Birds and bees?

Embracing the earth, theme of the 9th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, is shown on the program cover as a stylized person with wings stretching diagonally up and across the page. The concept became stunning action on stage behind a gauzy curtain at the opening ceremony as a white gowned figure stretched and beckoned to the rhythym and words of the theme song. How wonderfully our imaginations take to the concept of flight!
After the keynote speaker, Gertrude Mongella, received a final ovation for her hopeful and helpful outlook on women embracing the world, I looked down the many steep steps mindful of Chichzen Itza in the Yucatan in 1989 - not so steep, but a serious decline nevertheless. I headed toward Management Hall to place my poster but my thoughts and imagination flitted elsewhere. Farther down and across the distance I saw buildings pressed together with shorter ones seeming to stretch forward as if Ewha University could offer learned understanding and hope.
In the air there were no gulls darting about to admonish the pedistrians for not trashing a leftover sandwich. At my feet there were no sparrows twittering at the seeds and insects in the sand. In the bushes there were no starlings swooping up the live and dead organic material to maintain their excessive body heat.
And my heart sank.
Is this what over population comes to? Do we give up part of the natural world so we can exist? The trees and bushes supply oxygen to the planet but what of animal species filling niches among and beyond that? When Chris and I walked from the Senate building in Washington D.C. to the Museum of the American Indian in February, 2005, we counted ten species of birds - ten species, not just ten individuals - in the air, trees, shrubs, and water. True there was open land but when population demands, how long will it take to cover every foot of soil with concrete, or whatever, for housing and offices?
If we do not prevent this from happening our species will disappear, become extinct. I don't want that to happen. I am just egotistical enough to believe we can, with this marvelous brain matter folded so haphazardly inside our skull, find solutions to let us soar among the developed plant and animal life as if we were butterflies emerging from a self imposed chryalis. To hunt for solutions as if our very sustainence depended upon it is the reason I came to Seoul in the Republic of Korea, June 2005.
Naomi Sherer