“Can we not go anywhere without…?”

When George Clooney and I were dating…wait a minute.
When I first saw George Clooney’s monument…wait…no.

When Monument Men staring, er, starring George Clooney came out, my friend and I decided any excuse to see an oversized George Clooney is worth the almost ten bucks meaning I saw this movie in a theater. I love every movie my former lover, wait, no, George Clooney is in but it did set me off into thinking, once again, how narcissistic and self-obsessed the human primate is. We just love love love ourselves–and now, we are loving ourselves to death (i.e. the planet is becoming uninhabitable because we love ourselves so much).

As you likely know, the movie is about humans risking their lives for art made by humans–but no one is really making any peep about the devastation of nature’s art, namely our native flora.

I asked my friend why a native wildflower, say, Madia elegans which I adore and can break your heart, is any less art than a Picasso? In fact, wouldn’t native plants be even more significant as ART because nature “made” them, “designed” them over thousands of years, for and in a particular place, and if you kill them, you kill them not only as ecosystem-supporting organisms, but you kill them as ART too?

(See first sentence of this post). No we cannot. Drink your wine and listen to me.

So, this movie about George Clooney’s monument, no, wait, (stop making that joke; it’s getting old; ok), this movie about people almost killing themselves to save stuff made by other people while every day, another population of NATURE’S ART get destroyed–this is the norm for the human primate.

Yesterday, a population of native trout lilies was permanently destroyed for the expansion of a mobile home park here–the entire area of native flora is gone, forever, as of yesterday, and this is OK. “NORMAL”; but putting your life at risk to rescue stuff fabricated by your own species, monkey stuff, is the story here. The point of the movie. Touching, poignant, important, the preserving of our “culture”…

But every day we lose nature’s ART is ok. No one puts themselves at risk to save this…perhaps a sad feeling as we drive by in our cars, a “tsk tsk”…”and it was so pretty”.

Why is the definition of ART, HISTORY, not extended to the natural world? Is it because nature does not hold the imprint of the human species getting back to my point that we are a self-obsessed, narcissistic species?

Look at Madia elegans, look at the trout lily, look at the steer’s head (population just decimated here for “fire safety”), and tell me that these wildflowers are not art. Tell me they are not HISTORY; tell me why it’s ok to so glibly destroy them.