For sake of humanity, future ... think

I know it is a cliché, but in my case it is true: I never cease to be amazed. It happened this morning before my coffee had dripped into its carafe. Bill Steigerwald, a columnist from Pittsburgh, stated that large numbers of polar bears are not starving and drowning because of global warming. I disagree, but that wasn’t the amazing part. It was his reasoning. His evidence was that no one has published pictures of dead polar bears.

In case your brain is still foggy from sleep, and at the risk of insulting your intelligence, I wish to point out that a picture of a dead bear would prove nothing because everything dies. If I depended on seeing dead things to indicate danger of extinction, I would assume groundhogs, squirrels and possums are the most endangered animals of all. I found it difficult to fathom how anyone would make this argument.

I always have marveled at the efficiency with which the natural world deals with death. I have dozens of birds in my yard all winter at my feeders, but I very rarely ever see a dead bird in any season. I know very well they die, but I never see them. In nature either the predator eats the creature or it is quickly eaten by scavengers.

I have spent a lot of time walking through the woods around here, much of it with my hound dog Oscar who had one of the best noses on four legs. He loved, adored and cherished anything disgusting and dead. He would defend these objects with a viciousness that was positively frightening and carry his trophies until he got bored or his jaws ached. Yet even he could wander through the woods for hours on end and not find much of interest.

If you want to know if the numbers of creatures of any kind are diminishing at an alarming rate, you have to count the living ones. If the numbers are in serious decline, there may come a point at which there are not enough to reproduce healthy offspring. You can argue that it doesn’t matter if species become extinct. I think the arguments on the other side are stronger, but many species have become extinct in the past. You could argue that the decline will level off at some point, and the animal will not become extinct, but you would have to produce evidence to support it. What you cannot argue is the absence of photos of dead animals means they are not dying.

Steigerwald’s other line of reasoning was simply that polar bears have been here for 250,000 years. But other creatures have become extinct after existing an equally long time. He also ignores the obvious reality that there are far more humans on the planet than have ever existed before, and industrialization changed how we affect everything around us. The situation we and the polar bears are in never has occurred before.

I have always felt a little intimidated by my colleagues who teach logic because I never had any formal training in the subject. They will refer to classic errors in logical thinking using terms that I have to think about to recall their meaning. However, I didn’t need any formal training to spot the wrong-headed thinking in Steigerwald’s logic.

What has happened to us in this country? We don’t have reasoned arguments; we have shouting matches. We are just not thinking; we’ve substituted rallies for our team. This is not a new problem, but it seems to have gotten worse. The difficulties we face are complicated and cannot be reduced to slogans, but a lot of people act as if anything more complex than a slogan is just an attempt to confuse the issue. Why is it that the thoughtful media presentations that fail to come up with easy answers are the least popular, and the idiot shows designed to get people’s dander up have huge numbers of fans? 

Soon I will be back in the classroom and trying my best to say in the very nicest way: THINK, you people. For the sake of humanity and our future, please THINK. 

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.