The Gibbon and the Mirror

I saw a documentary once about the effects of western tourism on places environmentally unsuited to coping with it – specifically national parks in Africa. A hundred yards from the tourist hut, which was nicely constructed in the local style, was the smoking midden, which contained the remains of used tampax, metal food cans, broken kettles and mirrors. At the edge of the midden was one of the native gibbons with a fragment of mirror, changing the angle of the mirror, looking at his face edgewise, side-on, frontally, changing expression…

That's us. The world a non biodegradable midden, and ourselves watching mirrors, lenses, screens, our personae and reflections.