There have been five major mass extinction events in the fossil record. Some folks claim the human race is causing the sixth right now. Dumping massive amounts of greenhouse gasses, saturating the world with never before seen chemicals and introducing all manner of non-native species willy nilly are touted as the major causes.
I have a different perspective. As population inexorably increases, loss of species diversity is directly driven through the conversion of wild lands to agricultural lands necessary to support the increasing number of (human) mouths.
Ideally, efficient mono-crop farms strive to exclude all but a single species from a plot of land. This puts us, as a species, in direct competition with nature. It isn’t even a nice, civilized, Geneva Convention kind of brawl — it’s a highly mechanized, no holds barred chemical, biological and radiological weapon kind of thing. The worrisome part is, we’re winning.
It isn’t even necessary that we use neonicotinoid, GMO crops or SIT (sterile insect techniques). Anything we do to increase crop productivity is aimed at eliminating whatever might naturally live there.
Humans don’t just take land randomly, but actively seek the most biologically productive plots of land to subdue. There is no percentage in farming the Atacama Desert or Antarctic, but the Amazon basin is very attractive, just like the North American midwestern prairies were.
In the end it boils down to the fact that it’s either us or them. There is no room for millions of bison to roam, passenger pigeons to fly or locusts to swarm if we want our daily bread, cornflakes and T-bone steaks.
This article appears in The Whistleblower.
We flock to estuaries, along riparian rivers where we can act as if occupants of Edens. (Rivers and lakes, and even ocean shores made for easy and relatively safe transportation corridors, for us soft tasty omnivores).
Unfortunately we foul any place wherein we’re sedentary.
Physical anthropologists point out that we are running and walking animals, becoming rather quickly unhealthy without motion.
Our brains evolved into such moveable feast niches, able to do so due to increased calorie availability.
Our skeletons are not as swift, gracile, as some of our ferebears such as the beautiful Homo erectus and such relatives who expanded from Africa long before and separately from ourselves. I suppose, like so many animals, beefy large characters clubbed their male way to social status, to the extent that females accepted brutality; so we didn’t go all out for cantankerous bullish ways, still able to bond and band together in generous harmony, to “move in space with miniumu waste, and maximum joy.”
I look at the apple photo, remembering my brother holding a seemingly perfect apple, offering me a bite, in a wild feral orchard, now covered by shopping malls. Always naive, I bit, and the whole inside had been occupied with soft organisms that had presumed safety inside their foodish shelter.
Underestimating the power of hunger and naivete’, he could not know that even today, I am not repulsed by those inoffensive occupants of apples. I merely leave them some, eating around them.
No Imidacloprid necessary! I recommend that all accept the validity of these other lives, and demand the extinction fo Neonicotinoid producers instead.
A life is diminished beyond fuction when it is so narcissistic that it cannot tolerate other lives.
THe Oceti Sakowin peoples have a saying, a recognition taught in earliest childhood. It is not ritual, but greeting:
They say, and think, when opening their minds to wakefulness, “all my relatives.”
it constitutes the only essential prayer, the source of lively compatible inquisitive eagerness and welcome.
In this land of the greatest living beings of earth, the Coast redwoods, I constantly seem to have to remind humans with whom I interact: We are NOT the crown of creation. A single individual one of these has the capacity to live and sequester carbon, break CO2 back into lifegiving oxygen , for a span of over twenty to thirty of our fullest lifetimes.
This December I saw optimistic yung pumpkin and crab spiders weaving webs on the sunny arbors here. I whispered cautions to them, but in ensuing days noticed the gnats and flies who also decided that our climate had changed . THe flowering ceased, though,
They withdrew.
Models show that locally we may not dessicate but may precipitate an equal or greater amount of rain.
Some kind souls sprout clones of redwoods to plant in the Puget Sound area. I noted a few more hardy insect-consuming garter snakes in coastal dunes than in last century’s years, picking one up to help young boys unfamiliar with them to assuage their excitement away from possible fears (we are the cruelest of all species, killing from fear)
Yes, our omnivorous design makes a population averaging over 140 per square mile of habitable earth, totally untenable. China, having excessively promoted humans uber alles for thousands of steady years now, continues to evolve new constraints. Today’s is yet another coronavirus, a relative of common colds and deadly SARS. There, evolutionary biologist calculate, originated Yersinia pestis, a virulent form of Vibrio cholerae (the latter bacteria genus a denizen of estuarine habitats and brackish waters everywhere. In fact some other Vibrio can have properties allowing their inhabiting humans. Expect them)
We work at odds with ourselves. HIV has become quite varied in its nucleotide makeupp, and if you pause, aware of social signals in the most modern generations of humans, you can see the pressure toward casual mating strategies being either promoted or noted. I suspect the latter. Immune system compromise occurs under unrelieved stress as well, and nature, our overgeneral term for the myriad individuals of all kinds, all, like excess humans, seeking , as does life itself, ever new occupiable niche, has to mirror excess humanity. We seek instead of skill or knowledge to act with integrity, to become ever-more opportunistic middlemen, squeezing into cracks we make between producer and consumer.
We accept such pests when they are human, while attempting to wipe uut pollinators, supposed “weeds”, and other organisms that long antedate our own overproliferation.
Could it be that in excluding other life, inventing toxicities (an interesting compound word. Play with it) to diminish the lives of others , so that we can create intolerable – come on , now 140 per square mile???
Could it be we are doing what psychoanalysts have called “transference?” raging and blaming others for our own behaviors?