Paula Kaufman: Elephants remember what we forget (Opinion)

Humans probe space for intelligent life. That’s ridiculous. Let’s first search Earth. Where is human intelligence? With each school shooting, each bomb, we come up empty.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., lamented: “We have learned to fly the air like birds, and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.”

While we ratchet up violence, nature’s wisdom outshines human folly.

Trees don’t start wars. Animals don’t destroy their own habitats. They don't engineer their own extinction.

What does “intelligence” mean? How do we measure competency? In the natural world, it equals cooperative survival. Everything from towering forests to coral reefs display this know-how. Nature needs no ceasefire to co-exist.

Western society creates hierarchies