If you can ignore the anthropomophic and speciesist idiocy that it is morally objectionable to kill “cute” animals (when all plant and animal species save humans are integral to evolution and planetary survival), this article speaks volumes about why humans (capitalists above all) are an evolutionary mistake and how the only measure of value in capitalism is exchange value, not the intrinsic value of life.
“Too many” elephants in Kruger National Park, South Africa? Endangered wolves a threat to cattle and hamburger culture? Polar bears in the way of oil drilling and the energy crack fossil fuel industries supply to the denizens of the Anthropocene Era?
Simple solution: kill first, ask questions later, if at all. Kill anything in the way of “progress” (profits). The irony, of course, is that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases caused the survival crisis of polar bears in the first place, and now the need for more oil – access facilitated by melting ice sheets — demands the death sentence for those with barely an iceberg left to crowd onto to avoid drowning, and yet nonetheless still “stand in the way of civilization.”
As if needed, this is still more evidence that corporations own states, governments, and the entire legal system, and that the “services” and departments such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service protect their corporate masters not the habitats or species suggested by their Orwellian titles.
This is a stunning example of blaming the victim, and yet another decisive sign that the values and priorities of Homo rapiens are insanely inverted, and that this species by and large does not deserve to exist and indeed with this mindset is definitely doomed. May we go out with a bang, not a whimper.
**********************************
Court: Polar Bear Habitat that Interferes with Oil Drilling Has To Go
By Philip Bump, Gristmll, January 15, 2013
Blocking Oil Drilling a Capital Crime, Genocide the Penalty!
Through a bit of evolutionary serendipity, polar bears are cute. They are big and fuzzy and have thick, dopey heads. This is helpful to the polar bears, because it’s given the animals a powerful tool in their fight for existence. “Do you want polar bears to go away?”
To which oil companies say, “Only if they’re in the way.” Last week, a federal court in Alaska overturned a Fish and Wildlife Service habitat designation for polar bears after the fossil fuel industry sued, complaining that the habitat interfered with oil exploration. From the Wall Street Journal:
A U.S. court in Alaska has overturned a federal rule aimed at protecting polar bear habitat in the Arctic, handing a victory to the oil and natural-gas industry.
The rule, established by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is “valid in many respects,” but the agency didn’t follow all the legally required steps before adopting the regulation, U.S. District Court Judge Ralph R. Beistline wrote in the decision, which was dated Thursday and published Friday. …
The government designated barrier islands, offshore sea-ice and “denning” areas, where female polar bears are known to make dens where they give birth to their young during winter months, as critical habitat. At the time of the designation, in November 2010, the Fish and Wildlife Service said the areas were “essential for the conservation of the bear.”
It’s fossil fuel industries that have put the polar bear in its current plight. Rampant greenhouse gas emission and the warming that has ensued has caused Arctic ice levels to plummet. With less ice, it becomes harder and harder for bears to conserve energy and to find food. As we noted in 2007:
As sea ice thins, and becomes more fractured and labile, it is likely to move more in response to winds and currents so that polar bears will need to walk or swim more and thus use greater amounts of energy to maintain contact with the remaining preferred habitats.
The government tried to create a protected habitat, a place where bears could hunt and rest as best they could without additional interference. But unfortunately for the bears, the Fish and Wildlife Service put the reserve on land that was already inhabited: by oil. So the Alaska Oil and Gas Association and the American Petroleum Institute sued, with the oil-obsessed state’s help.
The AOGA issued a pleased-as-punch statement [PDF] in response to the court ruling, including this quote from executive director Kara Moriarty.
AOGA members care as much about protecting Alaska’s environment and wildlife as anyone else, but we also recognize the need to responsibly develop our natural resources in order to keep the state’s number one economic driver healthy.
Emphasis added, to highlight the part of the quote that is bullshit.
Even worse was the statement from Alaska’s governor. Again from the Journal:
Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell said Friday that he “applauded” the court’s decision.
“The Fish and Wildlife Service’s attempt to classify massive sections of resource-rich North Slope lands as critical habitat is the latest in a long string of examples of the federal government encroaching on states’ rights,” Mr. Parnell said.
You can hear Parnell salivating as he says resource-rich. After all, he — along with every resident of Alaska — has a dog in the fight over drilling. Last year, every Alaskan received $878 thanks to the state’s Permanent Fund, which distributes profits from oil drilling to residents. More drilling equals more money for the state, meaning happier voters in Parnell’s eyes. More polar bears don’t do him much good at all.
Making the moral of the story this: Polar bears may be cute, but the faces on dollar bills are a lot cuter.
Depressed, pissed-off, sad, for the animals. I feel useless and powerless so yes, may we go out with a bang and not a whimper!!
It’s affecting me too, I am wrapping a new book with emphasis on total liberation and alliance politics, and while it works better for me in theory than any other theoretical standpoint, in practice I am increasingly skeptical humans can form any enduring, complex, diverse and yet unified, and certainly effective resistance/transformation movement, so my rhetorical is very muted when it comes to arguments for alliance politics in practice (leftists, environmentalists, vegans, feminists, people of color, etc. all working together without ego, competition, hierarchy, etc in one big happy global super-aliance family??? each one of these movements if fractured among itself along many fractious lines, as the feminist, vegan, and animal movements are, we definitely have common interests and enemies but can we really come together in a global kumbaya?? we are more violent tribal xenophobic chimpanzee animals than the peaceful loving communal altruists too many like to fantasize we are — hence another reason i have problem with education-based tactics — most people cant be educated! we forgot what nietzsche and freud taught and we ourselves say all the time — we ARE animals, and very violent, delusional, and irrational ones at that. we fall back on descartes and see ourselves as a rational essence when it suits us, but the truth is a but more unsettling and unflattering). I am increasingly skeptical and fall back on the “we are fucked” position because I do think the environment is at or past the tipping point and the entire history of humanity is one of warfare, driving species into extinction, and ecological devastation throughout the globe and since we migrated out of Africa say 1-200,000 years ago, or however many times and with however many variants of the Homo genus (there is absolutely no consensus on the facts and timeline of human history whatsoever, but you see the patterns as far back as they cane be traced). Will post a rather simplistic essay on this topic soon.
The closest historical analogy that I can think of to our present situation in which we have three fundamentally different species of humans at work on the planet: Homo rapiens, Homo empathiens, and Homo indifferens (the latter constituting perhaps 90% of the total population), is being a full-blooded Aryan living in Nazi Germany in early 1943. Like a racially pure Aryan living under the Nazi state, we humans living in the developed world are the recipients of all the protections and benefits afforded by the modern welfare state, from ample food to health care to state-subsidized entertainment. And as long as one is willing to suspend one’s moral conscience and hide from the truth, one can live pretty comfortably. As long as it is other conscious entities doing the suffering and being murdered (non-human animals now, Untermenshen then) we can still enjoy the good life. But this is all within the context of a terrible reckoning on the horizon: eventual obliteration of the Reich by the Allies then, environmental apocalypse now. So, the fundamental question for each of us becomes what should a committed Homo empathiens do in the face of such a scenario? Do we behave in our personal lives like those (pitiably few) “good Germans” who bravely worked to undermine the Nazi state from within through “illegal” acts even at the risk of their own lives, or do we behave like the majority of Germans did (Homo indifferens) and, while perhaps personally regretting the “excesses” of their more rabidly antisemitic countrymen, do nothing that might result in sanctions from those in authority. In short, do we quietly condemn Auchwitz among ourselves or do we attempt, however quixotically, to burn it down? Do we sit back, enjoy life while we can, and let Nature take its inexorable revenge upon our species or do we take our role as moral agents seriously and work to gut this corrupt regime from the inside out?
Bravo, thanks for the stimulating terminology, analogies, and scenarios. I find it amazing that it is scientists not citizens who are really getting pissed off and enjoining others to appropriate outrage over the greatest holocaust and omnicide of all, and advocating civil disobedience when the entire animal advocacy movement (and many other movements as well) is too complacent and timid to show denounce this madness and become a “friction on the machine.” Oh no, those who parrot Gandhi and King in words not actions, we cannot show anger at levels of violence Gandhi or King could not even imagine or break any unjust laws that facilitate and legitimate omnicide, for that would be “confrontational” (ha, exactly what G&K intended to provoke — confrontation!), that might alienate the public (who are always lagging behind moral and social progress and need to be galvanized and persuaded that CD and other actions are just and necessary), and that would even be violent (didn’t G&K distinguish between nonviolent and violent tactics of demonstrate, protest, and lawbreaking)! Seriously, things are that bad in this movement, forget about the narcotized and overworked and sickly social masses. In the speech I gave in Germany two years ago to a vegan audience where I was very critical (in a dialectical and balanced way) of veganism, I used King’s line, “We will fill the jails with singing children!” I read a vegetarian forum thread on this talk some months after it, and out of 100 or some comments, nearly all were intensely negative and critical of the talk, not one paragon of pacifism even knew I was directly quoting King, and one guy even vilified me as a threat to children and families!! Somehow this idiocy of alleged “opposition” groups, this Stockholm Syndrome and Good German character needs to be worked into your stimulating scenario … ; Pity the animals, they have to rely on timid and fully socialized pacifists to win their liberation, and they only have to wait millennia until enough vegan pamphlets get handed out to spark moral and social revolution and by god even overturn global capitalism and the military industrial complex. So leading vegan pacifists, and I am not exaggerating, urge us — and the animals! — to be patient, for, as Peter Singer so boldly informs us, we will with the power of our arguments, not coercive force. Should I laugh or cry?
Reblogged this on Centre of the Psyclone and commented:
For those of you who think there’s hope for the preservation of species, biodiversity . and ecosystems, here’s a reality check.
If humans are simply the result of millions of years of DNA programming, then why fasten such moral dogma to our behavior. We are just intelligent chimpanzees who do what all creatures would, if they could. The strong displace the weak and the smart control the stupid. When did evolution become a moral code, where some eliteists decide what behaviors are good or bad? Who decides what will be in the best interest in the planet ? Natural selection has made us what we are and if we damage things then something more suited to survival will result that will displace us. Your assumption seems to be that we have some moral right to live on the earth, and somehow act as managers of all the lesser species. But if that were in our DNA, things could not be as they are.
Hi Mark, Surely we are not simply the result of DNA programming, for example every time we use contraception we go against our ‘selfish’ genes.
Many non-human animals do display a moral code, so when we act immorally and cause suffering, we are not ‘doing what all creatures would’.
There are moral rights and wrongs, best decisions for increasing the well-being of all sentient animals in the world, and science, not some elite, can inform them. See Sam Harris’ book ‘The Moral Landscape’.