These days, a person is too tempted to spend time staring at a screen, occasionally extracting something useful out of the miasma that pervades the media and the Internet. Particularly irritating to me is the snowstorm of e-mails begging for money for one cause or another, and even to help them do their jobs, for which they are already paid handsome salaries. And also irritating is the fact of the media becoming the most highly developed drug pushers on the planet, in the employ of pharmaceutical firms seemingly bent on having you survive by consuming their products.
But that is not what I have in mind to discuss with you. I want to tell you that you have not listed what I believe are the two most important literary works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The first is Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, which is a wake up call to humanity to stop poisoning planet Earth and learn to nurture her, for the benefit, and indeed, survival of humanity as well Earth’s wild life. The second book, The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, was published in 2014. It dwells on the knowledge and impact of the destruction and extinction of species after species by humans.
In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson writes persuasively on how rampant use of the insecticide DDT in the mid-twentieth century was a danger to society in manifold ways. The insecticide came into common usage in World War II when the military used it to clear islands of malaria threat as well as other diseases. Rachel detailed how the pesticide entered the metabolism of birds on a large scale. The direct effect was a softening of eggshells, preventing the appearance of a next generation. Large inroads in the bird population had already been made. The California Condor and the Bald Eagle nearly disappeared. It’s a long and compelling story, but as a result of one woman’s earnest study and warnings about harm to the environment through large scale use of the pesticide, in the United States, and indeed around the world, DDT is now banned except under special conditions. The battle is not over. It is believed that an alarming decrease in the bee population is due to introduction of synthetic pesticides, added to fertilizer, that aid plant growth but spell disaster for bees who are in close contact with the plants in their honey gathering and pollinating mission.
In The Sixth Extinction (2014) Elizabeth Kolbert dwells on the horrific impact of uncontrolled hunting and killing over the years, extending to the present, such that entire species have disappeared or are on the verge of disappearing from planet Earth. In the last century we have seen the disappearance of passenger pigeons, the Great Auk, the Dodo Bird, the Tasmanian Tiger, the Falkland Islands Wolf, the Caribbean Sea Eel, the Carolina Parakeet, the African Atlas Bear, the Zanzibar Leopard, the Toolache Wallaby. Among those now threatened are Elephants, Polar Bears, African Lions, Rhinos, and the Siberian Tiger. In the news today is concern about the vanishing Vaquitas Porpoise in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Totobaba fish.
Contributing to the extinction of species is the Chinese craving for artifacts made of ivory, which has led to a decimation of the elephant population in Africa. Another gross failure in that culture is its greed for shark fin soup, notably in China proper, but also in Chinese restaurants around the world. The belief is that the soup increases sexual potency and has other health benefits, but there is no scientific evidence that this is true. Sharks are caught, stripped of their fins, and returned, crippled, to the sea, where they die, no longer able to swim. The fins are frozen and sold to an eager market. Similarly, Chinese demand for the bladders of the Totoaba fish has led to fears about the extinction of this species in the Gulf of Mexico.
Fortunately, there is growing international concern about these matters. Whether humans will measure up before more species are driven to extinction is subject to conjecture.
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