TheMillerCircle.org

Golden Toad

A beautiful little amphibian called the Golden Toad was first described in the Monteverde mountain region of Costa Rica in 1966, but has not been seen anywhere in the world since 1989 and is presumed to be extinct. This biological tragedy is made more alarming by the fact that this region of the Costa Rica mountains is protected as a national reserve and was presumed to be a site for species preservation, not extinction! Costa Rica has some of the most delicate and unusual ecological systems of the world. Placed at the isthmus of the junction between North and South America, Costa Rica has both a Pacific and a Caribbean coast, with a prominent North-South mountain range that serves as a continental divide, which, like that in North America, determines whether rivers flow to the Pacific or Caribbean oceans. Monteverde is near a unique regional preserve in the mountainous region North of San Jose, the main city of Costa Rica (To get there you have to drive up a 30 km road that is unpaved, very rocky and dangerous. We did it in a small four-wheel drive car, during an intense rain storm, but most others we met hired tour guides to take them up and bring them back: they looked at us like we were a little nuts).

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Few of us understand what is behind the sudden Russian invasion into Georgia. Georgia is an ally of the West and its current President, Mikheil Saakashvili is a U.S. educated lawyer turned politician. If you listened only to the mainstream media in the US, say for example Brian Williams or Katie Couric, you have the impression that the Russian invasion is their attempt at Cold War Revivalism and an act of pure aggression. When you hear such declarative statements coming out of our chief media hypes, you know there is something wrong. And so there is.

A thoughtful discussion of this issue can be found at FAIR, a site that I visit often for gaining additional insight into a number of issues. FAIR attempts to contrast the media reports on issues, with a more substantive examination of the relevant information. Based on their summary, South Ossetia and the similar enclave of Abkhazia have been largely independent of Georgia since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia has had troops in that region since the early 1990s. Their purpose has been to protect the strong separatist sentiment against periodic attacks by the Georgian army/influence and in the past combat actions have taken place in the region. Earlier this month, fighting broke out between the Ossetia separatists and the Georgian army who tried to reclaim dominance over the disputed region through their own military actions. According to reports from Human Rights Watch shelling of civilian regions has taken place against Ossetians and significant numbers of them fled across the border into Russia, though some later returned.

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It took me many years after my father’s death to realize that he was a genetic Democrat. By that I mean someone who had a natural proclivity for thinking about the health of society as a whole, rather than his own narrow interests, as Adam Smith told him he should do. And, although he tolerated me growing up as a Mormon when we lived in Salt Lake City Utah (perhaps for social reasons as we eventually lived in a new suburban, high percentage Mormon community), I later came to appreciate how much he disliked the Mormon Church and even later, as I underwent an early separation from the church, I was able to resonate more deeply with his disinterest in religion in general and Mormonism in particular. Although he never counseled me about religion, his personal emphasis focused on a higher plane of human social interaction, much higher than those we would generally hear about in Sunday school, which were mostly a kind of "do good or loose an organ" type of instructional emphasis. Sunday school was like the installation of a fear policy in 12 not so easy lessons: too many don’ts. But, what really did me in was the Book of Mormon, about which I later came to appreciate the conclusions of Mark Twain, who visited with Brigham Young in Salt Lake and wrote about his experience in "Roughing it–A Personal Narrative." In that hilarious book, Twain read the Book of Mormon and wrote about its structure and the author [Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church]. From the Salamander Website: "Whenever he found his [Joseph Smith's] speech growing too modern, which was about every sentence or two, he labeled in a few such scriptural phrases as, "exceedingly sore," "and it came to pass," etc. and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass," was his pet. If he had left that out, his bible would have been only a pamphlet ." I used to develop some kind of vague rash just trying to read that book, which I found to be utterly incomprehensible and silly, although it took a while for the silliness part to sink in. Until then, I thought there must be something wrong with me.

The alternative to religious indoctrination when I was growing up was my father, who was transfixed on ideas about social equality and justice, especially racial equality, which in Utah was easy to think about without taking much action, because there were virtually no blacks in the state at the time. I was probably 10 or 12 before I ever saw a black person in Utah and my very first encounter was with two blacks, a husband and wife who had joined the Mormon church and who worked as servants in the home of a rather well to do neighbor.

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