The Human Legacy

I was inspired by an article I read in “Another Escape”, where Sophie Sellars asks “What prompts the human need to ascend? Why are we drawn upwards?... We look up to those we admire, we look up when we want answers… elevation meant survival…. We see these traits in our children today.. in the palmar grasp reflex of a newborn or a child who delights in climbing a tree….”

I identify with many points she raised in the article. That we climb mountains to transcend mundane routine, that testing the body to its limits and then some more with the mind develops a certain character that will never be the same again.

Personally I’d take it further than the action of humans wanting and needing altitude, I’d say it is a primal need to conquer before being conquered, a primal need to move, to migrate, to seek new experiences.

Migration is a hot topic no doubt thanks to President Trump. But before Mr Trump had anything to say about it, millennia have come and gone where birds do it, fish do it, mammals, insects and reptiles right down to bacterial pathogens migrate and colonize.

Migration is universal and why does it happen? Mobility is necessary to find a suitable place to breed and to live. Resources fluctuate at any given time in any space.

Beyond merely human rights, I’d say my travels have given me a bird’s eye view of the whole ecosystem. I cannot imagine animals not having similar rights as we do to migrate. Increasingly we are taking away much of their habitat and forcing them to smaller and shorter migrations as we expand our reach further into forests, desert and deeper into the sea.

I love and admire the human spirit: it is strong, passionate, brave and endlessly curious about the world.

I just hope that while “we continue to push the borders of our creativity and smash preconceptions of our earthly confines..” we have enough space in our hearts and minds for the animals to roam as free as we’d like to be.

Human achievement isn’t just about what we’ve done today, but what we leave behind for tomorrow, for the next generation. We need to look upwards and forwards.