They’re always sniveling that we should protect some little frog that is on the brink of extinction. Some little slime nugget on its last puddle, that is clearly of no use to anybody and that nobody would miss. And then someone pipes up that the frog might very well have some metabolic component that could cure cancer, or something. We don’t know, the reasoning goes, what we might be able to extract from that frog, if properly ground up, or who it might ultimately benefit, and we won’t ever know if we let it disappear. So we should save the frog.
Hell. It’s meant well, I guess. People who say those things want to save the frog for other reasons, but you have to bring up a commercial aspect to get people’s attention.
But it irks me. That frog has earned her little frog-shaped slot in the ecosystem like everything else, period. That frog cannot be replaced by an AI-generated version with winsome eyes, a human expression, and miraculous paisley underparts. Did you fall for that one? You need to pull your anesthetized head out of your screen, go outside, and let real nature flay open your heart. You need to love that frog.
Because saving that frog usually involves a lot of things that people don’t want to do, like setting aside land that you could otherwise slap a Walmart on. The business of keeping that frog in the picture is usually not profitable in the very short run. That frog, in fact, is hopping somewhere in between a man and his money, and that is a very dangerous position, existentially, to be in. Such a man is not going to be moved by a recitation of the value of undeveloped wetlands for air and water quality, flood control, and carbon sequestration, because that is not the kind of value you can trade on the exchange.
Hear this. You just need to save the frog. Not because powdered frog cures baldness. But because it’s a dang frog.
It’s the same with people, too. Horrible things are being done to people, and we are being lectured why we must care. You’ve heard it before: First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist. Then trade unionists. Then Jews. And you know how the story goes: they come for you but there is no one left to speak up for you. Now you’re sorry.
But that isn’t it, is it? It’s not about self-preservation.
I’m pretty far down the list of people who are going to be picked up and shipped off to a foreign prison to be tortured and killed. Realistically, the odds that people like me will be shoved into that cattle car are slim. But we speak up anyway, because it is sinful and wrong. Because we actually comprehend that other humans have value, even socialists and trade unionists and Jews. Because real justice is not capricious, but thoughtful. Because we refuse to live in manufactured fear of the other. Because any time someone tells us any group of people is criminal, or dirty, or in the way, or worthy of extermination, we know we are being lied to.
Job one, don’t let yourself be lied to.
Jobs two through a thousand: stop the liars and exterminators. Stand in their way. Do not let them scrape the “undesirables” out of sight, or bulldoze or clearcut or mine or poison the home we share with the frogs and slime nuggets. Stop these motherfuckers, before they destroy everything so that a few people can own everything that’s left—and nothing of value.
Many times when I have my nature interpreter hat on someone will pipe up and ask the question, “What purpose does X serve?” I like to think that these questions aren’t posed because the questioner is evil and wants a reason to get rid of the item in question, but instead wants to know where that item fits in the great web of life.
I like to think that and at one time I immediately launched into an explanation of what purpose various unloved critters served in the world. But on another level it struck me as a very mechanistic view of things. If the species in question has no useful purpose (ie it eats some harmful bug or it can be ground up to make a wonderful drug that cures Susie’s cancer) why not let it disappear?
Asking what purpose a thing served also implies that there is some Great All Encompassing Purpose behind everything. And if we embrace the notion that everything around us and including us is the result of random chance, then nothing has a purpose at all. And that notion is offensive to the masses who choose to believe that they need a purpose or everything will descend into chaos.
A few years ago the folks who battle malaria announced that they’d developed the ultimate malaria cure; use genetics to render all mosquitoes sterile and eventually dead. It was claimed that nothing relied solely on mosquitoes as a food source and taking them out of the equation would only be benefit. At the time I wondered about the claim, but also had a dewy eyed view of science and assumed someone had done the due diligence to back up this claim.
And then in the last couple of days the RFK Health & Human Services department published a report announcing significant threats to the health of American children. They had an extensive list of citations backing up their claims. When it was revealed that a significant portion of these citations were made up, the folks at HHS claimed those lies didn’t change the truth of their findings.
Once upon a time I grew up in a very religious family that embraced the belief that the Bible was absolutely true and that there was an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent God behind everything. The fact that the Bible is a stitched together collection of stories and propaganda doesn’t make less likely the existence of this God and some heavenly reward for His followers.
I was reading the Jon Krakauer book “Under the Banner of Heaven,” which retells the story of the Mormon bible. I was flabbergasted that there could be such a huge fanatical population — multi-millions of people — who ate up this crazy story! I said to my spouse, “This Mormon bible story is absolutely bonkers!”
He replied, “Unlike all the others?”
A friend posted on Facebook recently that the Bible was a woke document, using woke in a positive sense. I asked if she’d ever read it cover to cover, but even the New Testament has tone deaf sections.
The Fundamentalists who go around talking about God’s desires for nations have missed the point. The Old Testament was all about the Jewish people and the Jewish nation and among other things advocated displacement and genocide of the people who lived in Canaan/Palestine before the Jews migrated there.
The New Testament is about God’s relationship with individuals and how they were supposed to relate to Him via the church. The Gospels were written for specific audiences and get more filled with miracles and demonstrations of power the farther they move away temporally from the time of Jesus and his followers. The most flamboyant of the Gospels, Luke was apparently written by a follower of Paul and is best viewed as propaganda aimed for non-Jewish audiences.
One of the best quotes I ever heard about the Church was from a PBS program. The Church could have been established without Jesus, but not without Paul.
I’ve never understood why the Catholic Church is viewed as having been established by Peter as the first Pope when Peter was known to have been at best uneasy about bringing the Gospel to Gentiles and separating the early Church from Jewish practices while Paul was known for preaching to everyone, not just Jews.
When people ask “What purpose does X serve?” I’d ask “WTF purpose do humans serve?” None of these other creatures seem hell-bent on destroying our ecosystem. Only humans and their insatiable greed. If we’d destroy only ourselves, I’d be on board with that. But there will be collateral damage. Sure, there are undoubtedly some life forms that will survive us. And one of them may even evolve to become the dominant life form in time. But everything we now have and take for granted will be obliterated. Fucking humans.
There is no purpose. Only existence.
Yes, yes, yes. Exactly.
I dislike it when someone says, “The heron was designed for fishing” or “the shark is a perfectly designed eating machine.”
No, it isn’t and no, they weren’t “designed” at all, anymore than the sand picked up by the wind is designed to smooth the mountains.
Agreed. Talking about how animals evolved for their lifestyles is problematic. Designed doesn’t works. Shaped suggests a shaper, as does formed.
Their lifestyles (I’ve never liked that word) resulted from their evolution, which is pretty much the other way around. Teleology and Neo-Darwinian theory don’t mix.
Well said, Murr. It reminds me of this, from the “Stages of Global Warming Denial”:
“And since in the history of life on earth more organisms have gone extinct than exist today, it follows logically that the current rate of extinctions must be trivial both ethically and in its effects on human life.”
That is almost a verbatim quote from an ex-friend of mine. (He didn’t use the phrase “ethically and in its effects on human life,” but that was what he meant.)
I usually pop in here after having slept for at least six hours after it’s posted, and usually another ten hours after that, and I pop in my little comments, mostly to tell you all I appreciate you. This time, I’m not going to do my little insertions. I am going to just plain appreciate you.
I think I can speak for all of us that WE appreciate YOU. I’m glad you have given us a forum where we can not only discuss actual issues, and offbeat ones as well, with you, but with each other. You don’t get that on “social media.” Yours is one of the first blogs I go to every morning — right after the weather. I have a great fondness for all the people on here that make this a conversation. I appreciate all of them, too.
Good morning from Stockholm. Thx for the thoughts— doing my best to acknowledge and protect those who need it, slime and all.
Yes–save every species simply because it exists. We shouldn’t need some human utility or even a knowledge of the species’ functional role in an ecosystem to value it. As Aldo Leopold said, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first rule of intelligent tinkering.” (from memory…it could be slightly different wording).
I looked it up: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
Saving every species simply because it exists doesn’t take into account the possibility that the species might be in decline because of natural causes. Extinction is part of the life of species.
It’s been argued that some species we’re laboring to save might be in the process of natural extinction. A Chinese scientist friend hates giant pandas. They have apparently never been common in recorded history (which for China is a very long time) and have suffered die offs due to natural declines of bamboo, their preferred diet. The current boom in the population is a result of intensive management rather than any special fitness of the species. They are valued for their cuteness, not so much for any essential role in the environment.
The problem of preserving every species is determining which species are suffering declines because of us and which are just declining.
They are pretty dang cute though, you will admit.
So I guess in our Instagram-ready reality, it’s not survival of the fittest, but survival of the cutest. And since the pandas decidedly lack interest in sex and human doctors basically have to be their “fluffer” to get them going, maybe it’s time to just let them go….
That’s the take of my Chinese biologist friend. She feels that the money spent on keeping pandas alive could be better used elsewhere. The general feeling is that the appeal of giant and red pandas makes them good ambassadors for habitat protection. Save the pandas AND save their environment.