Environment

All we are saying is give love a rest  

Is it time to halt the perpetuation of our species? 

by Michael Nenonen  

By Michael Nenonen

Sitting with my grandmother in her final days, witnessing the theft of her strength, her mind, and her pride, I thought, “Let it end, let it end, she’s suffered long enough.” I’d never before wished death upon anyone, and now I was wishing it upon someone whose love had long kept my innermost hearth ablaze. I recalled lines from Lord Byron’s poem, So We’ll Go No More A-Roving: “For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And Love itself have rest.”

There comes a time when we’ve seen too much, when the burdens of grief and pain, of shame and guilt, become too heavy; when, in strange reversal, existence becomes our enemy and extinction our friend. If this is true for us as individuals, then could it be true for us as a species? Have we lived too long?

If humanity’s collective suffering had mass, then it would surely be too much for the Earth’s crust to bear. Ignore the oceans of blood we call history and consider only our current situation. In 2006, nearly three billion people live on less than two dollars a day and have no access to sanitation. Almost 800 million are chronically undernourished. In the past, it would have been possible to survive without money through subsistence farming or hunting and gathering, but these options are being systematically eliminated by our industrial economy. Globalization hasn’t helped matters much. Between 1980 and 2000, a period of rapidly intensifying globalization, worldwide infant mortality, economic growth, life expectancy, and education and literacy rates improved much more slowly than they did in the preceding twenty years. The developing world’s indebtedness ensures its continuing impoverishment: for every dollar the developed world gives the developing world in grants, it receives 13 dollars from the developing world through debt repayments (globalissues.org). Much of the happiness enjoyed in the developed world is dependent upon this exploitation of the developing world, as well as of the indigenous peoples within our own borders. Many of our pleasures are therefore vampiric, diminishing our own anguish only by increasing the sum total of humanity’s suffering.

Poverty’s miseries are compounded by violence, genocide, tyranny, and disease, horrors that are in no way confined to poorer nations. The situation probably won’t improve in our lifetime. In fact, it will likely deteriorate as corporations and nation-states scramble to claim dwindling vital resources, such as oil, fresh water, and fertile land, and as oppressed peoples become ever-more militant in defending their most basic interests. Our social, economic, and technological systems, which long ago escaped our control, are no longer content to merely torment their creators; now they’re mutilating the biosphere. For example, this Frankenstein’s monster we call a civilization has created a swirling vortex of industrial debris colloquially known as “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” half-way between Hawaii and San Francisco. The layer of garbage extends downwards to a depth of thirty metres, and outwards to fill an area roughly twice the size of Texas. For every pound of plankton in the Patch there are six pounds of plastic leaking poisons such as DDT and PCBs into marine ecosystems. In the next decade the Patch may well grow to ten times its current mass. Even this monstrosity is dwarfed by the total amount of territory we’ve transformed into toxic landfills, or saturated with cancer-producing and hormone-disrupting chemicals, or covered in the ecological wastelands we call cities. If the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is only the tip of the iceberg of global pollution, then is there anything besides iceberg left in our world?

Industrial civilization is also driving our planet’s sixth mass extinction, a biotic holocaust as terrible as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Half of all remaining species probably will be extinct by the end of this century. And, of course, we’re destabilizing our climate. James Lovelock, the man whose Gaia hypothesis revolutionized the way scientists understand the biosphere, believes that by 2100 the Earth’s temperature will have risen by at least 5 degrees Celsius. This rise will be fuelled largely by positive feedback loops that are kicking in as our planet warms, such as the release of greenhouse gasses from melting methane deposits and the disappearance of heat-reflecting polar icecaps. Sea levels will rise and hurricanes will become more powerful, rendering many of our coastal regions uninhabitable. All of the world’s breadbaskets will succumb to desertification. Lovelock argues that our global population will plunge from our current total of 6.5 billion to around 200 million, most of whom will be living in the Arctic Circle. One can only imagine the traumas this surviving remnant will have to endure in such a sweltering, resource-scarce, poisoned, and depopulated world. As pessimistic as this sounds, it’s worth noting that Lovelock doesn’t consider the possibility that in their death throes the world’s major powers may unleash their nuclear arsenals against their rivals. If this happens, then the worst fears of the Cold War will finally be realized.

Roger Waters said it best: “Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up.” It would be funny if it wasn’t so damn painful. I sympathize with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT, (vhemt.org), whose motto is “May we live long and die out.” Members don’t advocate suicide, murder, or forced contraception; they simply encourage people to stop having children, and to thereby give our planet time to heal. Their appeal goes beyond speciesism to address our highest loyalty, our loyalty to life itself. The movement doesn’t have a prayer of succeeding, or of even having a significant impact upon our population growth, but its heart is in the right place.

I’m also reminded of Gnostic myths that depict the world as a dungeon for the soul, a dungeon where some of us are torturers and executioners, but all of us are victims. Most Gnostics condemned violence, whether directed towards others or oneself, as a violation of the soul’s sacred beauty, but they were steadfast in their refusal to procreate, which helps explain why there aren’t many Gnostics around today.

Regardless of Gnosticism’s futility, it’s still relevant. Our children don’t deserve the savageries they’ll suffer in coming decades, they don’t deserve the humiliation of their spirits or the betrayal of their dreams, and they certainly don’t deserve the ruin of a planet we’re leaving for them. Perhaps the only compassionate option available to us is to cherish the people who are already alive, while refusing to add anyone else to their ranks. Let us live until we die, and in dying have done with it. I’m inclined to agree with the modern-day Gnostic from Theodore Roszak’s novel Flicker who declares, “No more babies for Hitler.” If everyone made this pledge, then we’d finally topple the slaughter-bench of history, but of course this isn’t going to happen. Still, each person’s refusal to procreate spares the biosphere the burden of another consumer, denies the dungeon another victim, and, although it doesn’t knock the slaughter-bench over, it nonetheless gives it a solid kick.

Perhaps grief has commandeered my reason, exaggerating possible dangers into dreadful certainties. On the other hand, maybe my grief is momentarily pulling aside the veil of optimistic delusion obscuring the truth of our situation. Maybe we’re all sitting at humanity’s bedside, and maybe love itself needs rest.