The whalers killed whales while Greenpeace watched. Now, you don’t walk by a child that is being abused, you don’t walk by a kitten that is being kicked to death and do nothing. So I find it abhorrent to sit there and watch a whale being slaughtered and do nothing but “bear witness” as they call it.

I think it was best illustrated a few years ago, the contradictions that we have, when a ranger in Zimbabwe shot and killed a poacher that was about to kill a black rhinoceros and uh human rights groups around the world said “how dare you? Take a human life to protect an animal”. I think the rangers’ answer to that really illustrated a hypocrisy. He said “Ya know, if I lived in, If I was a police officer in Harare and a man ran out of Bark Place Bank with a bag of money and I shot him in the head in front of everybody and killed him, you’d pin a medal on me and call me a national hero. Why is that bag of paper more valued than the future heritage of this nation?”

This is our values. WE fight, WE kill, WE risk our lives for things we believe in…

Imagine going into Mecca, walk up to the black stone and spit on it. See how far you get. You’re not going to get very far. You’re going to be torn to pieces.

Walk into Jerusalem, walk up to that wailing wall with a pick axe, start whacking away. See how far you’re going to get, somebody is going to put a bullet in your back. And everybody will say you deserved it.

Walk into the Vatican with a hammer, start smashing a few statues. See how far you’re going to get. Not very far.

But each and every day, ya know, people go into the most beautiful, most profoundly sacred cathedrals of this planet, the rain forests of the Amazonia, the redwood forests of California, the rain forests of Indonesia, and totally desecrate & destroy these cathedrals with bulldozers, chainsaws and how do we respond to that? Oh, we write a few letters and protest; we dress up in animal costumes with picket signs and jump up and down; but if the rain forests of Amazonia and redwoods of California, were as, or had as much value to us as a chunk of old meteorite in Mecca, a decrepit old wall in Jerusalem or a piece of old marble in the Vatican, we would literally rip those pieces limb from limb for the act of blasphemy that we’re committing…

… But we won’t do that because nature is an abstraction, wilderness is an abstraction. It has no value in our anthropocentric world where the only thing we value is that which is created by humans.

- Captain Paul Watson, environmental “interventionist”, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

3 weeks ago  /  0 notes

To Really Listen, You Must Blind Yourself

On the walk back to my hotel I had to walk up a fairly dark street and on the left there was an alley lit by candles with a woman holding a sign that said “Bach Suites.” This intrigued me because I had heard about these and asked “are these the cello concerts.” “Yes, just walk up the path and follow the candles,” was the answer.

I was hoping I could record something really cool with my new 3D video camera but when I got upstairs they explained that the concert is done completely in the dark. “Huh?” Yes, they will lead me into the concert hall with all the lights off and sit me on a bench. Then they will start playing and the concert will last 30 minutes or less.

I was intrigued and figured this would be an interesting experience. It sure was.

Turns out my mind doesn’t like being in the dark. My thoughts, as I was walked in, were something like this:

“Who else is here?”
“What is going to happen?”
“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”
“What if I step on someone or sit on someone when I sit down?”

I heard a female voice near where they asked me to sit down. “Who was that? Is she a billionaire? A Tech CEO?”
We sat in silence for a minute or two and my mind continued to race. My mind doesn’t like being in the dark and searched for anything to grasp onto as I stared into the totally dark room. Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was a tiny sliver of light up on the ceiling but for the most part it was dark. Really dark.

Then the music started playing. My mind kept wandering and thinking. Heck, I wrote most of this post in the dark in my mind because I was a bit bothered by the circumstance I was in and not at all that comfortable.

Soon, my mind calmed, though, and something funny started happening. The music was deeper and richer than any I had ever experienced. Part of that is I figured out soon that there weren’t any other people in the room. Why? Because I could hear everyone breathing.

Blind people had told me that they can get around just by listening. I remember meeting one blind guy at a dinner at LeWeb and was amazed at his ability to get around using nothing but a cane.

Now I understood. Your senses come alive when one of them is taken away from you.

The music came alive. Something else happened. Because I couldn’t capture it I just enjoyed it even more. I thought to myself that more and more of us will crave experiences that can’t be captured and shared with friends.

Robert Scoble on G+

4 months ago  /  0 notes