Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), this is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of our attention, why is that? Now ‘let us remember this again, ‘What we give our Attention to matters,’ as Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to.
Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour.
This week I bring to your attention once again another excerpt which we have titled – The Road Ahead from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein.
This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world.
The Road Ahead
In the beginning, the marks that our axes made were hardly noticeable amongst the immeasurable riches of the planet. So we gave little thought to the destruction, only looking ahead to a horizon we never seemed to reach. However, some measure of what we were doing tens of thousands of years ago can be understood from an event that left the last and best-preserved record of the effect the axe may have had in Eden. The event took place only a thousand years ago, when the Maoris arrived in New Zealand.
At the time, the dominant animal there was the moa, a large, flightless bird. It weighed anywhere between 10 and 200 kilos, and as there were no threatening mammals it had taken over the role normal to browsers and fruit eaters. Moas were so numerous that later European settlers often found ploughing difficult because of the sheer number of their bones. But within five hundred years of the Maori arrival, every moa in New Zealand had vanished. Archeological evidence shows that moa meat had been so plentiful it supported the first Maoris in groups as large as fifty without the need for agriculture. The Maoris took the moa to be a free lunch and only later learned there was no such thing.
The Maoris also burned large tracts of vegetation that had very few fire-resistant plants, so within a few hundred years there were parts of the country that the settlers had transformed from a rich, diverse ecology into a virtual desert. Only bracken flourished, because it was resistant to fire and did not need the moa to spread its seeds. Having originally enjoyed a rich and varied diet, the Maori settlers were eventually reduced to surviving off bracken roots.
Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein
I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:
https://humanjourney.us/development/the-axemakers-gift-james-burke-robert-ornstein
Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.
Namaste!
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