152
Juggling the deep story here comes down to a combination of demographic/cultural (tribal and religious) pressures upon women, and any government’s struggles to
balance, if at all, questions of national debt, per capita income, access to a sustainable
quality of life (incorporating natural capital depreciations and all those economic
externalities that typically involved non-renewable resource extraction) distributed
across the entire population of the country, as well as equality between regional
and state sovereignties. Such conjectures were posed by John Locke in his Second
Treatise on Government (1689) which—upon the author’s 20 years of flipping positions—arrived at a conception of natural rights and the power of human conscience.
17
Such rights, conceived earlier by Aristotle, but widely disbanded throughout the
Renaissance, were not burdened by the conceptual and physical burdens of a human
population explosion that continues to rally the most inclement and pessimistic factors to which human communities are heir, in our times.
Take a measure of all such communities in the twenty-first century and we find the
aforecited calming words of Isaiah and Micah incompatible with the implacable context of the Anthropocene. Indeed, Africa’s biodiversity looms large in the crosshairs of
that desperate effort currently being finalized by some “500 experts in 50 countries”
under the banner of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform On Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). At present, the publication papers number over
8000 pages, intimating the true extent of the Sixth Extinction Spasm
18
(Fig. 17.2).
17.3 The Search for a Sanctuary Amid Conurbations
All of these numbers swirl in and out of public policy, applied ethics, convictions
that might gain sufficient traction to urge our species forward in a positive manner.
But down on the ground, trying to cope with these convolutions, the realities are
grey. They certainly weighed heavily upon my own mind as I (mt) bushwacked
through the approximately 25 square miles of wildland in a suburb of Mozambique’s
capital, Maputo, with its nearly three million residents. I was followed by
machine- gun and machete toting military trackers, clearing dense thickets, avoiding
enormous wasp nests, and trying to decipher decaying fuses or rusted metal bombs
that one best not step on. Those wilds were the walled-in remains of what had been
a weapons depot for the Mozambique Defense Armed Forces, and where thousands
of abandoned munitions still lay scattered.
17 See Two Treatises of Government (or Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, The False
Principles, and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers, Are Detected and Overthrown.
The Latter Is an Essay Concerning The True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,
Published in London, 1689 by the Whig radical, friend and eventual co-trustee of Locke’s estate,
Awnsham Churchill.
18 http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/special-themes/biodiversity/biodiversity-science-and-policy/ipbes/#:~:text=The%20Intergovernmental%20Science%2DPolicy%20
Platform,of%20biodiversity%20and%20ecosystem%20services, Accessed June 6, 2020; See also,
See “The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change,” by
John Vidal, Huffpost, March 16, 2019.
17 The Echoes of Malhazine
Juggling the deep story here comes down to a combination of demographic/cultural (tribal and religious) pressures upon women, and any government’s struggles to
balance, if at all, questions of national debt, per capita income, access to a sustainable
quality of life (incorporating natural capital depreciations and all those economic
externalities that typically involved non-renewable resource extraction) distributed
across the entire population of the country, as well as equality between regional
and state sovereignties. Such conjectures were posed by John Locke in his Second
Treatise on Government (1689) which—upon the author’s 20 years of flipping positions—arrived at a conception of natural rights and the power of human conscience.
17
Such rights, conceived earlier by Aristotle, but widely disbanded throughout the
Renaissance, were not burdened by the conceptual and physical burdens of a human
population explosion that continues to rally the most inclement and pessimistic factors to which human communities are heir, in our times.
Take a measure of all such communities in the twenty-first century and we find the
aforecited calming words of Isaiah and Micah incompatible with the implacable context of the Anthropocene. Indeed, Africa’s biodiversity looms large in the crosshairs of
that desperate effort currently being finalized by some “500 experts in 50 countries”
under the banner of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform On Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). At present, the publication papers number over
8000 pages, intimating the true extent of the Sixth Extinction Spasm
18
(Fig. 17.2).
17.3 The Search for a Sanctuary Amid Conurbations
All of these numbers swirl in and out of public policy, applied ethics, convictions
that might gain sufficient traction to urge our species forward in a positive manner.
But down on the ground, trying to cope with these convolutions, the realities are
grey. They certainly weighed heavily upon my own mind as I (mt) bushwacked
through the approximately 25 square miles of wildland in a suburb of Mozambique’s
capital, Maputo, with its nearly three million residents. I was followed by
machine- gun and machete toting military trackers, clearing dense thickets, avoiding
enormous wasp nests, and trying to decipher decaying fuses or rusted metal bombs
that one best not step on. Those wilds were the walled-in remains of what had been
a weapons depot for the Mozambique Defense Armed Forces, and where thousands
of abandoned munitions still lay scattered.
17 See Two Treatises of Government (or Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, The False
Principles, and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers, Are Detected and Overthrown.
The Latter Is an Essay Concerning The True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,
Published in London, 1689 by the Whig radical, friend and eventual co-trustee of Locke’s estate,
Awnsham Churchill.
18 http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/special-themes/biodiversity/biodiversity-science-and-policy/ipbes/#:~:text=The%20Intergovernmental%20Science%2DPolicy%20
Platform,of%20biodiversity%20and%20ecosystem%20services, Accessed June 6, 2020; See also,
See “The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change,” by
John Vidal, Huffpost, March 16, 2019.
17 The Echoes of Malhazine