All things considered, shouldn’t some animals just go extinct on their own? I’m not talking about certain species of whales or the buffalo, animals that man hunted to the brink through sheer selfish greed, or the passenger pigeon, which we did hunt to extinction through our own selfishness.
The dodo bird was killed off on their island of Mauritius after the Portuguese and Dutch showed up with dogs and pigs and monkeys to destroy the nests and eat the eggs, and then they stole away all the nesting land to build on.
No, I’m talking about animals that, without our help, would just go away like they did for millions of years before Man sauntered into the picture.
Just think, if we’d been around a few million years earlier, we would have set up giant tracts of land that no one could use, just to keep the last two remaining T-rex specimens alive. Oh wait, we did that already & called it Montana, where the T-Rex lived…and they died anyways.
Save the Wooly Mammoth! They can go back to roaming the wastes of Greenland, about the only place left on earth where they won’t die of heat-stroke.
In 2006, there was this huge buzz about zoo keepers in Thailand and China using films of panda bears mating to get their own zoo pandas to become more willing to copulate. Panda porn, boys and girls, I kid you not. When your species has declined to the point where they will no longer willingly mate, isn’t that a serious sign that the species is circling the drain? Panda porn is not going to save a species that is already mostly dependent upon man’s artificial insemination, artificial child rearing, and captive environments to stay alive. They only eat one thing, bamboo, which has almost no nutritional value so they move slowly and have like no metabolism They breed slowly, if at all, and live where nothing else grows. They pretty much are an evolutionary dead-end; not quite a bear, not quite a raccoon, with no complete ancestry ever found. A mutation, I guess you’d call it.
Sure, we can blame China’s crowded, polluted, destructive way of conducting itself, but maybe we can also say that maybe they’ve run their course as a species and it’s time to say goodbye. Many myacid species that were similar to giant pandas did the same thing.
Maybe 10,000 years ago, had we stepped out of our caves and saved the graceful Baluchatherium, we could have had herds of giant hybrid rhino/tapir beasts three times larger than elephants running amok in Baluchistan today. At least, until they stepped on all the land mines or were loaded down with explosives by Muslim insurgents. See, Baluchistan is an ancient realm that was sorta part of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. Hey, Achmed, let’s see you ride a Baluchatherium loaded with explosives into a crowded market…
On the beaches of America you can no longer have your lights on after dark, because sea turtles get all stupefied and confused, and then get lost and can’t find the beaches they lay their eggs on. And after hatching the baby turtles get disoriented and head inland instead of to the sea. I don’t know if it’s the lights so much as the loud drunken parties and crappy music. I know that I’m less inclined to gravitate towards screaming people swilling Corona Light and trying to harmonize to “Margaritaville”. Being eaten by crabs and shorebirds is almost preferable.
Right now, the honey bee is fighting for species survival from some unknown parasite or disease that is killing off entire hives and entire beekeeping colonies. Bees are important, not only for the honey, but because there are like 22 different food crops in America that depend on bees as their sole source of pollination. We could lose the bees, and lose several important food crops. But something tells me that this has happened before, every few thousand years, and Nature adapted and found new ways to pollinate different crops and create different sweet gooey substances.
Yes, Man encroaches on the living space of lots of species, and we’ve done a lot of damage. I personally would hate to lose the whales, the buffalo, the bald eagle, the honey bee, the peregrine falcon, and the sea turtles. Every time we find a trendy new fish to eat, we overfish it till we have to find another. A few years ago, all you saw in the stores and restaurants was orange roughy. Not anymore. Where the hell did they all go? We ate them all. Now it’s tilapia. In a couple years, after we eat all of the tilapia, we’ll go on to eat some other fish we’d never heard of, at least not until someone on FoodTV slathered it in a chipotle gorgonzola chutney and some Italian flat-leaf parsley. I suggest we all start eating mullet, since the name recognition in the South alone is priceless. Or, if you have to have something with an exotic name, start eating barramundi. That sounds cool, and it’s a plentiful farm-raised fish.
But really, something like 90% of all the animals that have ever lived on Earth are already extinct, without our help and without our hindrance. We didn’t kill them all. They lived, they died, and Nature moved on. You want to save an endangered species? Look in the mirror. Man is a lot closer to extinction than anything else…and if you didn’t see the special on History Channel called “Life After People”, I urge you to do so. It was very eye-opening, how fast the planet will recover after we disappear, and utterly fascinating and humbling. Here’s a link:
http://www.history.com/minisites/life_after_people
I leave you with some words of wisdom from the late George Carlin.
"We're so self-important; so self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet! We haven't learned how to care for one another; we're gonna save the fucking planet?
I'm getting tired of that shit, tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day, I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois Liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet, not in the abstracts they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great; been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years, versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!
We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe, a little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas; a surface nuisance.
You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the Earth Plus Plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it, needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...assholes.
So, the plastic is here, our job is done; we can be phased out now. And I think that's really started already, don’t you? Don't you think that's already started? I think, to be fair, the planet sees us as a mild threat, something to be dealt with. And the planet can defend itself in an organized, collective way, the way a beehive or an ant colony can. A collective defense mechanism. The planet will think of something. What would you do if you were the planet? How would you defend yourself against this troublesome, pesky species? Let's see... Viruses? Viruses might be good. They seem vulnerable to viruses. And, uh...viruses are tricky, always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed. Perhaps, this first virus could be one that compromises the immune system of these creatures. Perhaps a human immunodeficiency virus, making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along. And maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction.
Well, that's a poetic note. And it's a start. And I can dream, can't I? See I don't worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we're part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron...whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn't punish, it doesn't reward, it doesn't judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while."
