Did I really get it that far wrong ?

As a religiously devote child in the Fifties, I somehow got the impression that WWII only ended because the penicillium fungus (David) was saving more kids than Civilization (Goliath) was capable of gassing or bombing.

As an adult, I realize now that I was not far wrong.

From opposing moral positions, Dr Henry Dawson's primitive penicillium and the advanced Auschwitz doctors, together, put the fatal 'post' into modernity.

And so, gradually, we collectively changed our minds. No longer did we believe biological progress to be linear --- and exclusively directed towards human 'civilization'. Instead it involved all creatures and proceeded in all directions.

But it seems that not everyone got the memo. Old guard believers in "man-centred" Progress are still around and still destroying this planet.

I believe my book about the Dawsonian revolution, about the 'other' Manhattan Project, is that true rarity : a page-turning Good News Story from that Bad News War.

And if re-telling it helps in any small way to forestall the rush to destroy this planet in the Sixth Extinction, so much the better...

The 'sixth' extinction was supposed to be the Jews ...

Natural history (also known as pre-modernity and post-modernity) wears muddy boots and does fieldwork, cumulatively demonstrating the existence of 400,000 different species of beetles - so far.

They are always filling up the gene pool.

Natural philosophy (also known as scientism or reductionism or modernity) sits in a laboratory and explains why those 400,000 different forms of beings only appear to exist and why 399,999 of them (or maybe more) don't really need to exist, not in their brave new world of tomorrow.

Their special joy is draining the gene pool ----- one extinction at a time ...

Sixth Extinction is a Guy Thing

Because 'Man' (with-a-penis) faces a stark existential choice over the Sixth Extinction : attempt autarky without Mother Nature or embrace commensality with Mother Nature...

Wartime Harlem got its "Double V" victory --- sort of

WWII's famous "Double V" campaign --- a military victory over Axis evil abroad and a moral victory in truly welcoming human diversity at home -- was led mainly by black Americans - many of them from Harlem.

Most black Americans back then (and most historians today) think the campaign basically failed.

But the story on the ground in Harlem itself, a story told from the point of view of the Nash Building and the Lutheran Hospital, suggests a different and more ambiguously hopeful story.

What capped the overseas military victory, in most peoples' eyes, was the autarky-oriented American-only atomic bomb dropped over Japan, based on gaseous diffusion technology developed at Harlem's Nash building.

(A technology that produced most of the world's cold war nuclear weapons that still threatens our world.)

Despite this effort being set in Harlem, only one black American, scientist James Forde, worked in that building, helping perfect the Bomb's technology.

 This was a clear sign of the wartime Allies' failure to practise at home the kind of acceptance of human diversity that they preached in their overseas propaganda.

But a few hundred metres away from the Nash, at Harlem's old Lutheran Hospital, a happier story was being played out.

For just days after the July 1943 Harlem Riots revealed to the world the Allies' racial divide, a young crippled Italian-American surgical resident broke all the rules to try and save the life of a dying baby named Patty Malone.

After twelve shamefully silent years, the good news story of potent life-saving powers of penicillin finally broke wide, virtually overnight: broke Stateside and Worldwide.

That young doctor, Dante Colitti, was inspired by the example of another crippled (in fact dying) doctor from his own neighbourhood -- Nova Scotia born and raised Martin Henry Dawson.

Dr Dawson worked at the world famous Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre, just a little further up the hill from the Lutheran Hospital.

Since September 1940 he had been growing his own hospital-brewed penicillin, to try save young patients with invariably fatal SBE - patients that the wartime Allies sentenced to death by not-so-benign neglect, because they deemed them not of military or economic significance.

SBE was also a disease that disproportionally hit minorities and immigrants the hardest - 'The Polio of the Poor'.

(These two facts are not coincidental .)

Dawson had given the world's first injections of penicillin, ushering in our present Age of Antibiotics, to a black from Harlem and to a Jew from the Bronx.

This too was not coincidental .

It was Dawson's way of protesting  the medical elite's determination to use the claim of war necessity as an excuse to ignore the illnesses of the poor, not to heal them.

He wanted to save these SBE patients for their own sakes --- but also to put teeth into the Allies' claim that they were committed to the welfare of all humanity unlike the uncaring Axis.

It was Dawson's way of seeing that the victory over the Axis abroad was hastened by - and matched by - a moral victory over hatred at home.

Dawson won his fight - Allied attempts to patent penicillin and limit its wartime use to only those they deemed worthy to receive it failed.

Thanks to Dawson and Colitti, wartime penicillin was mass produced in Brooklyn and send worldwide, in a Christ-like spirit of 'open commensality', to try and save all those dying for lack of it - whether white or dark, rich or poor, friend or enemy.

I believe that it is past due time that Harlem re-examined its significant role in 1945's ambiguous "Double V" victories.

Because the mixed lessons those twin victories sent out to postwar kids everywhere still shapes our now boomer-led world, as it faces another global crisis in the SIXTH EXTINCTION ...

Researchers - not data - change

The historical ("primary") documents that fuel this blog don't change - can't change - frozen in time from the Manhattan of 75 years ago.

But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.

For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.

But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.

They were the negative option : these deniers weren't actually actively claiming to control Nature, merely weakly claiming that they were sure another Manhattan nuclear Project, done by others, could quickly clear up any weather issues arising from normal human activity.

It all starts with an unrealistic faith in Synthetic Autarky

But all this fitted uneasily with my main contentions - that the overwhelming pre-war faith in "synthetic autarky" lead to "plenticidal indifference" and hence ethnicities and species extinction.

I eventually realized that nucleosynthesis ("fusion power"), geo-engineering/terra-forming and the active efforts to start human society again on a sterile Mars were the more active contemporary expressions of this pre-war fantasy.

And that the horrific fallout from our tolerance of all these bizarre efforts was a collective plenticidal indifference that has led us to today's runaway (Sixth) Mass Extinctions.

I am not sure there are even a handful of "Extinction Denier" bloggers lurking about  --- rather there are about seven billion of us Extinction Tolerators reading about another beetle species gone extinct, sighing for a moment then resuming our daily lives.

After all, pace J B S Haldane , who - besides God - really wants 150,000 distinctly odd species of beetles anyway ???/

We genuinely regret species loss - but we don't lose sleep over it

Morally, mass species extinction through plenticidal indifference is like the Nazi Hunger-Plan-in-slow-motion

If the Nazi Final Solution had been totally successful, ten million European Jews would have died violently by gas or bullet.

If the Nazi Hunger Plan had been totally successful, thirty million Eastern European Slavs and Jews would have slowly and quietly ebbed to death through hunger and cold.

If extent of intention rather than extent of execution marks the true magnitude of evil - and I believe it does, as do most people who have thought about it, then the Hunger Plan - though too little known - was the far greater Nazi evil.

There is always a market for movies made up of violence porn - and scenes of mass murders by bullet or gas chambers fills that pornographic need.

Slow starvation deaths makes for bad Hollywood

But extended scenes of slow starvation deaths are much more - not less - painful to watch --- even, or perhaps especially, for violence junkies.

Hollywood has no interest in making movies about slow quiet destructions of human lives and cultures by benign plenticidal neglect.

Slow quiet death (through inadequate land and hence food & fuel resources) to all aboriginals who refused to join modern progressive scientific industrial society was always and everywhere the implicit Hunger Plan from the 1870s to the 1970s.

Our extra special animus against relatively small numbers of powerless aboriginals requires some explaining.

It was because of their great moral power : they dared to question the unquestionable good of Progress and Modern Science and Technology, even as they themselves were clearly slowly starving to death in dismal living conditions.

They dared assault our innermost superego and awake long suppressed doubts we all had about the path of Progress- and for this they must die to let our superegos regain control.

Thirty years later - would the US Civil War have even been fought ?

In 1865, fighting and dying to defend the right of one person to buy another person for the equivalent today of a million dollar home, seemed to make great economic sense.

But that quickly changed as mechanization replaced human hand skills and as the cheap energy slaves embodied in engines and fossil fuel replaced the energy from fragile human and animal slaves. 

In the 1890s, King Leopold II of Belgium and his minions expected to extract great wealth from the Congo - but mostly from inert non-living wealth.

They saw no real economic need to keep the people of their Congo alive as forced labour, for working on future renewable resource plantations for example.

They quickly killed off half the entire population - ten million - the world's greatest mass murder ever.

King Leopold's plenticidal indifference

Some they deliberately murdered - but most died through plenticidal indifference.

For to their modern minds, the Congo seemed to have a plentitude of people-to-be-fed-and-clothed - far more than needed to exploit it successful with machinery and fossil fuels.

Best to let the excess 'useless mouths' died quietly from hunger - off stage.

They almost got away with it - perhaps if they had laid off those public capitations of heads and hands - they might well have.

Today, similarly, we can't really get away with the roundup and deliberate killing of a few hundred wolves or feral ponies without a huge hue and cry.

But if 95% of all the frogs in the world die because of a fungus disease spread worldwide as a consequence of a 1950s human pregnancy test, we will all purse our lips for a moment, sigh and then get about with our lives.

Our consciences almost clear.

The world is filled with a plentitude of frogs and frog species - how many do we really need anyway - won't one or two species be more than enough ?

The Sixth Extinction by plenticidal indifference and the Aboriginal (and other) Hunger Plans --- you tell me the moral difference...

Why deny something (extinction of others) you secretly HOPE is happening ?

It is generally agreed that no climate denier publicly denies the Sixth Extinction because they never ever regret other species disappearing - only if their own specie* is vanishing.

(*Specie = old fashioned term for money)

Truth be told, they yearn to see the world get drastically simplified - down to its basic mineral groups.

Call them modernists or plenticiders --- same thing : reduce, eliminate, destroy.

They really resent the way evolution has put humanity as the top dog, but not the only dog, on the planet.

Diversity - in the workforce or in the workforest - is their bete noir - if extinction can remove unpredictable diversity and replace it with predictable simplicity , the Inofes from the netherworld say 'bring it on' ...

Sixth Extinction Deniers : has anybody asked ?

Extinction Deniers

Do Anthony Watts, Jimmy Inofe et al deny that we are in the middle of the Sixth Extinction (a new major extinction, with species losses running well above the hitherto norm, believed to be caused by the recent great expansion of human activities) or do they accept it as happening ?

Has anyone even asked ?

Plenticidal Extinction

It is catchier, but less informative, to say we are living in the time of The Sixth Extinction than to use a ten cent word like The Anthropocene Extinction.

But I argue that even using a word like Anthropocene doesn't really begin to scratch the surface about what is truly unique about this latest - deliberately plenticidal - extinction.

But first, let us agree that there is an even bigger danger in simply giving this current extinction a number instead of a fully descriptive name.

Because humans couldn't be around for the first five major extinctions here on Earth - events we could only read about in the past tense in school - we risk turning a global tragedy into a form of global Reality TV.

'Now you too can be an eyewitness to a major historical event - sixth time lucky !'

But Athropocene isn't much better : it simply means an extinction caused by human activities - as opposed to earlier extinctions caused by climate changes or huge balls of flaming rock hitting the Earth.

That flaming hunk of molten destruction was not a living thinking being - it couldn't have changed course to avoid hitting the Earth no matter how many poignant messages it received from the Pope, Bono and Bill Gates.

But we have been told, told for centuries, that our hunting behavior is killing the larger creatures (megafauna) species wholesale.

 Now, in the last few decades we've been warned we soon won't be able to count the species of all sizes we are driving into extinction each and every year.

We have slowed up - reluctantly - in a few small areas - sped up in many bigger areas.

We are thinking , moral, beings and we aren't really stopping this killing.

At some point we must ask if this killing spree is not simply a tragedy incidental to human activities but in fact deliberate on our part.

We humans annually kill far more creatures because they are 'pests' or 'weeds' than we do out of greed ( the classic case of greed leading to extinction being the passenger pigeon.)

Here in Atlantic Canada many fisherman openly advocate killing off all the seals - not for their pelts or for use as food - but simply because they compete with us humans for something we truly value - the cod.

Its the old 'loaf of labour' theory modified.

The environment is just a mine of dead-like valuable resources in this view of reality.

Every pound of biological food energy that goes to the seal is a pound that doesn't go to Man.

Any thought that the seal and Man both do their small part in ensuring the ever constant global re-cycling of scarce carbon, oxygen,nitrogen, etc simply hasn't penetrated these thick skulls.

This view wants to see a world (that for now) that is one big level plowed field, stretching off past the horizon, totally sterile of any plant or animal or microbe we don't want there.

In the near future, this view won't even want that - no living beings will exist beyond humans (and even there ,only the healthy right-thinking humans will be allowed to survive) -- all our food will be made synthetically, out of rocks sublimated into steaks thanks to the energy of fusion fuel 'too cheap to meter'.

The chaos and competition of life is too much about for this mindset --- a clearing away of this vegetative undergrowth, this plentitude of life - is far overdue.

Plenticide the Plentitude of Life

Drain the gene pool as deep as it can go - human hubris has all the answers - plenticide off all our competitors and lets lie back and enjoy the non-living bounty of this Used-to-be-Green Earth...

Po, Po Pitiful Mo : too many Boomers praising plentitude & practising plenticide ...

Modernity's great sin was not its assumption that all our God-given diversity was actually, at its core, very simple, predictable and controllable.

Rather the sin lay in the fact that when Modernity's scientists discovered this not to be the case, they and it did not desist.

Instead human Hubris set about trying to create an alternative artificial simplicity that was predictable and controllable by Man alone : the Triumph of the Will over the Wind.

It was war on two fronts : plenticiding all of Mother Nature's complex unpredictable chaos out of existence and substituting a Man-made synthetic order and simplicity in its place.

From a forever labile thermo-plastic natural reality, it tried to impose an eternally thermo-set artificial reality.

Putting plenticide in writing

Most modernists never had any objections to using Zyklon-B to kill billions of bugs, but they did not want to see it used to kill millions of 'human germs'.

They generally preferred to let 'primitive lives judged unworthy of civilized life', like aboriginals around the world in peacetime and Slavs in wartime, to quietly wither on the vine -- from lack of land resources to feed, clothe, house and heat themselves.

The Nazis could have simply extracted most of the food, fuel and clothing from occupied Poland and Russia for themselves as 'a matter of wartime necessity'.

Then six million Jews in Eastern Europe - or maybe more - might have quietly died in the mix, from hunger-related diseases, along with 30 million of their Slavic neighbours.

After WWII, would have the world have not simply sighed and then speak softly of the cruel necessities of total war ?

But the Nazis killed Modernity stone dead (as well as six million Jews) when they chose to put their plenticidal-genocidal plans in writing.

For they at last made Modernity's always implicit plenticide fully explicit - indicating in writing that they deliberately planned to murder all the world's Jews with Zyklon-B, in an effort to remove a chaos-causing ethnicity from the Earth forever.

Plenticide & the Sixth Extinction

As a result, I don't see today's Sixth Extinction and yesterday's Holocaust as being all that different in their intentions, despite the wide difference in their methods and targets.

As a result of growing up in an transitional Era, we conflicted boomers are both Mo and Po --- practising plenticide semi-consciously on Nature with our actions --- all the while praising diversity and variety with our mouths.

But if we boomers don't start soon walking our talk, the earth & climate is surely doomed ..

moving the Human Heart from plenticidal to commensal --- before we burn up the planet

In a race against time,  humanity's heart must move from its current hard-hearted plenticide to displaying a willingness to dine at a common table with all other lifeforms here on Lifeboat Earth.

And it must do so before we self-immolate ourselves and all other life on Earth and bring on the Sixth Extinction.

So yes, I do blog with urgency.

But nothing half as urgent as when I just lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling.

Lying there trying and trying and trying to find some sort of explanation as to just why we humans find self-immolating plenticide so much more attractive than simply agreeing to share this earth with the other lifeforms, that after all, both sustain it and us ....

Synthetics & Plenticide : All Mod (ernity) Cons

First:
you synthesize an artificial, man-made, *Ur-topia of static reduction and perfection - the way it supposedly was before Nature's plentitude of chaos took over.

Then :
(Sixth time unlucky) you plenticide the life out of all the species that your Ur-topia's manifest says are no longer 'needed on voyage' ...

----------

*Ur-topias, (I say), unlike u-topias, look backwards to a supposed Golden Age rather than forward to a new Golden Age

Sixth Extinction not a mere 'bycatch' of Modernity

Plenticide, along with Synthetic Autarky, is Modernity's main product, how it measures success, what Modernity does for a living.

The Sixth Extinction, if not exactly planned by Modernity , is hardly lamented by Modernity.

Synthetic Autarky is the immodest side of Modernity --- 'we humans can create anything and everything out of nothing, we needn't rely on anything or any being'.

Plenticide is the other, less pretty, side of Modernity.

'We don't need to shed tears if useless mouths and parasites consuming resources that better belong to humans happen to starve to death on our watch and as a result of our decisions'.

Modernity is the contemporary ultimate in closed commensality : even exceeding the ancient Pharisees' closed commensality efforts...

Synthetics : everything and anything -- from nothing

Natural antibiotics : perhaps a something, underneath everything

As a naive little child, I was fascinated - like a white mouse before a cobra - by the audacious claims of Fifties synthetic scientists - those modern day alchemists of chemistry and physics.

From out of nothing, nothing but coal, air and water, nothing but bog ordinary atoms like silicon, they said that they could make any molecule, any mixture - even any atom - known on Earth.

Anything and everything.

More than that, they could design and create as yet unknown molecules, mixtures and elements.

Anything and everything.

All from nothing.

Captain America, synthesist and superhero.

And what then -- once they did make all these molecules & mixtures perfectly, reliably, repeatedly, cheaply over and over - out of nothing , almost nothing but abundant and cheap raw materials ?

There really won't be a need then for Mother Nature to go on making them imperfectly and with all those bothersome and unexpected irregularities would there be ?

True, synthetic production did not directly lead to the today's Sixth Extinction (Humanity's Plenticide against Nature) but it smooth the way, it did ease the human conscience.

After all, why fret over rapidly declining numbers of elephants (and their precious elephant tusks) when artificial ivory made much better, much cheaper and much more reliable billiard balls ?

The gene pool had always been way too big - way too many parasites dining off bounty that more properly belonged to Man - the sooner the pool was drained and the whole thing was sorted the better.

The Fifties Synthesist puffed their pipes in their porcelain white labs, not so quietly expecting ever-upward success for the human species .

The Miracle of Penicillin -- from the humble slime

Completely opposite in their expectations were the Willy and Joe plodders among some of the naturalist scientists of the Fifties.

Though most professed to be atheists , there was an almost old fashioned Christianity about their scientific actions and beliefs.

(Miracles & Atheists ?!)

These scientists wanted to systemically plod their way through all of Nature's bounty, patiently hoping against hope that they might find another life-saving compound like penicillin.

Their expectations weren't that great, so they wanted all of Nature to be preserved, as is, as much as humanly possible.

For even if they failed to find a new miracle today, who knew when yesterday's useless bug or weed might be tomorrow's natural treasure ?

Maybe God had produced what seemed like a trulyexcessive number of beetles as Huxley had grumbled (an estimated 400,000 separate species at last count), but perhaps God had his reasons - reasons we were not yet privy to.

And who knew what unknown natural disaster lay ahead to test the human race - a drastic climate change or deadly pandemic - when some unknown compound lurking in some dirty dark forgotten hellhole might not prove our humble savior ?

Rather than plenticide against Nature and her excessively large gene pool, these scientists took comfort in the size of her current gene pool and sought ways to see it remained as big and as varied as possible.

Against the confident synthesists, all these Fifties scientist much more modestly hoped for was that the human species might survive a little while longer.

Synthetist versus Naturalist : two wildly different takes on the human relationship to existing physical reality.

Not a perfect fit to Dunlap & McCright's Production scientist versus Impact scientist thesis but I believe suggestive none the less ...

The Axis/Allied plenticides of life and compassion

I see strong links between WWII and our current (human-driven) "Sixth Extinction" laying waste to the plenitude of Nature.

 The eugenic Nazis believed that the plenitude of humanity needed drastic pruning - starting with the Jews and Slavs.

 Their plenticidal crime was against the right of all humans to exist. 

The eugenic Allies/Neutrals told us to stifle our plenitude of compassion for the weak and the unfit - to limit our compassion to the fate of our own 'fit' .

 Their plenticidal crime was against compassion for strangers. 

My biographical subject ,Martin Henry Dawson ,("Manhattan Misfits") rebuked all three. His Manhattan Project ("Penicillin-for-All") originally hoped to save just a few strangers from an eugenic and heartless Allied medical establishment. 

It ended up rousing a nation and changed our whole world for the better -- forever.