The Onus on Us

   (This article was published in a botanical publication in the fall of 2016. I wrote it expecting Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election. My concern was that the neo-liberal Democrats would continue doing a poor job confronting global warming. Little did I expect that a scum-sucking  conman named Donald Trump would win the election and spend his presidency insanely gutting environmental protections to further enrich the capitalists. Now we are in the middle of a viral pandemic, undoubtedly caused by unnecessary human interaction with nature, and it looks as though we will not be able to concentrate long enough to stop the accelerating destruction of the Earth’s biosphere. Pathetic.

   Since Trump's election, Greta Thunberg started her school strike protest. People in the UK started the Extinction Rebellion. And Guy McPherson, an American scientist, has been talking about near-term human extinction while coining the phrase “Nature bats last.” So, a lot of conscientious people have been sounding the alarm over our terrifying predicament – but is it enough? Humans around the world must yet wake up, organize, and revolt against what civilization hath wrought. Every person has a responsibility to act. The way we live must change. I can only hope that this current pandemic will force us to reconsider what we value.) 

”Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist.

See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”         

                                                                                                             - Herman Melville

   I get an involuntary wry smile on my face whenever I read the term “Homo sapiens,” the binomial name for humans, which literally means “wise man.” Well, of course we would name ourselves that, I muse. Of course we would!

   This season we are distracted by an outrageous up-coming presidential election. And with war and economic instability making the news around the world, it is not too difficult to lose sight of the bigger issues that need immediate redress. Nature steadily plods steadily forward, with no regard to religious belief or nationality. Its power and importance is so immense that, sadly, as a society, we seem to lack the vision to see it.

   The questions are obvious but, politically, rarely asked. How do we regulate our lives to fit the finite resources of the Earth? What kind of economic system can be created that isn’t dependent on constant expansion and waste? Can we dramatically reduce the world’s human population before we cause irreparable harm to the environment which all living organisms depend? Do we, in short, have the ability and fortitude to overcome our dangerous habits and allegiances? 

   It’s easy and fair to blame much of this looming environmental crisis on the industries and politicians who justify and generate it, but I also wonder about the complicity of individuals and my own culpability in smaller but nonetheless destructive behaviors. Perhaps our apathy–or antipathy–towards nature starts in childhood. 

   Growing up in Virginia in the 1960s, I lived in a society where pervasive use of insecticides and herbicides was the norm, because any animal or plant that was a nuisance was expendable.  I lived among men who hunted deer and fished, but not because they were hungry. Using animals for sport was part of the cultural fabric, never to be seriously questioned. 

   As a kid, I spent many hours down by the creek, capturing animals that I didn’t know how to care for. The brook lampreys and salamanders that I brought home in jars would invariably be dead within a week. The adults in my life didn’t see this as a problem. My destruction of ant colonies, slugs, and other “unimportant” animal life didn’t disturb me…at first. 

   But my youthful nonchalance to the fate of other animals was shattered when I saw a television show in the late 60s that documented, quite graphically, people in Canada beating baby seals to death with metal-spiked hakapiks. When I saw a parent push a young child clutching a wooden bat out towards a lone seal, encouraging the child to “go for it,” I realized that reckless killing of animals for the sake of “the market” was an insane part of humanity. I was traumatized by this documentary and cried about it. It worried me like nothing had ever worried me before. What was this world I was living in?

   Our society has been one that frames nature as a “resource” to be used and exploited by humans regardless of the long-term consequences. We are taught that "in the beginning" it was all made for humans to use. Science has now presented us with a disturbing, quantifiable counterpoint. 

   Science has divided the geological timeline of Earth into categories that range from eons, eras, periods, epochs, and finally down to ages. There are actual material justifications for each of these classifications. Currently, humans are in the Cenozoic era, Quaternary period, and Holocene epoch. The Holocene represents the last 12,000 years comprising a fairly mild interglacial climate and the rise of civilization. Recently, scientists at the International Geological Congress have recommended that the current epoch – the Holocene – be superseded by a new epoch, the Anthropocene (“time of the humans”). Geologists want to date the Anthropocene as starting around 1945, the year we detonated the first atomic bomb.

   The hallmarks of this newly proposed epoch – the physical evidence of undeniable long-lasting human impact on the earth – are actually a curious collection of seemingly disparate items that some future analytic creature from another planet might discover in the geological strata dated to our time period:

• radioactive isotopes from nuclear weapons tests
• plastics
• carbon pollution from factories and cars
• concrete
• chicken bones

   The nuclear isotopes are understandable since man-made plutonium-239 has a half-life (half-life mind you!) of 24,000 years, but chicken bones? What do they tell us about human existence? 

   Chicken bones are scattered across the planet because chickens are the most widely “farmed” animal for human consumption. Worldwide, humans eat around 60 billion chickens a year. (I am reminded of Tolstoy’s famous admonition – “As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields.”)

   Here are a few other interesting bits of news I have seen lately, none of which have been discussed by the presidential candidates:

•  According to the U. N. Environmental Program, the extinction rate on this planet races along at roughly 150 species per day, which is 1,000x the “normal” rate of extinction. Some scientists claim that we are currently experiencing the sixth extinction event in the planet’s history and that 20% of plant and animal species alive today will be forever erased in 25 years.

• The International Union for Conservation of Nature reports that rising ocean temperatures are destroying marine life which also affects terrestrial life. The acidification of the oceans is the greatest threat to life on Earth.

• In attempts to control mosquito populations in the eastern United States (thus trying to prevent the Zika virus from spreading), state governments have sprayed insecticides that have killed millions of honeybees. Apparently, no one involved has ever read Rachel Carson.

• Human population has grown by over 56.5 million people so far this year.

• According to the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, air pollution kills 3.3 million people worldwide each year.

• The US dairy industry was recently fined $52 million because they killed half a million cows in an attempt to inflate milk and cheese prices.

• The Earth has lost a third of its arable land in the past 40 years according to a study published by the University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.

• The coal company Peabody Energy funded lobbyists and think-tanks to downplay climate change–a practice common among corporations who oversee the exploitation of the environment to appease their stockholders. (Also see the article Dark Money Funds Climate Change Denial Effort” in Scientific American magazine, Dec. 2013.)

• Drinking water in the United States has been widely contaminated by the heavy metal chromium-6, which is known to cause cancer. As reported by the Environmental Working Group, the drinking water in Phoenix has the highest concentration of chromium-6 in the country.

   You can see by the news that something in the world is dangerously askew. At what point can this kind of information deaden the senses? At what point will this kind of information fire up collective action?
 

   As I was finishing this article in September, the Guardian reported that 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences - including  30 Nobel Prize laureates – have signed an open letter stating: “Human-caused climate change is not a belief, a hoax, or a conspiracy. It is a physical reality.” The letter, which is well worth your time to read, goes on to demand that the United States take a leading role in eliminating greenhouse gases and that it is in our national interest to do so. 

   Humans are curiously paradoxical creatures. We say we want to save the planet while, at the same time, we have fully committed ourselves to a trajectory of destructive behavior. If someone tries to gain protection for other animals or the environment, we often act indifferently or with hostility. How to diffuse this cultural dissonance?

   If we are to live up to our binomial appellation, we must have the courage and foresight to address serious environmental questions and share in the sacrifice that will be required to safeguard this planet for future generations of all living species. Any chance for success will depend on two of the most intangible human qualities: reason and imagination. Can we learn? Can we change together for the common good? Can we be wise mankind? 

                                                                                                                                       -  2016

© T. Stone, 2020