Snow

photo by: Paul Jerry, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

I'll be honest with you. Yes, the planet is in the midst of an ecological meltdown, species lost every day, the climate getting warmer in ways that are unprecedented in the last several million years. Ecosystems are going under the bulldozer and chainsaw all the time and the human population is growing far beyond the ability of a consumer society to keep supplying all 7 billion of us with the crap demanded by it without destroying large swaths of the planet. More and more of the planet is starting to look like this:

View Larger Map

Yes all of this is true. But even if by some miracle we could continue doing what we are doing for hundreds of years yet, I would be completely against it happening. I am against the human hegemony of the planet. I am against the Human Empire. I want to put human beings back in their place. I speak for the non-human beings, the plants and animals that want their effing planet back.

You can call me an enemy of humankind, progress and all things right and good and happy if you like, go right ahead. It ain't gonna hurt my feelings none. I don't think it's true though. Obviously, human hegemony over the planet is bad for the planet, you can take one look at the map above and see that. A few hundred years ago, this continent was green and wild from one shore to the other: you can't say that endless strips of Quik-E-Marts, Exxon stations and strip malls instead of forests and prairies did the other biological inhabitants of the continent any good. Obviously it did not. That's 17% of the land mass of the planet that went from completely wild to what we have now in a few hundred years. Most of the damage was done in the last 150 years.

However, I don't think that the human hegemony over the planet is all that great for humans either. Sure, it's great for their total numbers, at least for the time being, but is quantity everything? Look at that map again, imagine all the little people on it. Almost all of those people are living under conditions that the original inhabitants of this continent, and in fact their own ancestors if you go back far enough, would almost certainly call slavery. They wake when someone tells them to, they go where someone tells them to, they do what someone tells them to until finally they can leave, they fight nerve-destroying traffic jams to get home to watch entertainment someone else has programmed, how are they not on the whole slaves? On top of which, they live lives in which any real contact with nature is mostly reserved for "vacations", those moments of freedom that good slaves get every year or so.

They are much more comfortable than their ancestors, absolutely yes. Well tended domestic sheep are probably more comfortable than wild sheep. Are we just domesticated animals, bred to fatten the account books of our masters instead of bred for wool shearing and meat? I consider that an ignoble fate if so. For that matter, what of the animals we raise for food under the inhumane conditions of industrial agriculture? Sure, there are a lot of them, way more than there ever could be in nature in fact. Should they be grateful for that? Would you be?

via the Humane Farming Association

Our human population is supported by a dachau-like machinery of mass agriculture, in which animals live under intolerable conditions prior to their untimely demise. Many people of course, the urban poor for instance, don't have much choice but to support this monument to Man's thoughtlessness. If you live in a city, low-cruelty food is expensive, potentially many times more expensive. One reason why there shouldn't be millions of people living all packed together in cities all over the planet. In a saner world, most of those people would be on their own small plots of land, raising their own food.

Of course, if you think animals shouldn't count and it doesn't matter how horrific their conditions are, I can't convince you otherwise. You sir or madame are simply an asshole and ought not to exist, and I hate you. May you die and be hunted by wild things in the afterlife until such time as you can reincarnate as someone's livestock. A pig maybe. If a superior alien race should do this to you, raise you in inhumane conditions until your untimely death, I am sure you would simply smile and remark, "well they are the superior species after all! Gosh it must be swell to be superior!"

But you're not the superior species. You're just a species. You didn't make the universe appear magically out of your ass, you are just one species among many on this planet. Get off your high horse, human.

I am not against meat. I am against fucking up the animal's life while they are alive. You want to kill them, fine, but let them live a decent life in the meantime. Not sure we humans can ask for much more than that.

And industrial agriculture ruins more than pigs lives. Our monoculture system of agriculture destroys whole environments for crops. All agriculture does this to some extent when it takes over a land, but in a well-ordered organic/permaculture farm, at least the biodiversity goes back up afterwards (though the original species may be still largely gone). Industrial agriculture destroys ecosystems and puts nothing in its place except monocrops kept artificially going by inputs of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. This doesn't simply destroy the land the farm is on, it messes up surrounding ecosystems too.

So we have the unnatural production of crops, the inhumane production of animals, and let us not forget, the domestication of the human being herself, in a process that lays waste to the natural world and alienates people from a productive relationship with their environment, alienates them from actual productive work and the fruits of their labors, makes any real security impossible as the job market continually convulses and in the end alienates people from each other too. So that the rich can get richer, maybe they'll buy a new planet some day. And what do we as average humans get out of this deal? Oh, that's right, a more comfortable life. Lattes in the morning and sleeping pills at night as you shuttle from your pointless work to your equally pointless entertainment, eating tortured animals converted into quasi-food pumped full of chemicals for the benefit of megacorporations. Because they sure aren't in your food to do you any good. That crap is in your food to make you eat more of it, and so benefit someone else's bottom line. Probably the same crap they put in the pig feed to fatten up those poor creatures. Hope nobody starts eyeballing your bacon...

You might be as domesticated as those unfortunate pigs above, but at least you are more comfortable. That's the important thing.

Right, carry on then, sorry I mentioned it. Silly me.

 * * *

Why did I name this post Snow? In a world of increasing global warming, snow might become a rare visitor to many places it used to be regularly found in in winter. Places where it used to snow sometimes, might never see snow in a future world. I had been thinking a lot about what is happening to the planet lately, what's happening to us too, and frankly wishing that a global pandemic would cut human numbers down significantly. If that makes me a bad man in your eyes, go ahead and think that.

When thinking about these versions of apocalypse, either an apocalypse of environmental collapse and humans effing up the planet and themselves yet more, or else a nice global pandemic giving us a reboot, visions of snow would come into my mind all the time and I wondered why. Why snow?

Of course, such a drastic reboot is not at all uncommon in mythology. Hopi mythology states that there were four previous worlds to this one, and in each case the worlds and people in them went terribly wrong and a remnant had to leave for the next world. This one being our last chance, there apparently aren't any more worlds after this. However they do have a prophecy which I have mentioned in other posts, that this world too would go through a purge and hopefully a remnant would be left to start over. Hopefully as in, I don't think there are any guarantees that come with that.

Of course for people in countries with a Judeo-Christian background, the legend of Noah and his ark is a familiar one. Quite similar to the Hopi myth in a sense, except on fewer occasions. People were being very evil, and so Jehovah told Noah to build an ark and put a survival remnant of people and animals and so on in it, because he was about to unload some whupass in the form of a flood. And so for forty days and nights, the remnant of the Earth bobbed around in the waves while JHWH was unloading the aforementioned divine whupass, and then the rain stopped and the rainbow came out, as a sign that it was over.

And I thought, "was that it?" Snow. As in, after a long traumatic period of global warming, perhaps snow will return to places it had once left. Snow will build up the ice caps, build up the North Pole again, build up the pack ice in the seas. As a sort of future rainbow, it makes a certain amount of sense.

It's a happy thought anyway, a thought of a future time AFTER global warming. :) I only wish I could be there to see it. Who knows, maybe in some other life I will.