We live in a bad zoo.

We all know what a bad zoo is. 

We can tell by looking at the zoo.

The animals are housed in cages or boxes, environments that in no way resemble their native homes, whether the jungle, the Savannah, the desert, or the lake.

They eat food their ancestors would not recognize as food.

Often, they are crowded together in densities they would have never experienced before capture.

They are awash in noises their ancient ancestors would find unsettling and unfamiliar. 

Throughout the course of the day, they don’t do what they would do in their native environment. They don’t move their bodies as much or in the same way, and they generally are largely inactive, particularly to their activity levels in the wild. 

You can also tell by looking at the animals. 

Their coats or feathers or skin are dull.

They seem sad, or anxious, or mean, or bored.

They exhibit behaviors, like nervous pacing or gnawing on their legs, that naturalists never see in their native habitats. 

They fight with each other, seemingly needlessly, not over food or sex, but over space, or over nothing at all.

They are not healthy, either too thin or too fat. 

In sum, they are sick, physically and mentally.

About the only thing you can say for them is that they are comfortable, and not particularly likely to be eaten by a predator. That’s about it.

Humans, too.

Like most of humanity. 

Most of us live in, cities, unnatural environments, packed too close together, often in little boxes stacked on top of each other like so many cans of beans in a grocery store. We seldom leave these environments to visit the woods, the mountains, the seashore. 

Most of what we eat would be unrecognizable as food to a homo sapiens in sub-Saharan Africa or western Eurasia. 

The din of our cities jangles us into anxiety or numbness that we notice only on the rare occasion that we venture out of the house, the office, our towns and cities. 

And look at us. Sure, we’re not as likely to be devoured by a saber-toothed tiger or trampled by a mastodon that we’re trying to slay for this summer’s dinners as we would be if we were safe in our cage being fed by the zookeeper. Yes, many of us have got all sorts of entertainment and comforts, also unrecognizable to our ancestors over whom we claim superiority.

We are sick.

But we’re sick, physically and mentally. The entire species is wracked with unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression. We invent new addictions every day to fill the vast emptiness of our lives. We torture each other, and our brightest minds are inventing new ways to kill each other. We senselessly destroy the very home in which we live -- the once-verdant garden called Earth, including countless species of plants and animals with whom we share this home. 

We live in a bad zoo. And we have nobody to blame but ourselves because, unlike the animals in our zoos, we are our own zookeepers. 

Now what?

This preface could lead us almost anywhere. We might play the psychologist, and explore why we might do such a thing as build this miserable zoo and lock ourselves in. We might be historians, flesh out the phases in the development of the zoo. We could take the spiritual path, and speak to the disconnection from and loss of intimacy with our Creator, our Source, that fosters this bad-zoo-building behavior.  

And maybe I’ll go there in some other post. This piece is the first of a series that will explore how we can, at the individual, family, and small community level, escape from our respective bad zoos, or at least improve the qualities of the zoos we’ve chosen to inhabit. 

(Deep bow to my dear friend Vaughn Gray, who introduced me to this notion several years ago.)