Geographic.

On a trip to Wal-Mart this morning, I decided that I wanted to pick up a National Geographic and read it from cover to cover, just as a personal challenge and guess what? I got from cover to cover. I skipped one article for the time being, but that's only because I wasn't really in a "reading about what parts of the earth still have fertile soil" mood.

Which, as an aside, I really, really dislike when people call soil "dirt". It's so incredibly white trash, and fitting into that demographic is never a good thing, so please don't.

But yes, back to National Geographic. Firstly, I want to add an addition to the previous aside and mention how much I loathe that they've started to refer to themselves as Nat Geo. It's such a "father trying to be "hip" and "with it" to fit in with his sons friends and coming off desperate" move. The marketing team at National Geographic need to realize that they'll always be cool in their own traditional way and they don't need to adopt bullshit abbreviations to fit in with the texting crowd. Just because they're our future, doesn't mean you need to conform to their ways, k?

Secondly, I want to touch upon an article in the one I read today that succeeded a fantastic story of a man who'd been studying elephants for the past 40 years. This story was all about the re-introduction of culling of elephants (a.k.a. using professional hunters to control the population of).

My initial reaction was the same as it always is when I hear about the mass killing of animals for the sake of population control: "who are we to decide how many animals are allowed to thrive at a time?" I just cannot stand that we can even call 100,000 elephants overpopulated and pass laws to eliminate threats to our crops and the such when we, the 6 billion and counting, are causing the extinction of other animals left and right because we're taking their natural habitats to grow our crops in the first place.

It's a fucked up system.

We come in, do what we will with whatever land we want, regardless of the rammifications, and when an animal is on the verge of extinction and our necks are being breathed down, we put the last few in wildlife refuges to re-populate the species, only to knock it back down when it gets out of control.

If thats how it works, why not play god with our own species? Oh, that's right, because when we kill eachother, it's murder and genocide and this and that.

Come on now.

Just because we've come out on top as one of the most intelligent species on the planet, that's no excuse to take it over. How about we use some of that intelligence and recognize how much wrong we do and how hypocritical we are?

All of this wasn't really what I intended to touch upon when I first thought of making this post, but I just can't stand how much we like to think that this planet is ours and everything else upon it is ours for the taking, controlling and manipulating. This does, however, segue nicely into what I wanted to touch upon.

The article mentioned that by reinstating the culling of elephants, a downfall would be an uprising in the hunting of elephants by non-professionals and thus causing an uprising in the retrieving and selling of ivory.

Why?

What the fuck is so special about ivory? I have never understood the whole rarity = appealing thing. Ivory, gold, diamonds, none of it.

It's all bullshit to me that people die over such ultimately trivial material.

We have to stop regarding these things as precious and start realizing that we're destroying what's actually precious in our fight to come out ahead because I don't know about you guys, but the last time I ate a diamond and washed it down with a tall class of gold, followed by some ivory for dessert, it didn't really do much for me.