Vanishing

I’ve been writing (very slowly) about birds.

As I read about various birds, I’m finding that they are strange, intelligent, alien creatures living their own full, social, and interesting existence, right next to us.

The more I think about birds and other animals, the more I see our overwhelming waste of the beauty right in front of us. We treat the world and the beings in it as objects to be consumed, rather than things that exist in their own right. A bird is a moving piece of meat. A tree is uncut floorboards. An ocean is a bottomless pit for trash that also contains moving pieces of meat for us to scoop out.

And despite how much that might sound like a parody of a certain kind of thoughtless, in-the-moment greed, there are plenty of people who would agree emphatically with those statements, just as I’ve said them.

The powerful are eating the world around us.

It will be ground up, plowed over, flattened, drained, dried to dust and every bit of life swallowed. Species are vanishing by the millions, gobbled up, chewed up, bones crushed between the teeth of the rich. Forests are mowed down, burned, chipped into toothpicks and used to remove the scales of now extinct snakes like popcorn kernels from Bolsonaro and Bezos’ mouths.

Will we just watch as everything around us is systematically processed into dollar bills and human flesh?