Ecocide - How Dare We Be Species-Suicide Bombers Taking ALL Life Down With Our Own?

Species-Suicide Bombers - How dare we sink to becoming the biggest mass murderers of all time, by a multi-multi-trillionfold?

The End of the World

A correspondent of mine emailed me to recommend a book by John Leslie titled, The End of the World.

More people living now than the grand total of humans who have ever lived!

She said the book makes a disturbingly solid case for our extinction, saying that we are among the last generations of humans. Part of this reasoning involves a complex mathematical determination of our trajectory, which includes the interesting calculation that there are twice as many humans alive, right now, THAN THE GRAND TOTAL OF HUMANS THAT HAVE EVER LIVED. That last is a provocative finding, to say the least. Now, I haven’t read the book, but just his premise got me to thinking. Of course, what I know confirms his conclusions in spades, but I couldn’t help feeling irked by his all-too-familiar perspective. For, to me, it is not just about our species. It is not just about our extinction. It is not just suicide, but murder. My correspondent, “Open Intelligence,” has used the term, “ecocide,” to make this kind of point.

Ok we’re commiting species-suicide; but how DARE we become species-suicide-bombers killing all OTHER life with us

Recently, I checked on the actual number of species that currently are on our planet, and the number was estimated at five-hundred million SPECIES. I think the whole problem IS that we only see “life” in terms of “our” life—our species. Indeed, some people think in terms of life being only for those of their religion, nation, social group, tribe, family, or even just oneself—all of which aid the murder of those who are “not life.” So, Leslie is apparently thinking along the lines of many others who are not seeing the tragedy we are perpetrating to those other than our species, which is a milder form of the bigotry and prejudice we hold for one human against another type of human. I think that is a shame. [Footnote 1] But then we cannot seem to even wake people up to saving themselves or their children, so how can we get them to empathize with the trillions upon trillions of other lives and the multi-hundred-millions of other life forms we share this planet with? I guess that is my problem with his approach: It comes from my feeling that –Ok, we are committing suicide, but maybe we fucking deserve it. But how DARE we “blow up”—like a species suicide bomber—without a second thought for their pain or their lives—which we are only too dumb, and ego- species-centric, bigoted to see, let alone empathize with—as simple “collateral damage,” innumerable multi-bijilliion-trillions of innocent souls/ life forms and hundreds of millions of other entire species of them with us. That is murder of the highest degree, and an evil that this planet has never imagined before this time. But, again, I see the point of talking to people where they are coming from as a starting point, as Leslie is doing. But shouldn’t we try to raise as much awareness as possible of, to me, the much greater evil that we are committing, for those who can hear it? I say, if we want to kill ourselves off, fine. But how dare we sink to becoming the biggest mass murderers of all time, by a multi-multi-trillionfold? We are currently making the Nazis look like Mother Theresas by comparison. If there will be a history of our species by an alien race after we are gone, I do not doubt that the words “Fukushima” and “Oil Spill dead zones,” will have the same kind of black potency that “Auschwitz” and “Dachau” currently have for us.

Continue with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter One:
Eight Billion Neros Fiddling

Footnote

1. On the subject of not being able to handle such a huge concept as mass extinction, my correspondent phrased it this way:

The pyschology of tragedy—Extinction? I’m afraid haven’t got time for it.

Mar 20, 2010 2:18pm by Open Intelligence. “The economy works by making people selfish. Mass extinction is merely collateral damage.” The link shared—to an article by Simon Barnes writing for The Sunday Times, of London, on March 20, 2010—reads:

Species are going extinct because humans can’t see it happening, and therefore we can’t believe it is happening. It is as simple as that. Believing that the elephant will no longer be around is like believing that one day the sun will rise in the west and the stars will fall as rain. We can only really get a handle on the short-term. A generation at most. Long-term planning means the next year or two. Our minds can’t cope with anything longer. That’s why we choose to govern ourselves by means of a comfortable timescale. Four years, five years: that’s Politician’s Time. Extinction is a happening thing, as I have pointed out more than once before. But it is happening in slow motion: you don’t see a monkey turn into a man, and you don’t see an animal go extinct. It’s just that one day you notice that they haven’t been about for a few years. The current rate of extinction is one species an hour,

Read more “Extinction? I’m afraid we haven’t got time for it” at http://thetim.es/fJOE7L [return to text]

Continue with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter One:
Eight Billion Neros Fiddling

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