The Great Whales

 News broke today that Trump has convened the so-called "God Squad" of executive branch officials to grant an exemption from the protections of the Endangered Species Act to expedite his proposed oil and gas drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. Predictably, they signed off on his plans. 

The winner here is the fossil fuel industry. The losers include all of us who must reside on a warming planet—plus the animal life that supplies much of the biodiversity of the region. 

In particular, scientists fear that expanded oil and gas exploration in the Gulf could doom the Rice's whale—of whom fewer than 100 specimens remain alive on Earth. 

I am reminded of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's prophetic warning at the end of the nineteenth century, in his poem Satan Absolved, about humanity's rapacious destruction of non-human life and biodiversity across the globe—which he saw as but an aspect of the larger problem of greed, imperialism, and industrial expansion.  

... From the deep Central Seas

To the white Poles, Man ruleth pitiless Lord of these,

And daily he destroyeth. The great whales he driveth

Beneath the northern ice, and quarter none he giveth,

Who perish there of wounds in their huge agony.

I am reminded too of W.S. Merwin's "For a Coming Extinction." Particularly when we read in the news that the U.S. government's "God Squad" has appointed itself the power to decree death and extermination to the Rice's whale, Merwin's words seem darkly apt.

Our "God Squad" is really the "great god" of Merwin's poem—death, extinction, the end—at least as regards the Rice's whale. 

And it is only our incredible human arrogance and hubris that grants us the belief that we are so self-evidently "important" that we have the moral right to condemn an entire race of life-forms that have existed for untold millennia to the eternal night of non-existence. 

As Merwin mordantly put it: 

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

[...]

Tell him

That it is we who are important