By Max Wilbert
Yesterday I met this juvenile red-shafted Northern Flicker in the high desert of Oregon.
Flickers are common, but like all life on Earth, they are in danger. Bird populations around the world are collapsing. Even “common” species like the American Robin have seen massive population declines because of habitat destruction, insect population collapse, housecats, and other human impacts.
Flickers are not safe. They face all these impacts. This tree is a Western Juniper, one of several Juniper species who are being clearcut en masse across Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, California, Wyoming, and Montana. Ironically, this is not for lumber or even firewood, but because of a misguided attempt at “restoration” of water cycles which have been harmed by overgrazing, overpumping, and more and more human impacts. People are arguing that cutting down the forest will mean more water available for humans. It’s insane.
These trees are also being cut down to supposedly help the Greater Sage-Grouse, another bird species which has lost 98% of it’s population. The Sage-Grouse is mostly being harmed by habitat destruction for ranching, mining, oil and gas exploration, urban sprawl, as well as increasing wildfires (about 90% of wildfires are caused by humans). Vast forests of native Juniper and Pinyon Pine trees, some of them hundreds of years old, are being cut down in the name of this “restoration.” The trees are being scapegoated, and the birds who rely on them will go as they do. Already, the Pinyon Jay (who are symbiotic with Pinyon Pine trees) is experiencing massive population crashes — more than 90% — as their forests are destroyed.
There are many other threats to Flickers. As I mentioned, insect populations are crashing, and they are the main food source for Flickers. Like Orca whales starving as salmon populations go extinct, the Flickers will go as the insects go.
Industrial civilization is driving a mass extermination of life, turning forests into fields into deserts, creating hundreds of oceanic dead zones in seas vacuumed of fish by vast trawlers, and destabilizing the climate. It’s a moral imperative for us to take action to stop this.
Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash
I fully agree, Max. The question is: What action? Where? When?And how?
Seriously! I’m not just bouncing the ball around here. Global, coordinated action against industrial civilization is mandatory. And I don’t just mean something passive, like “School Strike,” where millions of kids skip school, and mass on street corners.
We need a mass action that really slows the machine to a crawl — and shows that it can be repeated, any day — and without an identifiable leadership that can be eliminated.
What is the Achilles heel of the global industrial machine? Which element or organ of the monster is most vulnerable, and most easily impacted? The grid? Aviation? Highway networks? The fuel industry?
What can be hit the hardest and hurt the most, with an irresistible simplicity of action, minimum impact on the innocent, and with no identifiable leadership on the side of life, nature, and survival?
What? Where? When? How?
The best and most effective thing that people can do is to stop consuming all this extremely harmful crap. If people stop buying it, they’ll stop killing the Earth and the life here to make it. No demonstrations, civil disobedience, or monkeywrenching needed, and we wouldn’t have to confront their army of well-armed thugs either.
The only ones on this planet who should be cutting down trees are beavers. Humans started killing trees at the very beginning of civilization, which showed right then how evil civilization is.
Considering the massive harm and destruction that humans have done to the natural world, it’s amazing that there’s still life on Earth. Shows how resilient life is, but like everything else, that resiliency has limits.
Unfortunately, humans as a species won’t stop consuming crap, because we’re greedy, and have invented myths of entitlement. As one of our esteemed American heritage documents put it, we are “endowed by our creator” with “inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
And ask any good American if “liberty” doesn’t include buying, using, wasting, cutting down forests, and destroying habitats — and if the “pursuit of happiness” doesn’t include doing whatever we want, and whatever we can afford (measured in dollar costs, of course, rather than environmental costs). And that “creator,” by human thinking, only “endowed” our species with “certain inalienable rights.”
What we need is a sudden and massive human population crash. My fantasy is the painless vaporization of around 8 billion “excess humans” — only sparing a few enlightened minorities, like the people of Bhutan, the Maroons of Suriname, and various tribes that live WITH the land, rather than FROM the land, and whose vehicles are limited to rafts, dugout canoes, camels, donkeys, and horses.
“My fantasy is the painless vaporization of around 8 billion “excess humans” — only sparing a few enlightened minorities,…..”
Most people don’t say shit like this out loud – I mean – the part about sparing a “chosen” few.