| In 1982, I realized that the world was going to die. I did not stop to consider what world was dying – the world I knew, all humanity or the living planet – because high school students are impressed with simply having such grand realizations. My worldview was simple, but I did know something was dying and humans were doing the killing.
My youth convinced me that such realizations need to be preserved for posterity so I began cutting articles on environmental destruction out of my parents’ newspapers and magazines. The daily effort lasted a month before it became another thrust at the ages thwarted by the lure of video games and Star Trek reruns. Today, the Earth Crash Earth Spirit website does it for me.
Even though I did not archive the history of environmental destruction, my realization forced me to pay attention to it. For a few years, my knowledge of environmental destruction grew without expanding my understanding of the issue and what it means to humans. Fortunately, a small collection of insights, none my own, began to shape a deeper understanding of this vague impending doom.
First came a radio interview with, I believe, Jane Goodall. I have never seen the quotation in print, but the thought has stuck with me. Asked if she worried about earth surviving human development, Goodall responded that she was not worried because the earth would certainly survive and thrive long after humans were gone.
The insight was uplifting. It was the Cold War. A fast and painless-for-most human extinction with little damage to the environment was possible. It was reassuring that if we somehow insisted on destroying ourselves that we would not take the rest of the planet with us. Then the patron academic of Henny Pennyists, Thomas Malthus, entered my life. His predictions that war, disease and famine were the inevitable way nature controls human population growth had never come true. Wars, famine and disease were plentiful, but humans had proliferated without stop since he wrote that humans could bring an end to these three plagues by controlling their reproductive nature.
For me Malthus was not wrong, only on a 200-year losing streak. The endless bad environmental news indicated human growth had finally stretched the environmental elastic too far. Environmental news was moving from concern about lake ecosystems and animal extinctions to human health issues. Escalating rates of asthma, allergies, cancers and diabetes were the edge of an environmental plague that could only be cured by reworking our relationship with our environment.
Malthus left me with a difficult choice. His fervent belief in population control held as much promise of environmental stewardship as it did for preventing plagues. His prescription for overpopulation, however, was mandatory population control for poor people. Eugenics was unacceptable to my anarchist tendencies so Malthus became my personal Cassandra as I witnessed Europe enter an era of wealth, peace and low reproductive rates. The western nation with the highest birth rate, the U.S., is now the most aggressive and has the poorest health indicators.
As radical environmentalists began reaching the logical conclusions of their movement, Thomas Malthus received a strange new life. The destroy-civilization movement concludes that human civilization is the biggest threat to our environment and environmentalists are fooling themselves if they believe they can save the environment without dismantling civilization. Civilizations are a cancer that eats the environment, and we must return to a more natural state.
The voluntary human extinction movement goes further. This movement wants people to stop having children so that the human population will decline. It does not promote human extinction as such; extinction is simply the goal that will help reduce human density.
I could not find it in me to turn my back on the world to save it from dying, no matter how logical such a necessity appears. I felt forced to turn my back on rationalism and consider the traditional Aborigine way of instinct. Aborigine elders do not move through their world by what they see in front of them, but on what they feel inside. Your instinct can bring a lot of clarity to the scientific and pseudo-scientific arguments that have become the environmental debate.
Kneel down by your car’s tail pipe, take a deep breath, and ask your gut if this is a good thing. Take a whiff of the black crap in the middle of every parking stall. Try to recall either sensation every time you get in a car. Ask your gut if it makes sense to pump pristine water out of an aquifer that took thousands of years to form for two months of natural gas.
Spending more time listening to your instincts will slow you down. It is hard to make your gut rush, and in the end the slowing might be the answer after all.
The end of humanity online
· All the latest news on environmental destruction - www.eces.org
· Jane Goodall Institute — www.janegoodall.org
· The International Society for Malthus - desip.igc.org/malthus
· Destroy civilization - www.coalitionagainstcivilization.org
· The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement - www.vhemt.org |
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