There are quite a lot of interesting and informative videos on Lonely Planet’s YouTube channel which give us a glimpse of foreign lands and cultures through eyes of various tourists from diverse backgrounds. I feel, besides publishing greatly informative travel guides, Lonely Planet has done well to start this channel and share their own (Tony Wheeler slide shows) as well as others’ travel videos on it.
I particularly felt like sharing this video on my blog because it showcases a community still in harmony with nature and untouched by modern society/culture/technology, the Batwa Pygmies of Burundi. The biggest mistake of human beings is our irreverence towards nature and the attempts to “conquer” it! Nature is vastly more powerful and complex than us and we should humbly recognise and accept this fact. Living in harmony with nature is the only way of ending all the miseries humankind is facing today.
I also saw the movie Wild Ocean 3D at Imax the other day. That served to provide another example of how mankind messes up the ecological balance anywhere and everywhere possible by their arrival. Africa is probably the only haven left on Earth for species other than human beings to survive and hopefully thrive. The movie is set on the coast of South Africa, in KwaZulu-Natal, where the sea is still like it was world over thousands of years ago….teeming with plenty and diverse sea creatures. But now due to fishing of 1000s of tonnes of sardines each year by us, the food chain is disrupted!
I hope, like the tourist couple in the Lonely Planet video, more and more people would want to learn from the “tribal” folk and return to where we belong. That doesn’t necessarily mean going to live in a forest. But one could at least think 10 times before constructing a dam or fishing for tonnes of sardines the next time.
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