WE ARE CURRENTLY WITNESSING THE MOST SIGNIFICANT conflict ever to engage the human species. It is the conflict between those who possess the means and the will to exploit the living world to destruction and those who are banding together in a desperate and last-ditch attempt to prevent the New Juggernaut from trashing our small planet.
If the right side wins, this combat may become known to future generations as the crusade that rescued the Earth. If the wrong side wins, there will be no future generations of humankind, or of innumerable other animals.
The struggle is an unequal one. The Big Battalions belong to and are commanded by some of the most powerful individuals and cabals history has ever recorded. Their battle cry is “Progress!” Their arsenals are supplied by Commerce and Industry, misusing Science and Technology. Politics is their handmaiden.
They are now the effective masters of our destiny. They believe they can and will become masters of the planet, if not the universe. Since it is so dominant, this master class is all too well-known to us. However, we know all too little about the forces that oppose it. These are so new, so diverse in character and composition, and present such a confused and kaleidoscopic set of images that we bemusedly lump them into one amorphous aggregation, which we vaguely refer to as the environmental movement.
These opposing forces are in fact the leaders and the rank and file of an army of eco-warriors who are taking it upon themselves to defend our world from despoliation, destruction, and dissolution. Unfortunately, they are almost invisible to the generality of humankind because of the overwhelming communication control exercised by the vested interests, which have the power to literally destroy our living world.
So it is vitally imperative that we become acquainted with the 21st-century eco-activists who are devoting themselves to winning the struggle. We need to sing their praises, celebrate their courage and dedication, make them the icons of our age ... and support and follow where they lead.
This book introduces us to some of these new crusaders, young men and women risking it all for seals, whales, you, and even invisible particles in the atmosphere. Transcending the boundaries of a world conceived as only resources and exploitation to a world streaming with life and vulnerability. They fight for nonhuman animals and elements as if life depended on it— because, in truth, it does. And in the age of despair and apathy, they shake the ground beneath the dominant class, flaunting glimmers of hope to the masses of another world possible.
But let's make no mistake, the living world as we know it is dying in our time, and dying quickly. From my Nova Scotian home, I look over the convergence of sea and land where the North Atlantic heaves against the eastern seaboard of the continent, and in my mind's eye I see it as it was before the arrival of Western humanity:
Pod after pod of spouting whales, the great ones together with the lesser kinds, surge through waters aripple with living tides of fishes. Wheeling multitudes of gannets, kittiwakes, and others such becloud the sky. The stony finger marking the end of the long beach is clustered with resting seals. The beach itself flickers with a restless drift of shorebirds as thick as blowing sand. In the bight of the bay, whose bottom is a metropolis of clams, mussels, and lobsters, a concourse of massive heads emerges among floating islands of eider ducks. The walrus tusks gleam like lambent flames . . .
And then the vision fails, and I behold the world as it is now. In all the vast expanse of sea and sky and fringing land, one gull soars in lonely flight—a single, drifting mote of life upon an enormous and empty stage.
When our forebears commenced their exploitation of this continent, they believed its animate resources were infinite and inexhaustible. The vulnerability of the living fabric that clothes the world—the intricacy and fragility of its all-too-finite parts—was beyond their comprehension. So it can at least be said in their defense that they were mostly ignorant of the inevitable results of their dreadful depredations.
We who are alive today can claim no such exculpation for our biocidal actions and their dire consequences. Modern humanity now has every opportunity to be aware of the complexity and interrelationships of the living world. If ignorance is to serve now as an excuse, then it can only be willful, murderous ignorance.
The hideous results of five centuries of death dealing on this content are not to be gainsaid, but there are at least some indications that we at last are developing the will, and the conscience, to look beyond our own immediate gratification and desires. Belatedly, some part of humankind is trying to rejoin the community of living beings from which we have for so long been alienating ourselves—and of which we have for so long been the mortal enemy.
Evidence of such a return to sanity is not yet to be looked for in attitudes and actions of exploiters who dominate the human world. Rather, the emerging signs of sanity are seen in individuals who, revolted by the frightful excesses to which we have subjected animate creation, are beginning to reject the killer beast that humanity has become.
Banding together with ever-increasing potency, they are challenging the vested interests' self-granted license to continue plundering and savaging the living world for policy, profit, and pleasure. Although they are being furiously opposed by the old order, they may be slowly gaining ground.
Farley Mowat (left) with Emily Hunter.
PHOTO BY BOBBI HUNTER
My own hopes for a revival and continuance of life on Earth now turn to this newfound resolution to reassert our indivisibility with life, recognize the obligations incumbent upon us as the most powerful and deadly species ever to exist, and begin making amends for the havoc we have wrought. If we preserve in this new way, we may succeed in making humans humane ... at last.