Environmental Talk

There goes the neighborhood…

The Berkeley Daily Planet website features a commentary by Edna Spector. I’ve been a little out of touch recently, so I must have missed the news that humans are no longer going to be at the top of the food chain.

Or part of the food chain at all, for that matter.

I think there’s a term for the result of anyone who buys into this line of reasoning. I think it’s called Darwinism in action.

If you were kind of on the fence about whether the it was proper to combine “wacky” and “global warming” in the same sentence, the following diatribe might help to convince you which way you should be leaning.

Ladies and gentlemen … Edna Spector:

Friends! The hour of judgment is at hand for our planet. Doom is knocking on our door in the form of catastrophic climate change. Global warming not only threatens our so-called way of life, it threatens the very existence of the planet itself! Here in Berkeley, we must do more than our fair share to offset this crisis. Why more than our fair share? Quite simply because other communities cannot be relied on to do even their meager fair share in cutting back on carbon emissions. We must make up for what others fail to do on a global scale through our own heroic self-sacrifice. We cannot afford to wait until 2050 to meet our modest carbon emission reduction goals. Many of us who passed this measure will not even be alive then to implement it. By 2050 it will have been too late for this planet I fear, possibly far too late for all of the extinct species whose blood will be on our hands. This is no time for buying absolution through carbon credits or for half-assed symbolic measures which mostly have a feel good significance.

No, the time for bolder self-sacrifice has arrived. The only real, long term hope for the eco-sphere is a massive human population collapse, hopefully leading to the voluntary extinction of the human race. Already, a new urgency and groundswell of support is building for the idea that humans are a type of super toxin which the planet cannot sustain or support in the longterm. Cogent support for the voluntary extinction of the human race is well-articulated in all its ramifications and implications here : www.vhemt.org.

The city and residents of Berkeley should be on the leading vanguard of the voluntary extinction of the human race. First of all, if China can implement a very sensible one child policy in urban centers, Berkeley voters should approve an advisory No Child policy for residents of our city. It could be our answer to the Bush regime’s No Child Left Behind Act! Next, on the state level we need to rally support for a ballot initiative which allows us to die with dignity when we choose to. When this option is legally enacted, Berkeley should be the first city in California to open a euthanasia clinic. Hopefully, if we are true to our principles, our city’s residents will be lined up for many blocks waiting for their turn to be recycled into the earth!

Even before that time, younger readers of the Planet in particular should refrain from having children. Every person less makes a huge difference; a far bigger difference than using rapid transit, riding your bike or recycling bottles once you are born. Readers of the Planet who are already parents and grandparents should actively discourage further destructive procreation by their relatives. If pets need to be neutered and spayed by law, so should humans for many of the same reasons!

Imagine if Berkeley has the honor of becoming the first human ghost town on earth to revert to a primal state of nature! The oaks old and new will flourish along the streams in which trout and salmon teem! Mountain lions will boldly roam the plains and not confine themselves to Wildcat Road in Tilden Park any longer. Perhaps bears from other regions of the state will finally return to what we call “Grizzly Peak Blvd.” The grasslands will return to the slopes of the hills after forest fires clear them off and the air will blow pure and sweet over the bubbling creeks just as it once did when the ancestors of Running Wolf roamed the Bayshore in peace and harmony with all nature.

Yikes. The last time someone tried this there was a stampede for film permits in Guyana.

To her credit, it’s not like Edna is trying to sneak anything by you. She pretty much advocates the exaltation of wild nature over human life and isn’t too shy about proposing just how to go about it.

She does kind of miss the fact that it wasn’t a grizzly bear who came up with the printing press or the Internet or a thousand other inventions that allow her to spew this kind of nonsense from the comfort of her sustainable living room.

But, then again, it sounds like Edna doesn’t think she would miss any of those things if they were gone.

There’s also the question of who would feel “honored” about Berkeley becoming a ghost town if there were only mountain lions left.

I wasn’t a science major, but I’m pretty sure the only time a mountain lion feels honored about anything is when he’s gnawing the throat out of a rabbit.

You know, as part of that idyllic Thoreau-like future Edna envisions.