Thinking non-selfishly for a minute, we should look at the consequences of natural loss with a poet's eye: we are about to lose an amazing creation of great beauty and inspiration, and thus not only damage our souls, but be responsible for an act of crass destructiveness with no equal in history. The sack of Alexandria, the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide -- these all pale in comparison to reducing our environment to parks, gardens and lawns. Which is what will remain: we will have squirrels and sparrows and lawn plants, but the more complex parts of our ecosystem will not remain. Our political leaders will be able to claim less of a crisis because it isn't all dead, but converting a world of billions of species into an extended, homogenous backyard garden is like trading Beethoven for repetitive techno. The kind of mean mentality that allows us to create this ...wreckage... is appropriate to an outwardly satisfied but inwardly self-hating time such as our own. We hate our ugly cities, our tedious jobs that produce nothing of practical value, our prima donna spouses, our moronic coworkers and neighbors, the violent inner cities, the numbingly normative suburbs... yet we are sure there is nothing that can be done. How do we explain to the average person that they must give up that new car, house or child because if everyone has those, a distant future disaster awaits? Democracy rewards action on immediate crises, or granting of new "freedoms" or wealths to its population, but it does not reward the kind of leadership that staves off distant apocalypses. http://anus.com/zine/articles/prozak/ecocide/ I find this to be very true: no matter how much heavy metal and black metal bands sing about ancient forests and the beauty of wolves, the average person isn't going to stop polluting/trashing until there's a gun in their back!
