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Endangered spaces: have the guardians become the rapists?

The fractal is an evolving same same pattern of life’s need to recreate itself. Its beauty is only a perception. A reflection of our need to perceive and to reflect. A fractal is a self-perpetuating struggle for life in a changing environment. The beauty is that it hangs on. It doesn’t die until it does, until the waves of repetition are flattened by a bigger cause. A cause written in chaos, and not symmetry like we wish our lives to be. I see fractals in nature, and I see many of her lessons. Fractals are the lessons that will kill the teacher, and so life goes on.

My interpretation of the word, ‘conservation’, and its fractious meaning today has been torn apart by the greedy, money laundering, and self-gratuitous justifications of those who care not for any life on this planet, save their own! We gratuitously exploit nature for our own entertainment, bathing in spar-baths, spitting out carbons and waste (solids, plastics, processed trees and chemicals) all buried, out of our sight where life tries desperately to rebirth some of its glory. Underground and sent to outer space or thrown in the sea. This is our legacy. This we do little about, yet we argue real conservation is to include more entertainment, build more zoos, cull animals because we need more of their spaces, or THEY are overpopulating their space. We need to cultivate their systems in order to feed ourselves. We don’t share, and we’ve asked them for what we have taken.


Perhaps this is idealistic rubbish, and I spurt it out because it’s the end of a tiring year. I don’t think so, it’s becoming harder and harder for me to learn in these spaces, the endangered spaces that live under an ethic of protection and care.


Our earliest written definitions of conservation were simple. At the earliest in the 1300s it defines as a noun that means to prevent decay, injury, waste, loss…prevention was the act of conservation. Protection was the earliest form of conservation. We would define conservation as the protection of our natural resources like our wild water, free forests, the oceans and our skies. If we had to utilise them. It had to be sustainable and without depletion.



Then we raped and plundered and profited from the economy that nature would present to the greedy. Conservation automatically became an economic battleground. The war now has nothing to do with a battle to fight for the prevention and protection of nature. This war is between various sectors of greed. Governments versus private sector businesses – and so synonyms and substitutes were invented to justify the earliest of meanings.


The substitutes included; management, control, maintenance, governing, economy, salvation, custody and stewardship.


The battle for these substitutes led us astray. Custodians of nature have become rapists of nature. Naturalists have become fierce two-faced exploiters of wilderness spaces or animal rights activists fighting fires as they appear. Conservationists no longer exist because ‘Conserving natural spaces, the inhabitants of those spaces and the processes within those space from change or interference’ is long gone. Now only the substitute words battle to control this definition.


Poor conservation has led to bad management which now includes legal killing, legal exploitation of natural spaces, high entertainment impact areas within natural spaces. More human impact. More water, in water scarce areas for human consumption, more holes in the ground for more waste, more of everything. Under the substitute guise of management, control, science, economy. We also sell and trade in lion bones, animal trophies like skins and horns, we cultivate and destroy, we build and ‘soil’ or pollute the soils that should be protected. We do this legally and without care. We also battle and fight and wage war on those who do the same but illegally. This is managed by the substitute word ‘control’ or ‘govern’ or ‘custody’. Now perhaps all have become rapists of nature.


How do we stop this rot?


Article by Neil Heron

*All Images taken by Neil Heron

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