Death & I Are Too Close
Extract from Death & I Are Too Close, by Robby Miller
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My final thought on the role of animals in helping us understand how close we are to death hinges on the knowledge that humans (Homo sapiens) are just another animal species. Although we owe thanks to Darwin for figuring out how evolution accounts for the vast array of life on the planet, there is a common misconception that humans rest at the top of a pyramid of compounding improvements. However, this is only true for the traits that place us at the top of the food chain. I greatly respect the parasites that live within us and therefore are arguably higher up on the food chain. Each of those have been evolving for just as long as humans. So too have the bacteria that line our stomachs and make digestion, and therefore survival, possible. Even the mitochondria that symbiotically live in each of our cells—which we regard as ‘human’ because we inherit them through our mother’s egg—are just another organism that has been evolving for the same four billion years that life has been around on this planet. Each of them are specialists within the environmental niche on which their survival depends. Those that have not changed dramatically in millions of years only demonstrate that they found a niche in their food chain long before we did ours, a mere 300,000 years ago when we invented weapons to augment our otherwise limited hunting skills.
If you accept that we humans are just another animal and that our speciality is designing tools to get what we want (in excess of what we could get naturally) then please consider that all animal DNA is designed to propagate. Resource use is simply part of the propagation equation. And social cohesion on a vast scale is just part of the litany of tools we have invented to enable greater propagation of our species. We are not alone—bees and their like are also genetically designed for teamwork. It is intrinsic to all animals to exploit their environment and our speciality is to exploit it as a team with sophisticated tools. The greatest question of our time is whether we can master the social tools we have invented, like capitalism, or whether we will go extinct because they have got out of control. There will be an unfathomable amount of death and grieving if we degrade the environment to the point where it cannot sustain the population level we have become accustomed to.
Most people compare their personal wealth upwards, not downwards. Yet, inevitably, human self-preservation will require lowered lifestyles to ensure survival of the species. So, the question is not ‘if,’ or even ‘when,’ we will face reality but rather ‘How many people will die? How many loved ones left grieving, before we act decisively to undo the current industrialised vandalism of our environmental life support system?’ ‘How many animals will die, too?’ is an equally sad question.
Any goal to raise developing countries up to first world standards without reducing first world living standards is, in my estimation, like trying to digest fool’s gold. I do not know any another animal that eats it (fool’s gold/death) so enthusiastically. Let’s remember it was the large, resource-hungry dinosaurs that went extinct, not the birds. Be a bird. Live lightly.
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