Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
― The Basis of Morality
When I started blogging, I had no plan. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing but much like now, I write about what I feel compelled to write about. Sure, I’ve got a label marked ‘services’ on my site for anyone who might be interested in what I offer, but my writing is not connected with said offering or not so you’d notice.
And right now, in case it’s not already obvious, I’m intent on trying to understand how the hell it got like this where we’re literally eating ourselves alive.
Of course, in the opinion-fest that passes for social media, my voice is a dime a dozen but then again, I feel very few people are prepared to advocate for the end of humanity as a way, once and for all, of bringing the Anthropocene, if not to an end, to at least slowing the trajectory of destruction occasioned by our anthropocentric exceptionalism be that consumption, treating the world as a dump or killing everything that either has a commercial value or is in the way of putative progress. I might be wrong on this point either by dint of the fact that everyone knows this but is afraid to say it or the antinatalists are actually EFILists and would rather see everything go extinct but I don’t get the impression that this is an obvious or any solution.
To be honest, it doesn’t really matter. All I know is that the more we advocate for the cessation of our fossil fuel exploits, and all those other egregious habits that have brought us to this point, and ignore the fact we’re the epicentre of the evil that has been wrought against Gaia, the less likely it is that anyone is going to advocate for either a reduction in population or for everyone to stop breeding. In old school terms, we want to have our cake and eat it.
I’ll pass on that even if that makes me deeply unpopular. That’s not to say I’ve any expectation of anyone doing anything different on the strength of my words. In fact, if anything I might drive people in the opposite direction.
You might ask why I feel so strongly about this issue? Simply because I don’t have any faith, less still hope, that we’ll change our death-dealing, anthropocentric ways even if we ameliorated our emissions and stopped polluting the world. As someone remarked recently on a podcast, we’re Darwinian Malware and there isn’t much to disagree with on that score. And then there’s our non-human brothers and sisters who if it wasn’t hard enough already will be facing the prospect of their continued extinction or reduction in numbers to a point where nature will be devoid of anything that doesn’t have our paw prints all over it.
Does this mean I won’t write about anything else? No. But right now this seems the most important thing I’ve ever had to confront.
Blessings.
Julian