Consider the System

Thirty-five years ago I was living in Brooklyn and teaching at LaGuardia Community College in Queens.  Having a beer one day after work, I got taking to an old Jewish man, sitting on the stool next to me.  He worked as a physicist at an electronics company nearby in the heavily industrial neighborhood of Long Island City.  Harry Haines and I became friends and met for a drink after work from time to time.  Our common ground was intellectual conversation, so we talked Marxism, Existentialism, Atheism, lots of isms.

One late afternoon, as we were parting at the subway, we got into a bit of an argument over vultures--the real ones, not a metaphor for capitalists. Maybe Harry had had too many martinis, but he almost frothed declaring, "They are disgusting.  They should all be killed."  

"They have a place in the eco-system," I countered.

"Idiotic," Harry said, "They're ugly. We can do without them...disgusting creatures, simply disgusting, repulsive.  Kill them all."

Harry's attitude is a common one, even today.  How prejudiced we are by appearances and ignorance. Unfortunately, our sour attitudes translate into environmental policy.

The noble (and very endangered) California Condor is, in my eyes, one of the most dignified creatures on Earth, playing a key role in the southwestern North American eco-system, but despised by many for what are to me incomprehensible reasons:  they scavenge dead animals, and they have no feathers on their heads (so they can eat cleanly).  Simple fact:  they are part of the natural system, living vacuum cleaners, taking rotting flesh and recycling it.  At some point bacteria and fungi finish the breakdown/cleanup job if other animals haven't moved in to do it first.

Is civilization as we know it going to end if the endangered California Condor goes extinct?  If vultures everywhere go extinct?  No.  So, what difference does it make if we don't ban the lead bullets and shot, which are currently killing the fragile avian scavenger populations?  It makes a lot of difference because standing by and watching something cease to exist because we think it's ugly and don't understand its value is just anthropogenically wrong.

I have a fantasy for roadways here on the East Coast:  state and local governments set up what could be called Vulture Watching Stations.  These stations would be built above power line heights at measured intervals, and trained vultures would harbor in them, watching for fresh roadkill.  When you hit that skunk or woodchuck or deer or squirrel or whatever, the vultures can swoop in to feed, lifting the carcass to the edge of the road, if possible, but otherwise working quickly.  Vulture Clean Up Squads:  don't have to put them on a payroll.  Ah, but this is just my fantasy.

In Tibet, condors are sacred animals, relied on for the millenia-old tradition of "Sky Burial":  A human dies.  His/her body is prayed over, then the limbs are chopped off, the torso chopped up, and all those body parts are tossed to the sky or otherwise piled for the condors to consume.  The ritual is right; it is natural; it works with the greater system of which humans are a part.

But of course our modern, especially our industrialized world, will not turn to a practice like this.  For one thing,  there aren't enough vultures to eat all the dead human carcasses.  And for another, that's not quite my point.  Environmental policy needs to be generated from a big picture point-of-view.  It needs to consider what is best for all life, not only human life.  It needs to consider the greater eco-system.