Apocalypse Now

Rachel Carson says in Silent Spring:

“The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster” (277).

That was in '62. Undoubtedly, a lot has changed since then. As a result of Carson's efforts, DDT was banned domestically. The American public--those who chose to read or heard through word of mouth Carson's message--gained an improved insight on how we poison ourselves. I can't swing a dead poet without hitting some sort of "save the environment stuff" on campus, or even in the quasi-conservative Pullman community. I hear farmers talking about salinity, mass wasting, and the depletion of loess. Even back in Finley, my own personal wasteland, I once heard my father screaming at a (hopefully) mentally challenged maintenance worker named "Earl", who was dumping volumes of old chemicals out onto the ground.

Perhaps these little islands of awareness are just that--islands. I spoke with a friend this past week who happens to work for Orkin. We discussed the types of chemicals he uses and the past impacts of DDT. Mind you, this fellow is not an academic--sharp to be sure, but not ensconced in our world by any means. Even he was familiar, to some vague degree, with Carson's work. My brother initiated the conversation, figuring that both sides would learn something new. However, there are no "sides" in this issue. Not in any meaningful sense--pollution of the environment can (will?) lead to the destruction of humans. The only argument is to what degree we can get away with our waste.

My Orkin friend and I share such an understanding. He is troubled by the use of pesticides such as DDT, and even is dubious about the crap that his current employer foists as safe.

"What's in it?" I ask.

"Probably nothing good," he responds.

How could it be good? He is an exterminator. Remove the "ex" from the word, and we are left with "Terminator", hearkening unto Arnold's cybernetic villain/hero of the '80s and '90s. Has our trust in pesticides been restored since Carson, just how we put our faith in a cybernetic organism in Terminator 2? Didn't he blow away a ton of people in the first film? No, this cyborg is different--he has been reprogrammed to help people. In fact, he is ordered not to kill them. Just like our pesticides, the Model 101 T-800 can do no harm.

I wonder if this is just the same old shit, just reprogrammed. I know virtually nothing of current pesticides, despite having spent nearly four years of my life on a farm. An ex fighter pilot, my father occasionally flew dusters up on the ranch--and this fellow is hyper sensitive about what people put in the ground. I remember something from long ago: My brother, an older relative who shall remain nameless to protect his identity from Dad, and myself were charged with cleaning up a shed riddled with decades-old pesticides, gasoline, oil, and a number of unidentified ghoulish liquids. Dad gave us specific instructions--we were to very cautiously move each type of liquid into separate, stable containers, and then take a few trips transporting them to a treatment facility of some kind. Dad left to go do something else, and the three of us collectively groaned. It would take hours to transplant the liquids, and even more time to make the trips back and forth. We had all been working for 12+ hours of hard labor, and were ready to be done with it--Dad is a taskmaster if there ever was one.

"Alright boys--don't tell your dad this, but we are going to dump it out," said older relative.

My biology-inclined brother was reticent: "Didn't he say that this stuff could get in the water table?"

"Yeah, but do you want to spend another six hours taking care of this stuff?"

None of us did. We were exhausted--physically and emotionally (Hugheses have a dark joke about family reunions: "See you at the next funeral!") You can infer what followed.

What we did was not just a sin against nature--it was a sin against ourselves. I drive by that place every so once in awhile, and just now green grass is beginning to return, well over a decade later. My family lives within a mile of that spot. Finley has a poor history of pollution--our family's primary complaint with potential dam removal had to do with the massive exposure of toxic heavy metals (and the bodies) that will result from the river falling. One used to be able to fish in the Columbia and Snake rivers and actually expect to catch something edible (or catch anything at all). I hear that the Yakima is even worse.

All of this happens post-Rachel Carson. No rational person harbors complete faith in technology any longer. We have seen too many bombs go off, too many things die from our war against nature. Carson decries the propaganda war against fire ants, against any perceived pest. I was a participant in such a war, even in the '80s and '90s. However, we had to be eco-friendly murderers. Boiling water for ant infestations (surprisingly effective), and other crude non-chemical means for other troublesome flora and fauna.

The primary problem with participating in a war of propaganda stems from when you actually start to buy into its bullshit. From a very young age, all of us were taught to shoot--perhaps a common reality in a rural community, but our father put a special point on it. His rules were intensely strict, even compared with the draconian hunter safety instructors in the area. One old fellow had the temerity to claim that "guns are only tools" in the presence of my father, a Vietnam Veteran, who snarled in retort: "the only purpose of a gun is to destroy--don't you dare tell them otherwise." Thus, my weapons education was undertaken with more than a modicum of ambivalence--a necessary evil as my father saw it. We weren't even allowed to point toy weapons at one another; even "Nerf" was forbidden for a time. Even with all of this stern training, my part in the war against the environment got the better of me. My brother was generally a more successful slayer of starlings than I; he was more persistent. Flustered by my lack of contribution, I one day trooped outside with the communal BB gun, determined to end some poor bird's life. I didn't have to wait long to acquire a target--a mass of starlings swarmed onto the tops of the cottonwoods bordering the east side of our property. As soon as I pumped the action, the mass swirled away, a black blot against tufts of blue and white. However, I spied a straggler, perhaps a sick youngling, or one unfamiliar with our murderous intent. It was in the adjacent tree, perhaps accounting for its separation from the group. No matter--it was an impossible shot anyhow. The BB gun was pathetically weak; one could spot the shot as soon as it left the barrel. Not one to give up so easily, I took aim, and squeezed the trigger. A soft "thump" resounded as the BB lazily sailed out of gun and into the cottonwood leaves. I was sure I had missed. How could I have made such a shot?

The robin tumbled down, down, down through the leaves. I turned, hearing a gentle crash and an almost imperceptible "thud". There it lie, gasping, clawing out with its legs, grasping for branches that it would never feel again. Moments later, it was still, like my heart. "This has to be a coincidence," I thought. "There is no way I could have made that shot in a million years--a heart attack for certain, terrified by the sound of the shot and the flight of the starlings."

I didn't believe that, and neither did anybody else. My parents made certain that I paid terribly. My brother was sympathetic, but held firm at my fault. My sister saw me as a monster. Robins, amongst all but three kinds of "pest" creatures, were friends. I killed a friend in hopes of killing an enemy. The want to kill the enemy was apparently stronger than my will to see a friend. I wasn't a part of the mass bombing raids or the genocide that the government attempted to undertake in regards to some of the same pests I was set against--but I was still a part of the propaganda machine, the bullshit logic. Like them, I couldn't tell friend from enemy. Unlike them, I could never bear to take a shot at another living thing again.

Maybe that's where we can be redeemed--as groups, we really suck at learning from our mistakes, but as individuals I think we are right to hope. Many would scoff at my story--a mistake that anyone could have made--and pass me off as an over-melodramatic blogger. I didn't eat the creature, so I can't claim that I didn't slaughter it without cause. However, I didn't slaughter it without meaning--I watched it die, and will never forget that crime. What right do I, or anybody else for that matter, have to demolish anything that we please? If nothing else, what if somebody loved that particular Robin--a pet, a bird-watcher's regular, a potential companion to a lonely homeless person, a mother to a nest? When we kill, we do not kill in a vacuum. We can do nothing in an ecological vacuum. Humans are just as susceptible to ecology as any other thing on this planet. We are a part of this world.

All of this from killing a Robin and talking to an Orkin guy?

Yeah.

What would Rachel Carson say, had she lived? She barely survived 18 months after her work was published. Though Domestic DDT is illegal, we still export the crap out of it. Doesn't that defeat the purpose? Isn't everything in this world interconnected? Maybe that's the rub, maybe that's where Carson can still say something to us.

"Though many Americans have an improved understanding of local ecology, the matter of global ecosystems is something that they have yet to fully appreciate."

Global ecological understanding rejects nationalism. That's where I see our apocalypse--not in sudden change, but stagnation. Humans define themselves based on others, on what they are not. As a species, we do not understand ourselves. For the span of our evolution, humans have yet to systematically turn their self-awareness outward, to an understanding of our place in the world. Our most powerful adaptation, the ability to spontaneously acquire language, may be our downfall--we have communicated shared knowledge and developed technologies whose impacts are beyond the ken of our foresight, and we have yet to linguistically situate ourselves as an integrated part of the environment, speceistically, instead espousing to a "man against nature" outlook.

We shouldn't be worried about a post-apocalyptic reality. We should be worried about the absence of one.