver was sighted in the Detroit River for the first time in 75 Years.
Well, I was born and raised in the rust belt of the Midwest some 50 or so miles from Detroit, Michigan. I used to play in the PCBs that soaked the ground, streams, and rivers of my boyhood. I later learned that I was living in a cancer triangle and that nearly all of my boyhood friends and acquaintances became cancer victims as they aged. The whole of the industrial Midwest was a smelly, dirty and terribly polluted place. Things got so bad in the heart of America that one day the Cleveland river caught on fire.
Today there is very little industry in those areas of the rust belt. Most factories have closed and with it went a lot of the pollution that used to choke the birds, fish, animals, and people in the area. Most of that industry moved off to places like China where they now choke the life from the birds, fish, animals, and people that now have to be exposed to that toxic life.
The good people of my former rust belt home are suffering through a terrible economic collapse. The true unemployment in some of those areas are already reaching Great Depression levels.
But in all of the doom and gloom of modern life. A beaver is able to find its way back home to a once filthy dirty polluted river.
One day, when our corporate and financial masters have been replaced by a humane economic "green" society, there will be industry and sanity. The best and the brightest minds of the world will use their skills to replace the oil based economy that presently exists because of the tremendous monopoly profits that come from a 19th century technology.
The Beaver of the Detroit River is a symbol of an end of an era. An end to the dirty technologies that have killed so many and have caused so much suffering to the life of the rust belt. But it could also represent a beginning in an understanding that humanity is a part of nature and has a responsibility to nature. Humanity can use the opportunity of economic collapse to redesign its economy and its society from a consumption and greed based system into a giving and need based society. When we begin to understand some of the great minds of the world and their message for humanity, then the world will turn from defiling their own natural homes for profit.
You cannot kill the beavers, the bees, the birds, and the frogs and expect not to kill your own children. The lowly Beaver of the Detroit River has a message for us if we have the wisdom to understand.
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