I’m reading The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen. It’s the angriest book I’ve ever read. It’s angrier than I am at my angriest. I really like it…. But I’m so far waiting for him to justify what he believes, which happens to be what I believe, about how all life is interdependent and that everything matters but that, in addition, predation isn’t bad…. All the stuff that it pisses me off not to be able to argue against in my essays and such like.
I need the analytical version. I already have the polemic in my heart and soul.
I think he’d be very opposed to the gene-edit idea. This essay suggests that if DJ had his way, we’d just stop, just goddam stop, consuming and creating and capitalising and investigating and producing and buying and building and experimenting. For DJ, what should be allowed to go extinct is iPads and insecticides, GMOs and off road vehicles.
In a world where there’s enough money for weapons of mass destruction, how come we can’t afford to NOT exploit some of the fucking land??
Actually, I’ll get angry myself just writing about this.
So, let me quote just a section from that essay which seems to speak directly to gene-editing:
Another big problem with the idea of an ark for the Sociopocene is that it’s based on and promotes this culture’s harmful and inaccurate view of the natural world, that you can take a creature out of its habitat and still have the complete creature, that a prairie dog is just a bundle of DNA in a fur and skin sack, and not part of the larger body of the prairie.
This culture seems to believe – completely anthropomorphically – that the world is like a machine or a chair. Some human artefact. Something where the whole is no more than the sum of the parts. You can take apart a chair and swap out some parts, then put the chair back together, and you still have a chair (except that this culture would steal a bunch of screws, two legs, and the seat, then wonder why they can’t sit in it).
But that’s not how life works, whether we’re talking about a human body or the body of a river or a prairie. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. And if you don’t think so, have a surgeon take you all apart and put you back together. Call me when they’re done. I’ll have my Ouija board set on vibrate.
You can’t remove a wolverine from its habitat and still have a wolverine. You have something that looks and smells like a wolverine. But the wolverine is also the scents it picks up on the breeze and the soil under its feet. Without the weather patterns and everything else about where it lives it would not have become the being it is. – Derrick Jensen ‘Endangered Species Don’t Need an Ark – They Need a Living Planet.’
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