Parables from (a not quite) Paradise, NV 89154

1. World Peace Could Be At Hand--If We Could Only Be More Like the Sloth

In July 2002, I made a seventeen day tour of Peru.  I ventured to ancient Cuzco and the exotic Inca fortress at Machu Picchu.  I spent several days on the Amazon visiting Indian villages and hiking through the "selva."  My final days were in the capital of Lima.  It is always refreshing to escape the day to day life of the United States with its almost claustrophobic feelings brought about by the media's incessant accounts of turmoil and strife.  Actually, for almost three weeks I heard nothing of skirmishes in Afghanistan, homicidal Palestinian bombers in Israel, Israeli tanks in Palestine, impending war in Iraq, lingering strife in Northern Ireland.  No messages of conflict between congressional Democrats and a Republican president reached my ears. 

Was I in Nirvana?  In Machu Picchu and in the jungle, or as it is called locally, the "selva," I began to feel that perhaps I was, but then I did come back to reality in Lima.  The city was engulfed in protests and strikes.  The traffic was brutal. A stop sign or red light only meant that one would yield to bigger cars or trucks.  A go sign or green light meant precisely the same thing.  Pollution was horrific.  Black soot flowed from each vehicle (actually newer cars spewed forth white smoke, perhaps in hopes of the election of a new pope).  Horns blasted forth every conceivable kind of loud sound.  At every corner, beggars approached car windows, as did persons selling everything from national flags and household cleaners, to candy and chewing gum.  Squeegee blades were on stopped windows almost immediately.  The beach suburb of Miraflores looked almost like a southern European resort, but the thought of the temporary shacks aside the surrounding mountains, made any feel of luxury or comfort rather uncomfortable.   Each city, town, and suburb also found traffic flowing toward a central plaza--The Plaza de Armes--which celebrated Peru's role in the wars of the 1870s with neighbors Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia.  A heavenly Nirvana  it was not.  But then, just maybe a heavenly Nirvana was near at hand.

Human society, and especially Western society, embraces an ethic of progress.  The ethic is reflected in the biblical admonition that mankind should go forth and subdue the land for its own enrichment.  Christian and Muslim principles (indeed misinterpreted but certainly acted upon) alike suggest that the faithful should go and convert the heathen, and trample them (even to death) if they resist the "true word."  Western individualism is often a playing out of win-lose game of social Darwinism.  Militarism is a natural concomitant of human group value structures.  Yet most faiths also envision a quite different Nirvana, an almost non-materialistic "pot of gold," at the end of the rainbow we call life.  In contrast with the images of CNN and the street scenes of Lima, the heaven we seem to wish to seek is one of satisfaction, relaxation, non-competition, non-acquisition but still self sufficiency, self pleasures of perhaps undefined natures (but then of very well defined nature for suicide bombers, ala 70 virgins at one's feet), and above all, most of all, always always PEACE.  That ultimate desire of Peace is also the central virtue espoused in diplomatic circles and in foreign policy statements of all nations.  That ultimate desire of Peace is the rationale for international conferences, and it is the rationale for the creation of bi-lateral and multi-lateral alliances, and of course, for the creation of the United Nations.

In the selva I sensed that this Nirvana was alive and well on our own earth.  The naturalist guide for our Amazon boat tours, urged us to be quite, but to get our cameras out.  He was sure he had spotted among the leaves of a Kapok tree, a three-toed sloth.  Indeed he had, and we sat in stunned silence as he directed our eyes to an upper branches to what appeared to be a lump on the truck of the tree.  After we took our pictures and moved onward in our journey, the guide told us about this most heavenly of all god's creatures.

As the story unfolded, I indeed was convinced that the key to our human survival, the key to peace on earth could be displayed in the lifestyle of this much maligned creature.

The sloth is not a taker.  The mammal, which typically grows to be about 8 pounds and as much as two feet in body length, does not engage in any win-lose or parasitic games.  As the sloth survives, it harms no other living creature.  He eats only the leaves of very specific trees, deriving both nutritional substance and its water needs from the foliage.  Yet the sloth gives back to the trees and to other creatures as well.  He exists in a symbiotic and synergistic relationship with all others in the environment of the few trees that he occupies. 

The sloth has a hairy body, and the hair becomes a breeding ground for the algae of the region.  The algae in turn gives the body of the sloth a greenish coloring pattern that afford him a camouflaged hiding from predators.  While the sloth spends most of its time hanging in sleep in mid level branches of its trees, it does seek energy from the sun by rising to higher limbs.  The sunshine, in turn, gives valuable heat to the algae as well, helping sustain its growth. 

The long stringing hair of the sloth is also the residential home of a special sloth moth.  With its limited dietary needs (the sloth craves only what it needs, unlike human beings, not what it wants), the sloth needs to engage in the animal process of discarding wastes only once a week.  In the process of doing so, he descends the tree, very slowly, digs a hole, deposits the waste and in an environmentally correct nice manner covers up the hole when he is done.  How