Death To Cute Little Seals

Sam Bowring reviews the downfall of the natural world and gives it his seal of disapproval.

Professor Will Steffen, a leading environmental scientist, reckons we’re beginning a new geological age. So it goes Mesozoic, Paleozoic, It’s-People-Time-Let’s-Party-ozoic, or something like that. Basically humans have screwed the planet up so drastically that “the loss of species diversity is similar in intensity to the event around 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs”. Way to go, team! It’s OUR time now!

One way we’re kicking nature’s arse is the annual seal hunt in Canada. This year the ‘limit’ is set at 275 000 seals. The words ‘275 000’ and ‘limit’ belong in a sentence together like ‘funtastic’ and ‘genocide’ … but seals aren’t the only lives claimed by the hunt so far. Three seal hunters have died after a boat capsized in the icy waters, with a fourth is missing, who’s being ‘searched for’. Let’s face it though – it’s likely he’s floating around somewhere in an ice cube like a cartoon character, waiting for the day the ice caps melt so he can finally drown in a luke warm sea. ‘Hey I travelled into to the future! Glug glug glug!’

Some anti-sealing activists have called the hunter’s deaths ‘poetic justice’, which I think is unfair. It would be more like poetic justice if their corpses were skinned and made into hats.

It’s no wonder that popular fiction represents humanity as having an insecurity complex. Know what I mean? In fantasy books it’s the wise nature loving Elves who always say ‘stupid humans, have you learned nothing, you should live in trees’. In science fiction, the aliens are always like ‘your puny earth technology is no match for us you primitives monkeys’. We seem to collectively think of ourselves as bumbling muggles … and maybe we’re right to.

On the other hand, maybe it was always meant to be this way. We’re animals, after all, and if you forget that, just watch someone eating or having sex (mash mash mash – it’s works either way). Maybe we’re supposed to proliferate and spread in this destructive way, maybe it’s all part of the plan. Perhaps the only reason I mourn the loss of diversity on Earth is for my own selfish reasons - because I like to look at fish and birds and harp seals - but really, they’re non-essential to my survival. If that’s so, I kinda wish I’d been born in a hundred years when it’s all done and dusted, once the memory of what came before has faded. I don’t want to see this once-beautiful world shrinking and turning grey, like a lost hunter’s ball-sack in icy waters.

Then I wouldn’t have to sit here feeling sickened at our behaviour, typing away on my energy sucking computer, surrounded bits of paper and plastic takeaway containers, with a belly full of meat and my high horse bucking wildly beneath me.

Then again, maybe we won’t make it that far.

Up yours, elves.

- Sam Bowring