Earth’s Greatest Threats Lie With Humans
“I don’t want to live in a world without cheetahs, Mom.”
Seamus loves cheetahs and what’s not to love—unless you are a Thomson’s gazelle? Cheetahs are the fastest mammals on the planet, formidable predators, sleek, saucy looking, and they even have spots.
My 6-year-old boy can’t imagine a future without his favorite animal, but we live in the small city of New London, Connecticut. Unlike coyotes, cheetahs are, to say the least, rare here…
If cheetahs are indeed endangered, so were surprising numbers of human beings that week as killer storms struck from the Philippines to North Carolina. With rage and rain, an increasingly overheated, climate-changed Mother Nature briefly reclaimed some of her territory, which we had defiled, dividing it up into endlessly buildable lots all the way to the high-tide line, pocking it with hog farms, studding it with nuclear power plants…
I’ve never seen a cheetah in real life. Neither has my son. And, if truth be told, I’m no cheetah champion either. I don’t even particularly like tabby cats… Still...
I started to wonder why I hadn’t taken his cheetah angst and turned it into the sort of teachable moment that parents are supposed to love when it comes to all that’s wrong in the world…
I started to wonder why I hadn’t taken his cheetah angst and turned it into the sort of teachable moment that parents are supposed to love when it comes to all that’s wrong in the world…
Remembering my own fears as a 6-year-old, my son’s seem decontextualized and vague. And thank God for that... When I was six years old, in 1980... I already lived in terror of becoming extinct…My parents, Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister, were well-known antinuclear activists … and their friends and fellow travelers in the peace movement of that time made dramatic, noisy, provocative messes all over Washington, DC, and beyond.
They dug graves on the parade ground at the Pentagon. They made giant cardboard warheads painted with the American and Soviet flags and set them afire … Men dressed as specters screamed, moaned, and laughed maniacally, while other friends dusted themselves with ashes and writhed on the ground in front of the White House … in a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan up to 20 million people could die from the blasts, fire, and radiation, while a nuclear winter could be triggered in which, it is believed, up to a billion peoplemight starve to death…
So I don’t want my son’s fears to be my starting point—or his. I want to start with his love, his hope. Save the cheetahs!
