Sunday, January 18, 2015

Dark Earth


“Don’t give me that intelligent life crap. Just find me something I can blow up!” When those words came out of Lt. Doolittle’s mouth in John Carpenter’s DARK STAR it seemed to capture so much of our foreign policy, not to mention our treatment of the environment.

Recent footage of dolphins stranding themselves (energetically) on the beaches of Barbados leads to an educated assumption that they are committing suicide as the result of being deafened by manmade acoustic assaults. A deaf dolphin is doomed to a grisly end at the hands of predation and/or starvation. “What in the world could deafen them?” you might ask. Aside from naval sonar blasts there is a worldwide underwater acoustic assault that is the product of extensive oil exploration. Ships trolling for oil deposits emit loud blasts and analyze the acoustic return in order to find deposits. The result is an auditory assault of unparalleled magnitude.

It’s not like the Koch brothers wake up in the morning plotting the deaths of sea creatures. It is merely the side effect of their corporate activities. They have to put up with the occasional protestations of pesky “environmentalists”, but at the end of the day profit motives rule.

The mission of the scout ship DARK STAR was to make space travel safe by blowing up unstable planets. It will be a dark Earth if we don’t stop blowing up this formerly stable planet.