DistractionFromExtraction 3: It's what we eat, not what we poop

Restaurant Industry A sells Endangered Species Platter.

Restaurant Industry B sells beef cattle.

Restaurant Industry C sells shark fin soup.

Restaurant Industry D sells foix gras and veal cutlet.

Restaurant Industry E sells organic beets.

Restaurant Industry F sells termite soup.

I like termites. They are a great source of sustainable protein, and they clear dead plant matter from forest and fawna. But I don't want them in the walls and basement of my house. The point being, I don't care about their excrement, I care about their source of consumption.

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Imagine those restaurant industries form a Restaurant Industry lobby.  And now activist environmentalists have journalists asking about the ethics on the menu...

Suddenly the industry lobby funds a massive campaign for restaurant consumers to properly manage their poop the day after they paid for the meal.  And a crying Indian ad surfaces to show just how badly some consumers manage their poop.

Should environmentalists start a "Zero non-composted Poop" campaign?

This is what termite droppings look like.  If you find them at the baseboards of your house, it does matter how many droppings there are, how big the pile is. But whether they are 100% diverted to beneficial fertilizer in your houseplants is not going to matter in the long  haul. (Wikipedia )

I fear that the whole Zero Waste thing is distracting from extraction. Making liability of the consumers rotate clockwise, where we are thinking more about what comes out our back ends than we think about what our dollars are paying to extract from the planet.

Restaurants are serving baby seal pups, and we are spending billions of dollars to "certify" which compost pile manages our poop most ethically.

"It's the extraction stupid"

We should always be more upset about the bushmeat than the quality of the outhouse.  Termites are friendly, so long as they aren't eating our houses.

Here's the problem. We need intellectuals, we need good people to care about future populations of good people. Those whose instinct to nurture overcomes greed and fear are the most valuable asset on the environmental battlefield. If all the relatively beneficial (relatively speaking) people committed suicide, the net benefit to the planet would doubtlessly be negative.

Will the Homeowner identify with the "Conscientious Termite"?

But our role as regulators also lays the trap for moral licensing.  We shouldn't tell our kids that we are all that different from other termites. We should show our kids what humans are extracting, and be honest about our own roles in the Anthropocene extinction event. As I put it in the blog over 10 years ago, we are like a lazy comet, meandering towards earth, leaving thousands of mining holes rather than an enormous Chicxulub Crater. 

All of this said, if you make it this far, understand I'm also contrite these days. When I look at my own consumption, my own automobile use, the melting ice caps, the thermostat at my house, and how much meat I consumed during my life, I'm only a good person relative to average humans.  That's like being an "ethical termite", crawling around with millions of other termites, trying to consume a bit less of the house. The termite who crawls conscientiously, or learns to live completely off of other termites sawdust waste, may be recognized by a super superior intellect which I can only roughly imagine, one as much smarter than humans as we are compared to termites. 

The noise around our collective guilt is a distraction from big capitalist extraction investments. Big Extraction makes it about the termites, not about the source of cellulose. They make termites aware of their own droppings, when they are gnawing apart the baseboards.

Let us pray for the future, between our efforts to delay collapse of the house.