going the way of the dodo
October 20th, 2000
Turn off the tv and think for a moment.
Despite the fact that most of the species that have ever existed are now extinct, never before in the history of the earth have extinctions occurred at such a breathtaking rate: we are causing it. Every year more than 20,000 species, evolutionary history, disappears forever down the plug-hole with our toxic waste (except that the toxic waste comes back to haunt us, but no Dodo ever has…) 20,000 species but countless individuals.
The species that, by small mercy we find useful, survive in a living hell, either subjugated to our will at every turn, and/or in such an unnaturally manipulated form that they are no longer able to fend for themselves or indeed live a decent, pain-free life. The domestic animals and pets that we have bred to suit our purposes may owe their existence to our interfering use of them, but what kind of existence is it? Deformed by breeding, commercial poultry for instance are subject to bone disease (amongst myriad other breeding-related deformities) which result in many of them suffering extreme pain as they grow at a ridiculously accelerated rates to become our next chicken-burger. We become the living graves of others, subjugating their most basic interests, that of life, to our most trivial tastes.
We keep nature captive everywhere. We cage and beat animals for food, sport and fun. We put fences around forests and call them national parks while over the fence we raze that same forest to the ground so that we can torture more cattle to feed our spurious taste for the flesh of other beings. We ‘cull’ our native animals so that we can replace them with introduced ones. The hypocrisy of the fact that National Parks and Wildlife are responsible (either directly or in the issuing of permits) for killing the most wildlife is truly mind-boggling.
The biodiversity of nature after earth’s previous extincitions was largely preserved by species enduring in small numbers in ‘refugia’, usually enclaves of tropical rain forest that survived the heating or cooling of the planet. Yet rainforests are disappearing more rapidly than any other bio-region, ensuring that after humans have finished with, the Earth will remain a biological desert for eons to come. Does this sound the death knell for nature?
So this is civilisation, this is what the free-market with its insatiable growth fixation, has driven us to become. We are aliens in Gaia, we are no longer part of the ecosystem, we think ourselves lords over it. We have become alienated from it, cocooned in our electronically enhanced concrete prisons, where we endure life so that we may occasionally be entertained and distracted from how truly soul-destroying it is. The result is that we are often unaware or uncaring about how we have, as a species, fucked up the natural world. We don’t see ourselves as part of it anymore, we are mere parasites living off it.
The earth was once gloriously diverse with nature. Yet every place that we have infested we have left our destructive footprint. Easter Island is probably a case in miniature of what most environmentalists see is happening to the world writ large.
Easter Island was first encountered by human beings during the fifth century when a boat, probably blown off course in a storm deposited its human cargo. The island is remote and hosted a limited but endemic range of species: 30 types of plants, no mammals and few insects, lizards or fish. The climate was not suited to the traditional diet of the new arrivals, tropical fruits and vegetables, so they subsisted on mainly sweet potato and chickens. As a consequence, they were permitted the luxury of leisure time because neither of these food stuffs required much work to provide.
The clan structure was the basic social unit, around which ceremonial activities worked. It is thought that these ceremonial activities became the driving reason for all other activity on the island, inducing a sort of intense nationalism that warranted wars in the end. It was the competition between these clans that is credited with the collapse of the islands environment and subsequently its human inhabitants.
All that remains on the island today are the infamous Easter Island ‘heads’ which became the symbols of power and hence prompted the destruction of all other values (including ecological ones) to that power. The statues were carved from a quarry, the production of which must have taken up a great deal of time and provided ‘useful’ work to the population. The island was heavily treed and these trees were used as rollers to transport the statues from the quarry. As the population rose (to an estimated max of 7,000 in 1550), clans would have proliferated, and prompted the escalation of statue production. Yet when the Europeans first landed on Easter Island in the 18th century, they discovered a number of unfinished statues in the quarry, and the island was treeless except for a few inaccessible specimens in the crater of an extinct volcano. It appears that culture went mad, ultimately destroying itself as it stripped nature bear to feed its irrational desire for growth and competition.
Captain Paul Watson, in The Politics of Extinction, compared the ecological destruction of the earth to the hull of a ship, each species a rivet:
If I were to go into my engine room and find my engineers busily popping rivets from the hull, I would be upset and naturally ask them what they were doing. If they told me that they discovered that they could make a dollar each from the rivets, I could do one of three things. I could ignore them. I could ask them to cut me in for a share of the profits, or I could kick their asses out of the engine room and off my ship. If I was a responsible captain, I would do the latter. If I did not, I would soon find the ocean pouring through the holes left by the stolen rivets and very shortly after, my ship, my crew and myself would disappear beneath the waves.The last option is the only sane one. Capitalists still maintain that a cut of the profits is more important while paying lip service to ‘green’ ideals, governments often wish it would all go away. Yet while things change slowly in public policy, destruction continues unabated in most respects. Sixty-eight percent of people opposed Jabiluka uranium mine, yet it went ahead. Despite an exhaustive public consultation process that demonstrated widespread opposition to it, genetically engineered crops are now being grown in Australia. The majority of people want nature preserved, yet the Vegetation Management Act at remains unproclaimed and unenforced while Queensland forests fall at the highest rate in the Western world. We say we respect life, but it remains only partial so long as it excludes the rights of animals and nature to be protected against our selfish whims. Is looking on in horror all we can do? Do we remain Earth parasites? Or do we kick the butts of the world’s oppressors by uniting our personal commitments with our public actions, and become truly integrated within ourselves and with the natural world on which we all depend. Of course we kick those damned butts, because if we don’t we all go down with the sinking ship.
Categories: environment, philosophy |
