Take in these great swathes of rainforest that stretch out from horizon to horizon! Really try to fully comprehend its true vastness, in terms beyond the infantile and limited scope of the immediate and ever-shifting present! Millions of years, tens of millions of years are what we’re talking about here! Even these war-mongering chimpanzees have managed to maintain a modicum of peace and balance with their environment and their neighbouring species here for millions of years. Yet look at you humans, who have been here for a mere fraction of that time. In the short era in which the human animal established the beginnings of what you call “civilisation”, you have wiped two thirds of the ancient rainforests from the face of the planet. Two thirds, Dr Green, two thirds!
From your humble beginnings as a tiny fraction of a percent of the vast and multifaceted conglomerate that constitutes the biomass of mammals on this planet, you humans – and the animals you imprison, breed and slaughter on farms – have become almost ninety-six percent of that biomass now. The chickens you humans raise to eat, and exploit with such cruelty as little egg and meat factories, constitute three times the biomass of all other birds on this planet! Many species are becoming extinct at a rate that is over a thousand times the rate that that of the pre-human era was. Indeed, around a million species around the globe are staring extinction in the face … extinction, yes, that eternal death of deaths.
Think about it. Really think about it! I want you to really engage with this information! These places, these organisms that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to exist in sustained systems of balance and regeneration and renewal – now almost all of them have been cut down, slaughtered, hunted, driven out, annihilated and burned to nothing, and they have been replaced, by the human primate in all of his arrogance, with dead things. With concrete, with steel, with plastic. Things that the earth itself has to be torn-up and decimated to produce. Things that do not breathe, that do not generate life, that do not produce the oxygen we need to breathe, that drain instead of refill aquifers, that foul instead of filter the water we need, the liquid that is the very quintessence and primary requirement of life itself!
You humans, with your “godlike intellect”, pour endless pollutants into the natural systems that do perform those very functions, and have performed them since time immemorial. You corrupt and destroy these systems without the slightest knowledge of how intricately connected everything is, from the massive whales in the ocean whose movements affect the very climate of the planet, to the smallest rodents whose burrows in the soil allow precious aquifers to be refilled so that streams can flow, and all life forms can have access to water! The very things that are unarguably essential for life, those are the things that your kind abuses, destroys, kills and befouls, for no reason but short-term, fleeting gain. And what do you replace them with when you have destroyed them? With things that are the antithesis of life! You humans foul the air with noxious gases from factories, from the endless belching exhausts of automobiles, trucks, ships and aeroplanes, not to mention the massively destructive methane which all of the billions of imprisoned animals on farms emit, whose brutalised corpses feed the insatiable appetites of the zombie-addicts – your kind, Dr Green, your kind – who slave their lives away in a mass slough of mindless, brainwashed toil, in unquestioning and pitiful servitude to this system that is slowly obliterating everything. Everything that exists on this rock, hurtling through space – everything – the human primate is annihilating it all. You dump plastic and oil into the oceans, along with other vile poisons, which all work their way back through the food chain into your own bloodstreams, and you pour into the waters pollutants from factory farms and industry, which turn vast tracts of the oceans into dead zones, kills ancient coral, and renders the waters devoid of any life whatsoever, those same waters that your supertrawlers have already mostly emptied of life to feed your voracious hunger for fish and seafood … and this in turn sets in motion catastrophic changes to the earth’s climate. You bury radioactive waste, you pump chemical poisons into rivers, into the bosom of the earth, into the air that you have to breathe…’
The General paused here, and his hands were trembling with emotion, his face glowing with such a heat of fury and passion that Margaret shrank from him. His nostrils were flared, and his breath was coming to him in great heaving lungfuls, as if he was in the middle of a savage fight to the death in the pit of some gladiatorial arena. He closed his eyes, drew in one long breath of air, and clenched his fists, calming himself before he became too worked up. After he had held the air in his lungs for some time he expelled it slowly, and then continued in a softer, less manic tone. ‘But how can I expect you to understand these things? It is asking too much, I suppose,’ he murmured in a tone of defeated resignation. ‘You First World citizens spend all of your waking time staring at screens and dead things and revelling in soulless pursuits. How can you expect to even begin to truly comprehend the vastness of the web of life, to feel the souls of the animals and the trees and the soil, and the infinite webs of interconnected power that flow between all of them, as they have flowed since the dawn of time? It is only when you commune with the forest, with these ecosystems in all of their
