THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

 

A band of murderous monkeys on a rock circling one of these stars say, “We must be the reason for all of this,” shortly after the monkeys blow themselves up.

 

In the beginning…

During the Second World War, a young woman working at a defense plant in Memphis, Tennessee, and a few of her girlfriends decided to spend a weekend in New Orleans.  

At the same time, a young, married army captain from Georgia, stationed in Arkansas, decided to spend a weekend in New Orleans  

Among hundreds of people enjoying the French Quarter, these two people happened to meet.  Liquor was flowing, hormones were firing, and the woman consented to sex.   He did not use a condom; he did not pull out; it didn’t end in a hand job or a blow job; hundreds of millions of sperm were ejaculated; by sheer coincidence, the woman had released an egg.    One particular sperm out of hundreds of millions fertilized the egg, and I was conceived.  

There is a better chance of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a storm in the Atlantic Ocean than of me being conceived. 

 

The young unmarried woman did not have a miscarriage; for whatever reason, not religious, she did not have an abortion; and I was born; a singular addition to the two-billion-human population of the earth at that time; an addition to a race of violent bipedal apes with just six degrees of separation from their cousins, the chimpanzees.

 

The war-like nature and propensity for violence of homo sapiens can be documented from its very beginning.   There is not a time in recorded history when men somewhere were not at war, killing each other; churches burning heretics and witches; people tortured and executed over political differences…

Just in my lifetime: the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the Iran War, and any number of skirmishes in the name of U.S. security. 

Then:

It was a spectacle to be witnessed; men on horseback, families in wagons bringing fried chicken and picnic trimmings, spreading blankets on the courthouse lawn, to witness the hanging of black men in Rolling Fork, Mississippi; so my grandmother, who was born in the nineteenth century, recounted.

Later:

George W. Bush lets the assault weapons ban expire… Twenty children, six- and seven-year-olds, and six adults died at Sandy Hook Elementary School – we said ‘thoughts and prayers’ and moved on.

This is who we are.

I am an old man now and have seen almost a century of human foolishness, greed and violence.   We are great apes with a veneer of civilization to hide our natural propensity for violence, which I believe will be the apocalyptic we so often prognosticate.

Pump that oil, don’t worry about climate change; build those data centers and don’t sweat AI. 

There are approximately 12,187 nuclear warheads scattered across the Earth, the equivalent of 6,000 megatons or 6,000,000,000 tons of TNT. 

The weaponized equivalent of six billion tons, or twelve trillion pounds of TNT, is in the hands of bipedal monkeys, at the whim of a handful of old men with a propensity for violence.

At the end…

the OL'Buzzard  

How big is a trillion?   If you tap the table once every second, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, with no breaks, it would take you thirty-two thousand years to tap out one trillion...

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

 

There have been five extinction events in the history of the earth. Three of them took place over hundreds of thousands of years and were the result of changing climate, one resulted from a volcanic eruption, and one from an asteroid strike.

   

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction documents the loss of birds, animals, and sea life taking place at an extreme rate.  

 

Kolbert argues that we are in the midst of an extinction event caused by climate change.   She only deals peripherally with the human causation resulting in climate change, instead documenting the extinction of life taking place across the globe.

 

Undoubtedly we are past the point of arresting climate change.  There was a time we could have prevented this, but we did not have the resolve.   We are now seeing only the earliest extreme weather events that are a roadmap of things to come.  

 

We are at a point where the climates change is self-sustaining.   As the Greenland ice cap and the arctic ice melt, tundra buried for millions of years is emerging and emitting carbon diode which adds to the greenhouse effect increasing global temperature, increasing the melting rate.  It is not beyond credulity that within the next one hundred years the human race could be a nocturnal species.

  

I am not worried about climate change, because creative scientists on the upper end of the IQ scale will drag the rest of us into a sustainable environment.   Though we may have a massive extinction event of plants and animals in our familiar environment, the human race will be ok.    

 

The elephant in the room is not climate.   Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads; the US 5,428; France 290; China 350; UK 225; Israel 90; Pakistan 165; India 160; North Kores 20.  

A total of 12,705 nuclear warheads, each one capable of mass destruction, exist in the hands, and at the whim of a few men. 

 

Think Donald Trump!

The sixth extinction 

 

The human race is not responsible enough to control this kind of apocalyptic power.  The term Mutually Assured Destruction is a prediction, not a deterrent.

FIRE AND FURY

LIKE THE WORLD HAS NEVER KNOWN!

There have been five major extinctions charted through the geological record.   That the sixth extinction awaits somewhere in the future is not a question but fact.   Whether that event results from an asteroid impacting the earth or the moon; or the sun boiling away our atmosphere leaving the earth like its sister planet Mars; or a cataclysmic volcanic event…    The question is not if, but when and how. 

There is a new scenario to add to the mix.    3.2 million years ago, a creature came down from the trees and found it could grasp a stick in its tactile hands and beat the brains out of other animals and creatures like itself. 

The 1.6% genetic difference between human and its closest relative in the great ape family allowed development of a creature that has been able to bring most animal groups to the verge of extinction, destroy the rain forest, pollute the rivers and lakes and oceans of the world and contaminate the very air that sustains life on earth.

The earth was able to adjust to man’s destruction for 3 million years.   Then in the early 1900’s, only 100 years ago, the population of man exceeded one billion: thirty years later two billion, thirty years later four billion… five billion, six billion, seven billion; and by 2050 the world human population is charted to reach nine billion.    The ability of the earth to support the consumption of food, water and natural resources required by this human virus is finite.

Only seventy years ago, in the 1940’s man traded the stick in his hand for a nuclear bomb.  Now instantaneous mass destruction brought on by human error or madness is possible.  

For sixty years the sanest among the race have held the reigns on nuclear destruction while building a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the entire earth seven times over.   

The fear has always been that at some point in the future this power would fall into the hands of a person or persons unstable enough to pull the trigger: fire and fury like the world has never seen.

Seventy-two years later, on the anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have two psychotic narcissists being goaded by their minions to unleash Shiva the destroyer of worlds – not understanding that the world they will destroy is their own.

PISS ON ‘EM

Many years ago my wife and I moved into an abandon farm house buried deep in the Maine woods.   We had no electricity, sewerage or running water.  We carried our water from the stream behind the house, read and studied by oil lamps; with a porta-potty for my wife and an outhouse I built for me.

Each morning I would wake up and walk out into the front yard for a morning piss.  There were numerous small ant hills around the yard and it became a routine to select one to relieve myself on.  Within a month the ants were gone. 

We all, unknowingly, walk over millions of ants every day.

After the sixth extinction, and as we approach the final nuclear extinction, I believe the ants, not the cockroaches or rats, will be left as the dominant life form on this earth.  

Therefore, we should start our battle now.

Piss on ‘em

the Ol’Buzzard