Jim’s Glum About Something Again

by Jim Washburn

Is Humanity Toast?

Some people read a book and are done with it, scoot, goodbye. I keep books I like. I also keep books I don’t like if they’re by authors I like, thinking I might someday revisit the book from another perspective and enjoy it. To borrow from the music world for an example, nearly everyone, myself included, who now thinks Exile on Main Street is a masterpiece thought it was a murky, indistinguishable piece of shit when it came out.

I revisit authors I like, having reread the 21 books in Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring series four times over. Over the years, when I’ve had trouble spelling a word, rather than refer to a dictionary, I often flip to the section of a novel where I remember seeing it. I don’t think of books as things: they’re more like musty old friends with bad spines.

Lately, I’ve been rereading some of the late sci fi/fantasy novelist Roger Zelazny’s books. Some are splendid writing; some aren’t but are still fine expressions of an idea.

Such is the one I just re-finished, Bridge of Ashes. The writing seems hurried, the characters and situations barely fleshed out, but it has a fine premise that has only grown more telling with time: The human race was created by alien beings who cannot survive in Earth’s natural environment, so they remain in stasis for millions of years while their custom-designed “planaforming” agents—us—proceed to develop and fuck up our atmosphere, earth and water to the point that it’s uninhabitable for us but just ducky for them.

I stole the idea, with some tweaking, six years ago for a feature I wrote in the OC Weekly, in which aliens had created us for our snot—it’s like “royal jelly mixed with heroin” to them. We’d been designed to screwed up our atmosphere enough to keep our sinuses draining 24/7, while our pesticides, etc. eroded our ability to reason. I used this as a device to lay out the numbing details of just how destructive the George W. Bush administration had been to our environment. You can read the whole snotty thing if you like.

When I wrote it, Bush hadn’t even won his second term yet, after which the ecological havoc ratcheted up. The agencies that were supposed to police mining, oil and other industries were stacked with lobbyists and other insiders; regulations were gutted, science was ignored, and we’re still paying the price today. Actually, we may never stop paying the price.

I’m not exactly Mr. Cheerful, but I’ve always felt the human race would pull through, like we do in books. Just lately, I’ve started thinking we are toast and that no amount of cinnamon sugar is going to change the fact. There isn’t some human genius who will save us from alien polluters, because we’re the polluters, so alienated from the only planet we have that we lack the will and reason to stop destroying it.

Even before the Gulf of Mexico was transformed into the world’s biggest deep fat fryer, our waters had been over-fished to the point of species collapse for many of the fish we rely on for food. This of course, is after decades of experts telling us not to worry about exhausting our topsoil, because the sea is the breadbasket of the future.

The BP oil spill just keeps coming, despite past assurances from BP and other extractors that they could handle any contingency. Let’s take a quick look to see how that’s going, shall we?

Even if they get a diaper on it, the oil already lost will haunt the ocean for decades at the least. Consider Cuba, where the FourStory staff recently sojourned: It hasn’t been especially despoiling of its environment or over-fishing its waters, not because it wouldn’t but because the socialist island lacks the resources. Much of Cuba’s coastal waters haven’t changed since the days when Ernest Hemingway fished there. The reefs off the northwest coast are the breeding grounds for much of the marine life in the gulf, and guess where it looks like the oil’s heading?

It’s looking more all the while that BP was operating from the same playbook as Toyota executives; that they’d ignored warning signs, inadequately prepared to cope with a mishap, and did their best to hide, cover up and delay information about the scope of the problem.

The blame’s not all theirs, of course. We use the oil they produce, and in recent years we’ve been deeply unconcerned with how they get it. We weren’t concerned when oil companies destroyed villages and wildlife in Africa, South America and other distant locales. It wasn’t any skin off our noses when they corrupted foreign governments, or when our oil-driven foreign policy supported murderous dictators and sheiks. Now our gluttony for oil has literally come home to roost, and woe to any other critter that roosts here.

The corruption is here, too. Always has been, since well before the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s. Much has been made of the contributions BP made to Obama’s presidential campaign; less of the gross amount more given to Republicans. In our news-dead culture, money speaks like nothing else, and oil money fueling nearly everyone’s megaphone. I doubt that BP money has bought Obama, but has it slowed his hand? Would he have been less trusting of BP had he been less cozy with them? Possibly.

For others resistance isn’t even a consideration. After the destruction and obfuscation of the last month, is there anyone who doesn’t believe an oil company should be fully responsible for its unsafe practices? There sure is, GOP Senator James Inhofe (the same gent who denies global warming), who blocked legislation last month that would have raised the liability cap for oil spills. Did you know that, thanks to oil industry lobbying efforts, there’s a cap of only $75 million that oil companies are liable for? No limit on the profits they can make; no compunction about giving them billions in dollars and tax breaks for oil development, even as they’re raking in historic profits; and when the greed hole blows to hell, they get a pass on sopping it up.

Here’s some other cheering recent news:

In China, a strain of bioengineered cotton designed to resist one form of pest has transformed fields into a thriving breeding ground for another pest, called mirid bugs, which are not just eating cotton, but also apples, peaches, pears, grapes and other major crops. And how much of the cotton grown in China today is bioengineered? 95 percent of it.

Friction between the two Koreas may spark a war any time now.

Our good buddy Israel just scuttled hopes of an agreement to get rid of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

People seem to be going nuts all over the place, stabbing kids, blowing stuff up, committing suicide while on break from making your iPhones.

Maybe it’s chemicals. A major study released last month found that children with higher levels of the pesticide malathion appear to be at greater risk for developing ADHD and other developmental disorders. It’s not the first such study, but it’s the first to suggest that much lower levels can trigger the disorders, and it’s not just for the kids of poor farm laborers anymore.

The May 31 New Yorker has an article, “The Plastic Panic” by Jerome Groopman, that gives the lie to our professed love of children. As the article relates, study after study has indicated Bisphenol A and other common compounds in everyday plastics cause all sorts of developmental, cognitive and other problems in children. The linkages are alarming enough that any prudent society would act on them. Many have, especially in Europe. But not us. Groopman says that in 2007, all it took to quash a body of well-vetted studies drawing a link between plastic compounds and developmental problems was a single memo from a plastics industry trade group.

It is incredibly difficult to find a smoking gun that definitively proves increased cancers, brain function disabilities, altered sexual development, and other problems are caused by a certain chemical, since we’re bombarded with so many. But when one study after another points to it, shouldn’t that be front-page news until we learn something from it, assuming we’ll still be able to learn? When we lose our ability to reason, we won’t even know it.

We went to Orange Coast College’s graduation ceremony a few nights ago, to see a niece matriculate. (Since OCC’s a two-year community college, it might have been more apropos if students had only been allotted half-gowns, like folks get in hospitals.) Amid much pomp and circumstance—several officials were in full Hogwarts festoonery—some 2,200 cap-and-gowned students graduated.

They seemed such a happy bunch. I wondered what sort of world they’re headed into, where we’ve already used so much of it up. I wondered if there will be many more generations who graduate, or if we’ll all end up brainless, crawling into storm drains to get away from the parching sun and the giant mirid bugs. And who ever will read my books then?

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