As ever, autumn is a busy news month. This year, I mainly seem to find stories about AI destroying humanity, as well as the rather more tangible risks posed by Russia. We briefly explained to the kids that nice countries don’t invade other countries, so they said, “well why don’t we fight Russia”. Hmm, yes, more destruction of humanity potential, we probably have enough options for that already.
The other piece of news, apart from a 15 year old schoolgirl being murdered in the street, was that two men appear to have chopped down a centuries old sycamore tree that grew at Hadrian’s wall. I immediately thought of the touching moment in Soul (amazing Disney kids film I had never heard of) when the main character holds a sycamore seed in his hand, and wonders at the joy of nature/the little things/life that happens while you’re making other plans.
It was a pointless thing to do, and of course I was shocked and disappointed. Then I thought about it for a while, as I watched everyone’s comments roll in on how they would now never get to take a picture of it, and the wanton destruction of nature.
Humans are strange apex predators. Like most other apex predators, a great deal of the damage we do is a bit pointless. Foxes kill 10 chickens, but don’t eat them. Presumably the prey drive supersedes any thoughts on how useful this application of energy actually is to the fox. It is probably fun; a bit like when people go fishing, and then toss the poor things back in with their damaged mouths. I secretly wish people went fishing to eat fish. It makes it seem more like a survival skill than where middle aged mens’ dreams go to die. Chopping down a tree does seem like a strange thing to do just to prove you can.
People have made much of the way this incident exemplifies humanity’s destruction of nature. But we are part of nature, and the circle of life will play out, eventually. Nature has the upper hand, as it always will, and it will destroy us. The earth will carry on existing without us, probably greening up considerably after we’ve pumped so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we have mostly died or moved into subterranean bunkers, with rickets and a life expectancy of 30. It’s all merely a longer term food chain, and we are surely the most hubristic of all predators, dooming ourselves more with every passing day. The seeds of the trees and flowers will sprout again after the nuclear winter, but we will not. Mammals are too complex a reproductive mechanism to survive. We want Nutella more than we want carbon capture or orang utans, because just like foxes, we do not think through the consequences of our desire for short term pleasure. We deserve our punishments.
It is the destruction of artefacts built by human hands, reflecting human lives, which makes me sad. Unlike damaging nature, it is humans cutting short human history and culture, truncating it forever, removing the evidence of past lives. I found it hard to believe when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan. It may have been 23 years ago, but it receives almost no journalistic attention. That wasn’t some idiot with a chainsaw, it was a carefully considered rewriting of history, yet another set of iconoclasts putting their country on the right path forwards by making it year zero. Every society seems to go through this spasm of revisionism on quite a regular basis, as if the slate doesn’t just need to be wiped clean for their power hungry future to arrive, but smashed and hidden from view.
Even destruction by the wronged party, that seems justified in a time of great conflict, is a wound that festers. The “liberation” of Libya filled me with hope at the time, and yet 12 years later, it has merely created more destruction. Dresden and Coventry did not need to be razed to the ground for the war to be won or lost, and Japanese civilians did not need to be pulverised on two occasions to make the point. All of these events have made our lives a little bit worse, in ways we never even realise.
We will never really build better lives for ourselves than the ones we have now, because we believe ourselves to be righteous and good. I am not the person chopping down a tree, but my very existence chops them down all the time, with every trip to McDonald’s. It is the self righteous that walk down the dangerous paths.
The resting writer 
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