Now that Aye Matey (I’m 80), I’ve circled the sun 80 times, am I supposed to be a white bearded sage sitting in the corner, smoking a pipe, pontificating, and casting juicy pearls of wisdom to be snatched up by a doting audience? Or, a smelly, black bearded pirate, mumbling with his nasty parrot in the corner, drooling into his grog, the parrot occasionally releasing droppings into his owner’s grog? The latter, according to my wife. Mexicans refer to my stage in life as the tercera edad, the third age, when you get free entry into museums and half fare on buses and free visits to the cemeteries on Dia de los Muertos. Oh, and free entry when go in box. The problem once you are officially tercera edad material, you don’t remember where your wife told you to get off the bus at the museum, so you ride around and around the city all day, staring vacantly out the window. Twenty-four hours later, you do the same thing.
Let’s pretend that I have a crystal ball and can look ahead another 80 years to 2103, and see the Seattle 3, my three grandsons, currently 11 and 9 (twins) at the ages of 91 and 89 respectively. They’re living on the moon or Mars in sweet little suites because the Earth has become way too unpleasant to live on. Venus is out, regardless how uncomfortable the Earth gets, because Venus is nasty hot and dry. If you listen to James Hansen, retired director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a world authority on Venus, Earth could become another Venus in a very long time. Hansen devoted the tenth chapter in The Storms of My Grandchildren, to The Venus Syndrome, a sci-fi saga in which he prophesied the extreme possibility of Earth becoming another Venus with surface temperatures in excess of 800 F. That won’t happen because we won’t continue to play the role of the frog acclimating to a slowly boiling pan of water, until he utters his final croak and croaks. We’ll be extinct or on the moon if we allow ourselves to reach the Mother of All Tipping Points (MATP), and take the Disney Land super-ride, the Downward Spiral to Venus and commit globacide. Zap!
Globacide means the whole enchilada. With a globacide, Homo sapiens species may survive to see another day if we develop the moon. But what about everything else? Globacide is pretty final for everything, including our cultural histories. I’m not a futurist, so I certainly don’t know what’s possible and what isn’t. Once on the moon, humans would have virtual reality with lions, and tigers and bears attacking us and each other for fun. According to Lewis Gordon, in the article, Can virtual nature be a good substitute for the real outdoors? The science says yes. (Washington Post, April 28, 2020).
We may not miss the incredible natural beauty of species abundance and biodiversity and whole ecosystems like coral reefs and rain forests, but that is only from our perspective, which seems to be all we care about. What about the millions of extinct or suffering extant species’ perspective? Are we going to argue that animals like dogs, crows and octopi don’t have feelings? Can’t they love us and each other? Absolutely that your dog loves you. Your parrot loves you. What about the octopus in the documentary, My Octopus Teacher? Would her descendants and those of all other species be able to replace their authentic nature with virtual nature? Are we going to provide a virtually real world for the millions of species and hundreds of ecosystems that have gone extinct or will go extinct? So what if we can clone every species that ever lived, are we going to clone whole ecosystems and biomes? A virtual Earth on the moon? Even if virtual nature and cloning on large scales were possible, aren’t the decisions to do so dependent on our long-term survival which is dependent on an awareness of our need for survival and be able to do something immediately about the preparation needed? We knew Hitler was threatening the future of the world and we went directly to war. Isn’t it obvious that climate change is doing the same thing now, only not as dramatic but definitely with the strong potential to destroy Earth?
Animals and plants are teaching us more every day they have feelings and maybe they sense that their lives are endangered but don’t have the capability to do anything about it. In the mid-1970s, Tom Michell rescued a barely alive, Magellanic penguin from piles of thousands of dead penguins that had been killed by an oil spill off the coast southeastern Uruguay. Forty years later Michell published a very endearing book, entitled, The Penguin Lessons, about living with a penguin, while the author was an instructor at a private school in Buenos Aires. In the final chapter Michell wrote,
“Is there any chance the world’s oceans can survive damage we are causing but just don’t we see? Thanks to inflation, it is the penguins and the rest of Nature’s descamisados (sic, innocent victims of war, economic and environmental crises, etc.) who pay the real cost of our way of life, in the only currency they have. The way we live today illustrates human capacity for dramatic change over a very short time, yet despite knowing that our modus vivendi is unsustainable, our modus operandi has so far proved incapable of bringing about measures necessary to allow wildlife populations even to equilibrate, let alone recover. What seems undeniable is that the Bank of Nature’s descamisados becomes insolvent, no amount our money will ever bail us out.” After reading this little book, I definitely believed that the little penguin, Juan Salvado, taught Tom that he had feelings and was every bit as capable of true love. So, who’s to say that animals and plants don’t have perceptions about their deteriorating homes?
Fifty-one years ago this spring, I was in northwestern Argentina studying desert armadillos for my doctoral field research and preparing to make a very tragic and costly mistake that really reflected my true attitude toward Earth and its inhabitants. I was preoccupied with thinking how I was going to ship 27 animals back to Tucson and to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago that next August, and not have to put them in quarantine for a month in LA. I failed. Not because I couldn’t get them through customs, which I did, but because of my incredible stupidity and singular focus – in me. Ten animals were successfully shipped to the zoo, but 17 died in the Mojave Desert in the middle of the night while I slept off a drunken party. They suffocated in the closed U-Haul trailer behind me. Some of those armadillos were friends. It played out like the worst horror movie made, and I was Dr. Frankenstein. They were buried that morning in the desert under a big mesquite tree. I cried for weeks and almost gave up my plans. Since that horrific time, I’ve dedicated my life to saving Earth. From us. In my estimation, climate change has upped the ante a million-fold since the first Earth Day, and Earth Day has surpassed the Super Bowl and Mother’s Day in importance. To not celebrate Earth should result in incarceration, at least until people like me realize there may just be more important creatures and ecosystems on this planet than us.
In 2103, another 80 years and I will have gone the way of all crusty pirates, but the Seattle 3 may be around along with hopefully thousands of other species. By then we and possibly other species will be very aware of the fact that one species, Homo sapiens, was responsible for premature globacide. And even if the other species can’t fathom our crime, it shouldn’t make any difference; we took complete advantage of their naivety and vulnerability.
So, what possible reason would we have to do that? A death wish? Passion for global termination? An addiction to human greed of money and power by a tiny minority of us who could care less about the future? Yes, but to a much lesser extent, all of us who knowingly do not attempt to reduce our ecological footprint are guilty. What other explanation is there? Do we have a choice? Absolutely. Can we still do something about reversing the process now? Absolutely, but the clock is ticking faster and faster. The modern pirates of the world, the power mongers, need to consider their parrots are as important as they are.