Bruce said it best when he wrote the song, "One Step Up," bewailing the fact that we humans don’t seem to be able to learn even from the hard lessons, creating a history that is almost consistently one step up and two steps back.
Photo: Frank Maurer, Creative Commons, Flickr
This is has never been more true than today, as we move through what scientists are now calling The Sixth Extinction – a period during which the loss of species as a result of human behavior will meet, and likely exceed, the past five great extinctions, which were strictly the result of earth events.
This loss of biodiversity, at the rate of three species per hour, is perhaps the most shameful chapter in our history because it targets non-humans, who are innocent bystanders to our fossil-fuel profligacy, chemical promiscuity and seeming indifference to what many see as the rape of the natural world.
Ask most Americans about Audi, Giorgio Armani, Paris Hilton, Ferrari, Ralph Lauren, Jessica Simpson or Nike and they can quote chapter and verse. Ask them what a sea dragon is, or where monk seals are normally found, and you will be greeted with dumbfounded stares. Since neither can be driven or worn as a status symbol, it doesn’t really matter, the looks suggest. I know because I tried this experiment myself on the streets of Minneapolis – one of the hippest cities in the country, where a disproportionate population of Internet-surfing, club-hopping, theater-going savvy young adults lives and plays. None of the 30 people questioned could tell me.
It is the summer of 2008, the year of an historic election whose candidates have included a black man and a woman. We have landed on, and are exploring, the surface of Mars. The first cloned human embryo has been created from a skin cell. We are on the verge of a cure for Type I diabetes. A government computer has successfully performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second. After a 40-year moratorium on hunting, humpback whales are making a comeback. All look like reasons to celebrate, until we look at the flip side.
The Caribbean monk seal is now officially extinct. Hawaiian and Mediterranean monk seals are not far behind. Puffins, birds with exotic-looking beaks who summer off the coast of Scotland, have declined by a third in less than five years. The lesser prairie chicken, native to the American Southwest, is slated for listing as an endangered species. The Mediterranean shark, along with half of the world’s ocean-going sharks, faces extinction. Polar bears have already made that infamous list of endangered species, but all legislators are concerned about is the listing’s effect on oil exploration and extraction.
In Australia, mercury poisoning has led to dolphin beaching, and the endangered regent honeyeater, a small yellow and black bird, is being repopulated through captive breeding, since survival in the wild has become untenable. Meanwhile, the Japanese continue their “scientific” hunting and killing of whales, The U.S. Senate has effectively blocked windfall taxes on big oil, and at least 16,000 species are now known to be threatened worldwide.
The only really good news this year, in fact, comes in the form of a leatherback turtle nesting on a Texas beach for the first time since the 1930’s. Perhaps it has been reading the pollsters and political pundits and knows that the Bushites – the greatest environmental criminals in the history of the United States– are now on their way out. Next stop, at least for Bush, is apparently a 10,000-acre ranch in Paraguay, a country known for its adoption of war criminals like Joseph Mengele.
Hopefully, in Bush’s absence, we can change our environmental stance (and dance) to two steps up for every one step back. It’s a dance-step we would do well to learn, since man is also an animal and subject to the same pressures from global warming and pollution that threaten earth’s other inhabitants with extinction.