"The wilderness is a really simple place. It is about survival, life, death, and birth. It is about living in the present! Humans have created so many façades that we live behind. We have made life complicated to the point where we have lost touch of why we are here. We are so set on planning for the future, or reliving the sorrows and misfortunes of our past, that we forget to enjoy the 'now.'" -Adam Bannister
They said it couldn't be done. They said I didn't have what it takes. I say, revenge is best served... à la mode!
"Much of what we've talked about this evening, and much of what we've talked about at previous meetings, is really from the Zoo's perspective. I would think that one of the most powerful ways to further [the Zoo's mission statement regarding] education is by not losing sight of the fact that we are also talking about particular animals at the Zoo currently in an exhibit that is arguably inadequate." -Annette Laico (Woodland Park Zoo Elephant Task Force Member).
Four slides showing the dramatically different amounts of space available to Watato, Bamboo, and Chai at Woodland Park Zoo versus what would be available for them at The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennesee. For decades these three elephants have had only the same tiny one-acre unchanged exhibit to call home. At The Elephant Sanctuary they would have 2,700 acres.
If Woodland Park Zoo President Deborah Jensen is to be believed, the Zoo and its elephant exhibit are all that stand between wild elephants surviving as a species and their ultimate extinction. Because to save them we must enslave them.
Dear Mayor McGinn and Seattle City Councilmembers: Is it now your position to remain conspicuously silent while the Woodland Park Zoo Elephant Task Force (better referred to as a "task farce") conducts its meetings and rubber stamps the zoo's intention of keeping Watoto, Bamboo, and Chai behind bars for the rest of their days for the amusement of a paying public?
Not ten minutes into the second meeting of the Woodland Park Zoo's Elephant Task Force on May 28th and it was becoming sadly clear what direction things were heading, and what that meant in regards to saving the zoo's three elephants, Bamboo, Watoto, and Chai.
Its face hacked off while still alive and conscious, left to die a slow and immeasurably painful death; it's difficult to watch, I'll admit that. But it's also necessary. People need to understand in the starkest terms what is taking place day in and day out in the name of greed.
"We could have gone in a different direction (with Jason)," Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman is telling me, using both hands to create a V illustrating two separate paths. "Who knows where things would've taken us."
I'm standing at the entrance to Park Güell, eyes closed, awash in a sea of voices speaking different languages. It's one of the things I love most about traveling: losing yourself in the sounds of another culture, forced to be an outsider and at the mercy of the kindness of strangers.
kimpluscraig.com