Circumstances of a mantis

This elegant phasmid mantis (thanks to MartinA for the correction) arrived on an updraft and stayed to visit me outside the screened window of my tenth-floor apartment for a long while. I thought about the creature's circumstances--urban life, diminishing habitat, lack of vegetation, climate change--and your questions yesterday about Renée and her attackers, a group of white teenage girls enacting random violence on a woman living in the street.

Fortuitously, a friend sent me a link to a sixteen-minute talk by Ricardo Levins-Morales that explains the connections among the invention of "Black" people, racism, slavery, and capitalism; and the affect of all those on climate change and human behavior. 

Sue's eldest brother is being evacuated from his home in California because of forest fires, and every one of us has been affected by the pandemic. Levins-Morales sees this as directly connected with the rise of capitalism and its preference for cleverness over wisdom, and he marvels that because of the historical bubble in which we live, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

If you'd like to hear his brilliant talk, and consider whether he answers some of your questions, go to this link, move forward to minute 13, and then let it play till the end of his talk, at minute 29. 

If you're interested in phasmids, which I thought this was until I was corrected and did more research, consider MsMun's blip journal and her respect for phasmids.