Miscellaneous Thoughts

What are the chances that the last Mastodon died of old age?  If your little band of hunters were killing that particular mastodon, or family of mastodons, and they were the last ones on earth, how would you know?

Isn’t it likely that all the Pleistocene mega-mammals got knocked off one animal at a time, one species at a time, just that way? With nobody having any idea that they were ending the career of a whole species, always assuming that “there are probably more of them somewhere else”, not knowing that everyone else’s “somewhere else” was right here, right now.

What we should have learned by now, but still don’t seem to have learned, is that we have run out of somewhere elses.  Just like we have run out of “aways”—as in “throw it away”.  Every “away” is somebody else’s “here”.

And even if you, the prehistoric hunter, did by some technological anachronism, realize that your particular mastodon was the last of all mastodons, would you still kill it anyway?  Your family is hungry, and if you don’t kill it, somebody else will anyway, so it might as well be you.

No other predator would even ask such questions, much less bother himself to make excuses—however feeble—for his actions.

After all, the system was set up to work in the absence of anything like moral restraint, or conscience, or even logic.  The way the rules of predation were set up, it was/is the job of the predator to catch what he can, and the job of the prey to keep from going personally extinct, and nobody’s job to make sure the balance was kept.  It just seemed to work out that way, until WE came into the picture, or rather, until we started inventing things.

By inventing us, with our great, big brains, Mother Nature shot herself in the foot.  With our cleverness and our technology, we have given ourselves nearly unlimited power, but we are still operating by the old cardinal rule: i.e. try to convert as much of the resources of the world as you can into your own kind of protoplasm. 

This one goal, when pursued by all living creatures under a system of total laissez-faire, somehow worked inexorably to increase the beauty and the living diversity of this world, . . . until one of those living creatures figured out how to give itself an overwhelming advantage in the game.  And now all of a sudden we humans have diverted a humongous percentage of the total biological GNP of the world funneled toward the increase of our species, while the millions of other species have had their share of the pie cut to the vanishing point.

If Mother Earth were a human body she would call us an infection, or a cancer.  If the Agricultural Revolution was The Fall, you might also say that that was the time that the human cancer metastasized.