Bernie Sanders’ popularity marks start of a movement

Bernie Sanders’ popular message is the reason for his dynamic rise in the polls. It’s not that the public is buying into the smear campaign against Hillary Clinton. It has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton.

It’s much deeper than that. People have had enough of business-as-usual politics purchased by big-money interests that has little regard for the needs of middle class and low-income families who make up 99 percent of the population.

Sanders has spent his long political career building a well-deserved reputation of honesty and independence from Wall Street and from the general corruption of our political system.

The all-powerful multi-national corporate interests and the “mainstream” news media that represents their perspective didn’t see the Sanders campaign coming and still are in denial of what is happening.

Bernie Sanders is not Barack Obama and this isn’t 2008. The Sanders campaign is bringing to the surface an ocean of underlying injustices and misplaced priorities in the corporate-co-opted American political system.

Sanders’ message is resonating deeply with the American public including members of all sectors and demographic groups. It’s not a cult of personality.

It’s a movement motivated by real issues that affect all our lives on a daily basis. The more people learn about Sanders the more they like him and his message.  There is no acceptable reason why, in the wealthiest country in the world, millions of people can be working 40 or 50 hours a week and still be living in poverty, lacking affordable health care, decent housing and the financial ability to provide a higher education for their children, while the upper one-tenth of one percent have accumulated 90 percent of the wealth generated by a growing economy. Something is very wrong with this picture.

It no longer matters how much of a monetary advantage other candidates may have over Sanders in the campaign. 

For instance, Clinton has been spending heavily in Iowa while Sanders has yet to spend anything on TV, radio or newspaper ads. But, still he has rapidly closed the gap in the polls.

The thousands who gather to hear Sanders wherever he goes speaks volumes about the hunger for authenticity that he brings to the electoral process.

We can expect that process to continue because the corporate news media is no-longer the actual “mainstream” media. Social networks are now the new and real mainstream media.

As members of the public we are now capable of informing ourselves and are no longer dependent on the carefully tailored indoctrination of the network News.

And that’s why Bernie Sanders is probably going to win in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, on Super Tuesday, at the Democratic National Convention and on the Presidential Election Day in November of 2016.

Best kind of conservation: A ‘re-wilding’ of our hearts

The senseless killing of Cecil the lion has catalyzed a worldwide discussion about the gratuitous trophy hunting of large carnivores.

In Western Canada, countless Cecils are killed in an equally senseless manner each year for the amusement, pleasure, and excitement of recreational hunters.

From the unrestrained killing of wolves in British Columbia and Alberta to the persistence of the insupportable B.C. grizzly bear hunt, large carnivores are persecuted in Western Canada by way of an anachronistic approach to wildlife management that relies on suffering and death as its primary tool.

The chief purveyors and ideological proponents of this faulty and antiquated model are government ministries responsible for wildlife management and trophy hunting special interest groups.

Moreover, they are rapidly falling out of favour with much of society as their excesses and biases steadily become more widely known.

Clearly, the time has come for a different way of managing wildlife.

Dr. Marc Bekoff, one of the foremost proponents and thinkers in the evolving field of compassionate conservation, writes that “compassionate conservation — in which the guiding principle ‘First do no harm’ stresses the importance of individual nonhuman animals — is gaining increasing global attention because most animals need considerably more protection than they are currently receiving. 

“And many people can no longer justify or stomach harming and killing animals in the name of conservation.”

Too often, conservation and wildlife management primarily focus on the maintenance of population numbers. 

We forget wild populations are formed by of individuals that can suffer stress and pain, which we deem unacceptable for companion animals that share our homes and those we farm to eat. 

Although suffering is a feature of a wild life, the human-induced suffering caused by sport hunting and lethal predator control, such as the B.C. and Alberta wolf culls, is not.

In Western Canada, thousands of large carnivores are killed annually under the guise of conservation and wildlife management.

The recreational hunting of wolves, grizzly bears, black bears and cougars is done for the most trivial of motivations such as “bagging a trophy.” 

In addition, hundreds more of these animals are tyrannized every year in the name of predator control, as large carnivores become scapegoats for the decline of other animals from marmots to mountain caribou.

Humans intrude, degrade, and destroy large carnivore habitat, including restricting access to or depleting their food, in our relentless pursuit of resource development, economic gain, and even recreational activity.

In doing so, top predators are deprived of the requisites they need to survive, and then are slain when they become “problem” animals as a result of their search for sustenance.

Large carnivores are demonized in books, films and television programs, as our society clings to malevolent myths that have no basis in reality, but are instead phantasmagoric products of our own deep-seated fears and paranoia about the “other.”

We diminish the lives of large carnivores by relegating them to the status of unthinking and unfeeling beasts, fostering our bloated sense of entitlement and misguided belief in human exceptionalism.

We hold the balance of power in our relationship with wildlife and typically wield that power with downright ruthlessness, motivated by a parsimonious self-interest that continues to be informed by superstition, hubris, and indulgence.

Bekoff summarizes the goals of compassionate conservation and the challenges we face in fundamentally changing our current relationship with wildlife thusly:

“Striving to live peacefully with other animals with whom we share space, and into whose homes we’ve moved, is part of the process of re-wilding our hearts, and coming to appreciate other animals for whom they are and for what they want and need in our troubled world, to live in peace and safety.”