Seven Wonders and Counting

Everyone knows the term “seven wonders,” even if they don’t know what the list represents. Now it turns out no matter what the original list was (Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), now is the time to create a new list of Seven Wonders. Why try to improve on the wisdom of the ancient world? Well, for one reason, six of the seven wonders are long gone, and the seventh only exists because it’s hard to destroy what is already a pile of rubble, albeit symmetrical (the Pyramids of Giza). Now that it’s time for a modern list, in mandatory Web 2.0 fashion, the internet community is being asked to vote on them. (Reuters has the story, on Yahoo News.)

The list of 21 candidates includes such core adventure travel destinations as Machu Picchu in Peru, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Chichen Itza in Mexico, Timbuktu, Easter Island, and Stonehenge (currently the top choice). This suggests a new game: how many of the 21 Wonders have you been to? Should be easy to knock off the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and Sydney Opera House for anyone with frequent flier miles. If you go to Rio for just to party, should you count the statue of Christ the Redeemer or do you have to be a believer? (Or redeemed?)

You can vote for your favorite new Seven Wonders sites at http://www.new7wonders.com/, and if you do vote at some point you’ll be offered the opportunity to purchase a certificate proving you did. There may be other promotional opportunities involved, as an IMAX film is also on the drawing boards documenting the final list. It looks like an interesting organization, whose other projects include reconstructing the 55-meter Bamiyan Buddha statues of Afghanistan, blown up by the Taliban in March 2001. Grounds right there for regime change, if anyone had asked me at the time.

Speaking of wonders, not that long ago we had weekly “Eight Wonders” columns at Yahoo in our adventure travel news blog. Our initial intent was to journey through the list of nations from Zed to Ace, Zimbabwe to Afghanistan, with various detours to countries to which we had other editorial coverage on Richard Bangs Adventures (such as Rwanda, Thailand and Australia). Soon, however, we decided that following the news might make a better criterion for list-building – for example, we had an Eight Wonders of Cuba column, in the wake of Fidel Castro’s recent health crisis. News generates links, after all, and our “numbers were being looked at.” Our Cuba list, and a related story on the outlook for a post-Castro Cuba by Tom Miller, got Y! front page coverage.

Flush with success, I pitched Eight Wonders of Lebanon. After all, its location in the heart of the Middle East gives it a front-row seat to over 3,000 years of history, its Phoenician culture was a well-known ancient maritime power, and its capital city, Beirut, was widely known at one point as the Paris of the Middle East. It was almost irrelevant that Israel was at the time lobbing bombs onto Lebanese soil, in response to offenses by the Hezbollah radical group. Though “travel” is often regarded as a news-free zone, exiled to the Sunday paper and other lifestyle outlets, it’s as plain as the terrorist living next door that there is no safe place anymore, and travel is too subject to the winds and whims of warfare, plague, politics, natural disasters or any combination thereof. (Interestingly, natural disasters are often safe topics for travel stories – witness the post-tsunami coverage of Thailand – whereas warfare usually isn’t.)

In any case, Yahoo’s news editors rejected the Eight Wonders of Lebanon idea, believing it was cynically trading on warfare. This, from a network that rescued Kevin Sites from obscure exile in Burma and rushed him over the border into Lebanon just in time to cover some street bombings. Kevin’s reporting got front-page coverage; our travel piece never saw the light of pixels.

A short time later the magic carpet was pulled out from under us, when Yahoo cancelled our project. So, taking nothing away from Hot Zone, but claiming a tiny piece of the online news domain for our own, stay tuned for the first episode in our second season with Eight Wonders of Lebanon, coming soon to a blogspot near you.

Dumb, Dumber and Dumbo

The saddest news I've heard lately is what some are calling a "species-wide trauma and the fraying of the fabric" of society. Sound familiar? Surprisingly we're not talking about humans but elephants -- according to Charles Siebert in the New York Times.

Siebert notes that "these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem." He goes on to list incidents and statistics that give heft to the seemingly bizarre notion that the cliche of a rampaging elephant is becoming less uncommon, more commonplace than we might care to think.

"In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks. "

Yikes. Just when you thought it was safe to go wildlife watching -- if you could make it through the TSA baggage check, the strip search, the visa hurdles, airplane food (or lack thereof) and the shots. Just do a Google search on elephant safari, and you'll find a passel of these pachyderm packages, from Bali to India to Africa, though most of us may have had our first if not only elephant-back ride at a traveling circus (which means that most of us have never had an elephant-back ride).

But it's no laughing matter. As scientists learn more and more about the mental and emotional abilities of animals, from a clearly self-aware parrot as described in Scientific American Mind to pet border collies with vocabularies of 200 words, to primate species with complex social networks, it should be no surprise that cultural complexity may not be exclusively human after all. In the case of elephants, the lore alone of accurate memories and secret graveyards suggests an understanding beyond mere animal relfex.

With such complexity comes, unfortunately, perversity. Young male elephants in southern Africa have been reported to intentional kill and rape (you read that right) rhinosceroses. And in one South African park, Addo Elephant National Park, up to 90 percent of elephant deaths are attributable to other elephants, not natural causes 0r hunters. More unfortunately details are in Siebert's article cited above, including the following: "It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly."

The cause or causes are simply the inexorable dimunation and deterioration of animal habitat, and with it the animals within. A social network is a fine fabric that can't be easily torn, at least without leaving scars. Consider something as commonplace as a death in the family: an empty seat at holiday dinners, a phone that no longer rings. Extend it to a national level -- trying to make peace in a nation torn apart by war, especially when the inhabitants retreat to the comfort of sectarian beliefs which inevitably exclude opposing sectarians. Make it global, and you have people blowing one another up for the thinest of reasons, upon the most fragile pretexts, because trying to live together is too stressful with limited resources and competing ideologies and priorites.

Such social breakdowns -- a collapse, in cultural terms, as Jared Diamond had it -- are themselves not isolated to the human race, which is not insulated from its environment and cohabitants. We're not in this alone, and if we offend another person on the highway then road rage is the likely result; if we offend an animal one hundred times our size and weight, we shouldn't be surprised to end up on the sharp end of a tusk.

A final note: is it just a coincidence that the New York Times story on the elephant cultural crisis comes out the same week as the above Newsweek cover and its story on the GOP? Of course it is.