Walpurgis
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EXTINCTION
« on: 2006-09-03 23:45:03 » |
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The present mass-extinction is older than recorded memory, but evidential from the paleontological record, showing what has been taking place since Homo sapiens hunted the prehistoric megafuna (e.g. mammoths, saber-tooths) into oblivion.
THE CURRENT CRISIS
"By conservative reckoning, the planet loses three or four species an hour, eighty or more a day, thirty thousand a year - the highest extinction rate in 65 million years." (Richard Ellis "No Turning Back - the life and death of animal species" 2004 Harper Collins p357)
"Humans--who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals--have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them--without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeeling toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behaviour of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us." - Dr. Carl Sagan & Dr. Ann Druyan
WHY THE CRISIS HAS OCCURED
The following quotes are from Ernest Becker's "Escaper from Evil" (1975). I have deployed them here to outline his theory of human evil. They explain the motivations and drives behind our mass murder of animal species - animal species who must be reduced or eradicated to provide us with the psychological security that WE are the most powerful and enduring - no mere animal! (please forgive Becker's androcentric language if you can.)
THE QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY "Man used his ingenuity to fill his stomach, to get control of nature for the benefit of his organism; this is only logical and natural. But this stomach-centered characteristic of culture is something we easily loose sight of. One reason is that man was never content to just stop at food: he wanted more life in the widest sense of the term - exactly what we would expect an organism to want if it could somehow contrive to be self-conscious about life and death and the need to continue experiencing. Food is only one part of that quest; man quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment and had to conceive ways to qualify for immortality. In this way the simple food quest was transmuted into a quest for spiritual excellence, for goodness and purity. All of man's higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original question for energy-power." (p22)
"...man wants above all to endure and propser, to achieve immortality in some way. Because he knows he is mortal, the thing he wants most to deny is this mortality. Mortality is connected to the natural, animal side of his existence; and so man reaches beyond and away from that side. So much so that he tries to deny it completely. As soon as man reached new historical forms of power, he turned against the animals with whom he had previously identified - with a vengeance, we now see, because the animal embodies what man feared most, a nameless and faceless death." (p92)
THE SOUL "By opposing culture to nature... man alloted to himself a special spiritual destiny, one that enabled him to transcend his animal condition and assume a special status in nature. No longer was he an animal who died and vanished from the earth; he was a creator of life who could also give eternal life to himself.." p19
"The guiding principles of the formation of all human ideology 'harp on the same monotonous tune: we are not animals...'." (p93)
A PIECE OF MEAT "Food is a sacred element because it gives the power of life. The original sacrifice is always food because this is what one wants from the gods as the basis for life. 'Give us our daily bread..' Furthermore, if food contains power, it is always more than itself, more than a physical thing: it has a mysterious inner essence or spirit. Milk is the essence of the cow, shark's teeth are th essence of the shark's vitality and murderousness, etc. (It is not) a mere object as it appears to us - but a piece of life, of spirit." (p29)
"Man has always casually sacrificed life for more life." p24
OUR MALAISE: GUILT and TERROR "If guilt is the experience of fear and powerlessness, then immersing oneself in a group is one way of actively defeating it: groups alone can make big surplus, can generate extravagant power in the form of large harvests, the capture of dangerous animals and many of them, the manufacture of splendid and intricate items based on sophisticated techniques, etc. From the beginning of time the group has represented big power, big victory, much life." (p36)
"Nothing strikes greater terror into a man's heart than to witness an eruption of power from the depths of nature that he cannot understand or control..." (p47)
POWER "All power is in essence power to deny mortality... Power means power to increase onself, to change one's natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude, to one of bigness, control, durability, importance." (p81)
"Missionary activity has always gone hand in hand with superior weapons and medicines because priests have always known that they have to prove their god represents superior powers. Think; if a race of men with advanced learning, health, and weapons were to land on our planet and tell us about a god who sustains them in Alpha Centauri, a new religion would sweep our large numbers of people overnight and discredit most of our institutions." (p84)
"(Man) worships power and has to respond to the obvious power of numbers, thrill to the spectacle of masses; it is visible proof that nature favors man if she has made his kind multiply so..." (p138)
"We know that men often kill with appetite and excitement, as well as real dedication, but this is only logical for animals who are born hunters and who enjoy the feeling of maximizing their organismic powers at the expense of a trapped and helpless prey." (p152)
THE HUNTER "...one of the main motives of organismic life is the urge to self-feeling, to the heightened sense of self that comes with success in overcoming obstacles and incorporating other organisms... Man can expand his self-feeling not only by physical incorporation but by any kind of triumph or demonstration of his own excellence." (p11)
"Man is an animal organism who must naturally aggress on this world in order to incorporate the energy-power he needs from it. On the most elemental level this power resides in food, which is why primitives have always acknowledged food power as the basic one in the sacrificial meal. From the beginning, man, as a meat-eating hunter, incorporated the power of other animals. But he himself was a peculiarly weak animal, and so he had to develop a special sensitivity to sources of power, and a wide latitude of sources of power for his own incorporation... he was the only animal conscious of death and decay, and so he engaged in a heightened search for powers of self-perpetuation. .. Very early in evolution men aggressed in order to incorporate to kinds of power, physical and symbolic... the trophy was a personal power acquisition. Men took parts of the animals they killed in the hunt as testimonial to their bravery and skill - buffalo horns, grizzly bear claws, jaguar teeth... These could be worn as badges of bravery which gave prestige and social honor and inspired fear and respect. But more than that... the piece of the terrible and brave animal and the scalp of the feared enemy often contained power in themselves: they were magical amulets... which contained the spiritual powers of the object they belonged to... In addition to this the trophy was the visible proof of survivorship in the contest and thus a demonstration of the favor of the gods. What greater badge of distinction that that? No wonder trophy hunting was a driving obsession among primitives: it gave to men what they needed most - extra power over life and death." (p107)
"An Associated Press dispatch from the "Cambodian Front Lines" quotes a Sgt. Danh Hun on what he did to his North Vietnamese foes: 'I try to cut them open while they're still dying or soon after they dead. That way the livers give me the strength of my enemy... (One day) when they attacked we got about 80 of them and everyone ate liver." (p108)
"... man is bloodthirsty to ward off the flow of his own blood." (p111) "... it is as though the sacrificer were to say to God after appraising how nature feeds voraciously on life, 'If this is what you want, here, take it!' - but leave me alone." (p109)
"We feel we are masters of life and death when we hold the fate of others in our hands. As long as we can continue shooting, we think more of killing than being killed." (p114).
OUR TRAGEDY "Mass destruction committed under the reign of God the Machine is a tribute to the expansion of an implacable, efficient force with which modern man can identify..." (p141)
"... men are truly sorry creatures because they have made death conscious. They can see evil in anything that wounds them, causes ill health, or even deprives them of pleasure. Consciousness means too that they have to be preoccupied with evil even in the absence of any immediate danger; their lives become a meditation on evil and a planned venture for controlling it and forestalling it. The result is one of the great tragedies of human existence, what we might call the need to 'fetishize evil,' to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled. It is tragic precisely because it is sometimes very arbitrary: men makes fantasies about evil, see it in the wrong places, and destroy themselves and others by uselessly thrashing about. This is the great moral of Melville's Moby Dick, the specific tragedy of a man driven to confine all evil to the person of a white whale." (p148)
"The tragedy of evolution is that is created a limited animal (on a limited planet) with unlimited horizons... It seems that the experiment of man may well prove to be an evolutionary dead end, an impossible animal - one who, individually, needs for healthy action the very conduct that, on a general level, is destructive to him." (p153)
The following quotations are from David Quammen's "Monster of God" (2003). They make it clear that part of our immortality quest is in being a hero (or worshipping heros). Our primary foe is terrifying nature embodied by the Beast that makes us mortal by threatening the body that we wish to escape.
THE MONSTER "Every once is a while, a monstrous carnivore emerged like doom from a forest or river to kill someone and feed on the body. It was a familiar sort of disaster - like auto fatalities today - that must have seemed freshly, shockingly gruesome each time, despite the familiarity. And it conveyed a certain message. Among the earliest forms of human awareness was the awareness of being meat." p3
DENIAL "Respectful, decorous disposal of the mortal remains has been important across virtually all times and cultures... Bury the corpse, cremate it, put it on a platform to be picked clean by birds, pile rocks over it like cairns of Komodo, even cook it and eat it yourself..." p133
"Seeing the corpse of a friend or a relative being chewed on by a crocodile - or a lion or grizzly bear or tiger - must carry much the same flavor of desecration." p133
OUR CURRENT SOLUTION "Doesn't separation inevitably mean eradication? Isn't containment (as in a national park that's too small to support a viable population) just another word for captivity? Is it possible to separate Homo sapiens from the dangerous inconvenience of alpha predators - around a lake, along a river, in a forest anywhere on the planet - without separating those predators from the habitat they need for a continuing existence in the wild? Can we have them at all if we're unwilling to suffer among them?" p136
"...the extermination of alphas predators is fundamental to the colonial enterprise, wherever that enterprise occurs. It's a crucial part of the process whereby an invading people, with their alien forms of weaponry and organized power, their estrangement from the homeland they've left and the place where they've fetched up, their detachment and ignorance and fear and (in compensation for those sources of anxiety) their sense of cultural superiority, seize hold of an already occupied landscape and presume to make it their own... It's one aspect of a campaign by which the interlopers, the stealers of landscape, try to make themselves comfortable, safe, and supreme in unfamiliar surroundings." p253
THE HERO "...a king serves the same function for his people that a shepherd (such as biblical David, in his obscure years before Goliath) serves for his flock: ridding them of the menace of predators. What distinguishes this tradition from mere livestock guarding is that the slaughter is preemptive, not reactive. The good ruler, like the bold shepherd, devotes himself to exterminating predators whenever and wherever they can be found. It's a paradigm of valorous leadership that traces back through some of the earliest masterworks of literature and some of the most durably resonant myths. Killing monsters, on one pretext or another, is something that has always allowed heroes to seem heroic." p255
"The list of legendary battles between heroes and monsters is long. There's Marduk versus Tiamat, Theseus versus the Minotaur, Perseus versus the sea monster, Ninurta versus Anzu, Sigurd versus Fafnir, Rama versus Ravana, Saint George versus the dragon, Odysseus versus Polyphemus, Nayenezgani versus Teelget, Bellerophon versus the Chimera, Oedipus versus the Sphinx, Minamoto-no-Yorimasa versus Nue, Tishpak versus the Labbu, Heracles versus the Nemean lion, and of course Beowulf versus Grendel..." p260
THE END "The evidence suggests 'a crucial and irreplaceable regulatory role' for those large, dangerous beasts at the acme of their respective food chains. 'The absence of top predators... appears to lead inexorably to ecosystem simplification accompanied by a rush of extinctions." p424
Read more about the previous mass extinctions - and the current mass extinction - here:
The Present Day - Holocene extinction event. A 1998 survey by the American Museum of Natural History found that 70% of biologists view the present era as part of a mass extinction event, the fastest to have ever occurred. Some, such as E. O. Wilson of Harvard University, predict that man's destruction of the biosphere could cause the extinction of one-half of all species in the next 100 years. Research and conservation efforts, such as the IUCN's annual "Red List" of threatened species, all point to an ongoing period of enhanced extinction, though some offer much lower rates and hence longer time scales before the onset of catastrophic damage. The extinction of many megafauna near the end of the most recent ice age is also sometimes considered a part of the Holocene extinction event.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
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