"More then once I have sat in the wilds and marveled that we scoure the world for
minerals so that people living in civilization can enjoy the comforts of civilization and either hord them, or use them and then throw them away."
We are a strange species, eh, with no accounting for taste. Some people I know are quite poor by North American standards, and spend long hours growing, among other things, coffee - so that rich people in far-away places can pour water through the ground beans and then throw them away. It's not easy to grow coffee, you get up well before dawn and work right into the intense heat of the day, and it doesn't pay much. But those same people, once they've satisfied their basic food/clothing/shelter needs, will make something beautiful - an embroidered shirt or dress, a hand-made pair of boots, a sculpture, a painting, a piece of jewelry from whatever comes to hand, a ceremonialized fiesta that consumes the income of a month. Once they're fed, they make art, they make an art of living.
So it's not such a stretch to me that people go into the northern winter looking for diamonds - let's hope they find some art in it, and make more art with a portion of the proceeds.
Trouble is - in the north, there's no mangos ............ cheers ...... macros |
