Age of the Fittest Lawn

Mary G. L. Shackelford in her commentary "What’s happened to the bees and why should we care?" made an irrefutable case for the elimination of petrochemical pesticides and herbicides everywhere - and now.

Setting down The Loop, I went out among the fruiting trees in my neighborhood to see the truth of the matter. Abundant blossoms of cherry, apple, pear, and plum trees were gracefully flouncing on the breezes. The purity of their color was a gift to the eye, and closer up their faint perfume was a gift to the nose.

But as I stood enthralled, I noticed that the sphere of space encompassing each tree was as empty of life and as silent as a death house. The moment darkened as I counted in my mind the thousands of honey and mason bees that were NOT thrumming amid the blossoms. The wind, fresh with promise, suddenly became sterile. The ripening fruit of a future season became a mirage and the trees themselves extravagant exercises in futility.

Blossoms without bees. Ovums without pollinators. Expectant trees awaiting the touch of benediction. All doomed to nullity for want of a humble insect to close the circle of procreation.

With typical pride and hubris, we humans continue to stumble and fumble along our exalted Path of Progress. As we go, we spew all manner of poisons made available to us to exterminate without thinking any other living thing we deem not worthy. We stride through time a toxic colossus, having ascended from Age to Age to become a race of lawn-tenders with a frenzied hatred for bugs, dandelions, and moles.

We inaugurated this Path of Progress by pounding one another, our animal victims, and some cereal grains, with rocks. The Stone Age. When we rose on our hind legs and freed our hands, we ate better and when necessary laid waste to the tribe in the next valley to prove that only the fittest survive.

With the discovery of fire and malleable metals, we pulverized and heated rock until it could be pounded with another rock into a blade. Thus we entered The Bronze Age, built cities, laid waste to other cities and, again, only the fittest survived.

Mastering slavery in order to make humans more malleable toward the mining of less malleable ores, we refined and melted iron and then quenched it in water. Thus we entered The Iron Age with harder and sharper blades, polluted streams, and an even more desperate need to prove our fitness to survive. Our cities burgeoned into city states which required the gargantuan organization of hundreds of thousands of warriors in order to seize destiny and annihilate adjoining city states.

Eventually becoming disgusted with the magnitude of killing and oppression, human beings began to turn the technologies they had mastered as weapons into the tools of enlightened advancement. Thus began The Age of Faith. Swords became plowshares, horses drew plows instead of chariots, men carved less flesh, more wood, and hordes of marauders bent their spears into crooks and watched peacefully over their herds.

New developments in trade and literacy birthed The Age of Reason, which lasted until the synergies of mechanization, new sources of power, and the forced dislocation of millions of agrarians augured in The Industrial Age. Densely-crowded cities of commerce and finance wrapped themselves in clouds of toxic smoke and the flags of nation-states. Laying claim to the resources of the planet, these nation-states unleashed vast new levels of slaughter via steel guns and iron projectiles leaving only the fittest untouched.

With the near limitless extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas, The Industrial Age exploded into The Age of Global War. The first such war gifted us phosgene and mustard gas, and the second such war graced us with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We then morphed into the Age of Poison. The atom and the hydrocarbon molecule were routinely blasted to smithereens a billion times and billion times and the deadly results allowed to waft the world over until not a farm, field, yard, garden, window box, or single childish dream could escape the kiss of contamination.

It’s a long, long way from crushing a skull with a rock to killing off all the pollinating insects upon which our food supply depends. Or is it?

What New Age should this one be called?