By Will Falk
More than 100 species went extinct yesterday. They were my kin.
Despite this, I have been hearing people talk about how the world is getting better, how progress is being made, and how we have a bright future.
For example, CJ Werleman recently wrote an article for AlterNet titled “Humanity is Becoming Increasingly Less Violent, with One Exception – Religious Violence.” His opening line declares, “Studies demonstrate the world is becoming less violent, and that human warfare is on the decline.”
Last night, after reading Werleman’s article, I opened my fridge and took out a package of tilapia fillets to make fish tacos. I stopped for a moment wondering why I couldn’t find cod or haddock anymore. Werleman’s words filled my head “Humanity is becoming increasingly less violent.”
Werleman bases his statements on a recent Pew Research Center study. He even quotes Dr. Stephen Pinker who says, “Today we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence” and “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.”
Pinker is right. This blindness is obscene.
The only way Werleman’s article makes any sense is through a refusal to acknowledge non-humans as beings capable of enduring violence. To accept Werleman’s and Pinker’s statements is to silence the natural world so that we may exploit natural communities. This ignorance is part of the ecocidal disaster we have landed ourselves in.
Would Werleman tell what is left of American old growth forests that have been reduced by 95% by human activity since European arrival that humans are becoming increasingly less violent?
Would Pinker care to look golden toads, baiji dolphins, spix’s macaws, Liverpool pigeons, West African black rhinos, and black-faced honeycreepers – all species driven completely extinct in the last decade due to human activity – and tell them this is the most peaceful era in our species’ existence?
No. Because non-humans don’t count, do they?
So, how about the increasing number of American little girls under the age of 8 who are suffering from chemically-induced puberty over the last 10 years? Or how about the mothers in the world (it is all of them) who now have dioxin – a known carcinogen – in their breast milk? Or is this not violence?
I understand what Werleman is trying to do. He writes at the end of his article, “The findings of the Pew Research Center’s study confirm the importance of secularism…” Werleman is trying to draw attention to the foolishness of religious violence. The way he does it, however, ignores his own religious tendencies. He ignores the human supremacy he is participating in through ignoring violence done to non-humans. Ignoring his own religion, he fails to account for the ecological wars being waged on non-humans and humans alike.
Environmental writer Derrick Jensen explains how this is a problem in an interview in CounterPunch titled “Against Prometheus,” “The fundamental religion of this culture is that of human dominion, and it does not matter so much whether one self-identifies as a Christian, a Capitalist, a Scientist, or just a regular member of this culture, one’s actions will be to promulgate this fundamentalist religion of unbridled entitlement and exploitation.”
Do not rest complacent and safe in the fallacy that human violence is dwindling. It isn’t. To ignore this reality is to participate in a fantastic leap of faith as surely religious as the religious violence Werleman’s secularism claims to save us from.
Will Falk
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Because humans see themselves as outside of nature and not a part of it, it’s a logical step to declare dominion over it, to conquer it, to bend it to our purposes. Those purposes include financial profit, no matter how short-sighted.
The consequences go far beyond the extirpation of any species. “What has a darter snail ever done for me” is often how that issue is raised, scripted by Koch brothers, BP et al. Take a look at the results–mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, clear cut forests in Oregon. This is not the Peaceful Kingdom.
As long as there are powerful interests which continue to convince us that the earth and everything in it are our gas pump, toilet and sushi bar, none will call it violence.
Two (probably controversial, even unpopular) points to obviously raise here:
Celebrating a supposed “peaceful” era of less war (not to mention improved living standards, especially infant mortality rates and increased projected lifespans) really does contradict the ecological issue. Put simply, Native Americans for instance did not so much live in harmony with nature as not live long enough to overpopulate the continent, seeing short life spans from their nomadic tribal warring lifestyles, if they even reached adulthood. They could not procreate enough for their footprint to overwhelm their environment.
While I’m not promoting brutal wars as a good thing, nonetheless the reality is that when 60 million died in WW2, not only did 60 million not continue their footprint on the earth, exponentially neither did their offspring, and theirs. It makes an ideology of promoting world peace, or global socialism, AND the preservation of nature, a contradictory dilemma. Mutually exclusive goals, as it were, with one being advanced, harming the other. No I don’t have a solution or more noble ideology, just pointing out an uncomfortable reality. The same dilemma the UN is mired in while seeking to mitigate climate change while many of its longstanding programs are engaged in industrializing the third world with roads, hospitals, electricity, running water- and health care reducing infant mortality.
I raise that point not as an argument to not act on climate change or preserving endangered species but to do so intelligently and know what the true goal is- and the heart may not be the best guide here.
Secondly while many of these extinctions could be tied to humans’ overly broad footprint, many also could be the destiny of evolution. The earth does not have the capability of supporting every life form that ever existed- for sure, if a more powerful hand decided to intervene in the extinction of the dinosaurs, how many species- needless to say, man- would not exist today?
I suppose it might be impossible to determine in each species what is the case- surely a slow, flightless bird such as the dodo had no place in this world- wouldn’t it be equally harmful for man to intervene and preserve its existence as it is to cause an extinction? What if the Polar bear were brown instead of white, would it be right to artificially preserve it when nature deemed its incompatibility with its surroundings should doom it?
These points are not presented as arguments but as another side of the coin the article fails to turn over.