Flush It Friday: No, Not UGA’s Own Anthony Edwards…
Not Paul Rudd, either!
Hackers from various other websites that review metal albums have been throttling our Internet Juice, causing whiplash outages since last Friday. I’m not sure if this post will run! I don’t even know what other posts might actually get edited and run today before this runs! Maybe it’ll be everything. Maybe it’ll be eerily quiet. I hope you’re happy, Ken from Angry Metal Guy. We know it’s you behind this.
In light of the Metal Blogging Deep State comin’ for the kings of this shit, I’m gonna do what I do best adequately enough: talk about a book. But this time, I’m gonna talk about a book that really chapped my ass. What a twist!
Things were whacky last week in the Toilet. Some articles got published, some didn’t. Some got the website to work fine. Others didn’t. Some of us are still met with a 503 message here and there, but, it looks like we’re (mostly) in the clear. So, while the gettin’ is good, let’s get to it:
Recently, I finished reading Half-Earth from famed naturalist, ecologist, and entomologist E.O. “The Ant Man” Wilson. Ostensibly, purportedly, this is Wilson’s attempt to expand on a question raised by Tony Hiss in The Smithsonian. I’ve had it on my shelves for a few years, drawn into the utopian ideas of wilding or re-wilding half of the planet in order to save it. What could it mean to do so? What would it entail? Would The Ant Man talk about mass human migrations (both voluntary involuntary) and about how we should direct those flows as part of an international resettling of peoples to their proliferating and capacious benefits? Would Dr. Wilson talk about how to repair, expand, reimagine new, current, and/or lost biodiversified ecosystems. What kind of living arrangements between human/human ecosystems, human/non-human ecosystems, non-human/non-human ecosystems would E.O. dream up, drawing on his 600 years of experience of field work all over the globe? How could other authors, thinkers, philosophers, ecologists, naturalists, environmentalists, stewards of the future use this utopian dream to begin their own utopian projects, spinning off newer utopian dreams and bolder utopian projects? The possibilities seemed truly endless, beginning as they would with the radical idea that half of the Earth–terrestrial and aquatic (to say nothing of atmospheric)–would be wild (again).
Alas, poor Yoricks, this is not, as Greenblatt claims in the book’s splash quote, “a brave expression of hope, a visionary blueprint for saving the planet.” While I maybe can’t quibble with the book being hopeful on Wilson’s own terms, it is certainly not visionary. It might be, dare I say, one of the most blinkered texts I’ve ever read concerning what to do about what we’ve done to the planet. About that, Wilson is clear-eyed, forceful, blunt, and unwavering. Wilson can see and diagnose very directly what has happened and who has perpetrated the crimes. In fact, it’s most of the book. Parts I and II (“The Problem” and “The Real Living World”) are the diagnostics, the taking of measurements, the weighing of accounts, the stark yet beautifully written prosaic confrontation with the myriad issues facing our planet and its unknown quantity of species of flora and fauna. That he only reserved the final third of the book for “The Solution” (which takes up about 40 total pages) concerned me at first, but it’s not uncommon. Many books like this spend much more of their time addressing what they can (the problems, what the world is like) while leaving less space for speculation and prognosis and dreaming. No matter! Let the dreams come, abridged though they may be.
For a book that spends quite a bit of time lashing out, correctly, at Anthropocenists, those fellow ecologists and biologists and scientists and philosophers who more or less believe that since we’ve already fucked the planet up for our own benefit, we might as well continue doing so in that direction, like eco-minded accelerationists. Fair enough. These people, in Ant Man’s handling, seem unhinged and myopic. So what do we do? To whom to we turn? Well, first, in chapter 18 “Restoration,” Wilson singles out two characters, two champion stewards of biodiversity… who just so happen to both be billionaire entrepreneurs with ecological interests. MC Davis of Miramar Beach, FL, and Greg Carr of “faraway Idaho” are the stars of this brief chapter, a chapter entirely credulous of this sort of moonshot. To be fair, in Wilson’s assessment, Davis and Carr have done quite an astonishing amount of work: Davis spent his life restoring the longleaf pine savannah of the US South while Carr “devoted his life to the gargantuan task of restoring the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique.” And sure, maybe we do just need to all line up behind whatever gold-hearted entrepreneur we can to make gargantuan things happen, but seems to be an unsustainable path forward. Forgetting everything we know about how much harm billionaires already cause the planet and how so often their innumerable nonprofits and global health initiatives often fail spectacularly to do much more than to function as tax havens. But! Let’s not take away from the successes of Davis and Carr, who, it seems, really did make the changes they sought. That’s good!
So we come to Chapter 19 “Half-Earth: How to Save the Biosphere.” Surely, surely, this is where we will finally hear E.O.’s half-Earth plan in… 3 pages. Okay, that’s a red flag, but let’s see what he says! Oh, it’s nothing. A review in The Guardian correctly criticizes the book for “providing no detail of the measures needed to ensure his goal or what territories should be annexed or what funding mechanisms or agreements will be required to achieve his goal [which is] a pretty serious limitation.” A pretty serious limitation indeed. Well, this is disappointing, to be sure, but it also can’t get worse, right?
In the next chapter, “Threading the Bottleneck,” we are deluged with a mushy hodgepodge of absolute faith in all realms of tech, whether it be AI, Whole Brain Emulation (WBE), biotechnologies, computer processing powers, or whatever it is. “It is past time to broaden the discussion of the human future and connect it to the rest of life,” writes Wilson at the end of the chapter, continuing, “The Silicon Valley dreamers of a digitized humanity have not done that, not yet. They have failed to give much thought at all to the biosphere.” And yet, the entire chapter, and, really, the only solution E.O. has other than wealthy do-gooders, is AI, is WBE, is making superspecies via cloning and gene-editing, is an absolutely befuddling belief in technology’s eagerness to make products that are longer-lasting and less disposable, even in the face of the reality that that is precisely the exact opposite of what any major manufacturers do or even want to do. What a catastrophe.
“In a world gaining so swiftly in biotechnology and rational capability, it is entirely reasonable to envision a global network of inviolable reserves that cover half the surface of the Earth,” Wilson opens the book’s merciful final chapter. There is not a hint or tinge or sliver of irony from the great naturalist, publishing this work as he is in the year… 2016. Good lord. Perhaps we should look at this as the ravings of a desperate man, a man who dedicated his whole life to studying ants, a man who spent his 92 years on Earth trying to understand it and make it better and more understandable and better for others. Perhaps we should mourn, as Wilson could not, that, when you have spent so many decades in the field and surrounded by people who want the right thing, who follow the precepts of Aldo Leopold, you might start to believe that others will eventually wake up, even those who we know are wide awake and hellbent on destroying not just us but every ant species Wilson ever discovered and named, no matter the cost. RIP, EO. You did your damnedest. You just couldn’t, at the end, see any further.
So, in his honour, and to forget about this awful book, let’s Flush!
Stick brought an amount of No.-ness to TMP for which we can only praise him. Rolderathis got Conglaciated for TTT.
Joe marked the 10th anniversary of the Toilet with the kind of pomp and circumstance one would expect. God mess this bless.
Spear premiered the whole dang forthcoming album from Ceremony of Silence. It’s out today. Buy it already.
Toilet Radio 506 is 90 grueling minutes of AI horseshit. And, yeah, I did listen—to the whole damn thing!
Aaron hit us with a real beauty, reviewing the latest from Scarcity.
Brock took off the training wheels and turned in an A+ review of the aforementioned A+ Hálios. Seriously, the hypetrain is in full effect.
Me, Myself, and IGoM [~Roldy] wore his cutest little booties while typing up this Fiadh Productions Roundup:
They tried to keep us down. They knew we were rounding into our 10th anniversary. They knew we were embarking on our next 10. But we can’t be stopped. We won’t be stopped. Even if we should be! Go back and read everyone’s shit. Go comment on it. Show the authors some love. We’re all in this for the love of the game. We’re all here to find new ways to say, “Hey, this is cool, and I like it, and I want you to like it, too.” Chop it up with the contributors. Oh and hit us with those GBUs in the comments. All my love. XOXO.
