Killing while Dying

“If you’ve been reading my columns in this space, then you know I write about unspeakably terrible topics. Primarily, I write about extinction. Extinction is the death of the last individual of a species. Writing about such a dire subject isn’t a lot of fun. I cannot imagine that reading my articles is much fun, either. On occasion, I try to squeeze a smile out of my readers, with varying degrees of success. I hope I’ll never be found guilty of causing people to die from laughter. I could not tolerate that kind of guilt.”—Dr. Guy McPherson

Planetary Hospice

By Dr. Guy McPherson

“In our weird taboo-ridden cult-obsessed hypersensitive creed-crazy culture, anyone who attempts to examine tough social questions in a logical, analytic, empiric manner, must learn to expect a blizzard of rhetorical abuse from all sides.”—Edward Abbey 

“When comedians get the laughs, they’re said to be ‘killing’; when the room’s silent, they’re ‘dying.’ Things being what they are today, given The Sixth Extinction, we’re all dying, even when we’re killing.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

BELLOWS FALLS Vermont—(Hubris)—March 2024—If you’ve been reading my columns in this space, then you know I write about unspeakably terrible topics. Primarily, I write about extinction. Extinction is the death of the last individual of a species. Writing about such a dire subject isn’t a lot of fun. I cannot imagine that reading my articles is much fun, either.

On occasion, I try to squeeze a smile out of my readers, with varying degrees of success. I hope I’ll never be found guilty of causing people to die from laughter. I could not tolerate that kind of guilt.

For over two decades, I taught courses at various colleges and universities. During this time, I was actually praised for my sense of humor. This is easy to imagine, if you’ve spent any time in a college classroom: most instructors and professors are many steps removed from hilarity.

My first professorial posting was at Texas A & M University in College Station, Texas, which was founded in 1876 in a remote area south of Bryan, Texas, and accessible primarily by train. The conductor would yell, “All aboard for the college station!” A year later, the town of College Station was awarded its name by the US Postal Service based on the station located slightly west of the campus.

When I showed up there in August 2008, I was assigned the role of co-teaching a class of about 400 students. The 9:00 a.m. section had about 150 students, and the 2:00 p.m. section about 250 students. Campus culture was such that the early morning section of the class filled with students sporting copies of the daily campus newspaper. If students tired of the instructor captivating in the first few minutes of class, then that teacher was facing the back of 150 copies of “The Battalion.” (Today, the “paper” is virtual, and has a Facebook page.)

My co-teacher taught the first and last quarters of the course; I taught “the middle half.” My colleague had no sense of humor. Students filled my office from the first day my co-instructor taught his share of the course until his final day of teaching. They begged me to relieve my colleague of his duties.

I was therefore put in the awkward position of explaining to the students that I simply could not replace my colleague, as much as they would prefer otherwise. I could not explain to my colleague how terrible he was (although I’m sure he knew). Instead, I completed my duties in teaching this course, and others. I longingly looked forward to moving on to a tenure-track position at the University of Arizona. When I arrived at my new campus in Tucson, I was already well-versed in stand-up . . . tragedy. And tragedy, to my way of thinking, always comprises equal parts humor and sadness.

During my 20 years at Arizona, I would explain to students that there are really more than enough people in the world. “Birth,” I would explain, “is a sexually transmitted disease that has proven fatal in every case.” I could have used the more accurate “condition” instead of “disease,” but I preferred to shock the students into understanding our shared planetary plight.

Obviously, I failed at my (self-assigned) task of encouraging Homo sapiens to stop reproducing. Earth’s human population has nearly doubled since I arrived in Tucson on 1 May 1989. In my defense, I “walked my talk” in contributing zero new humans over the course of my 64 (and counting) years on Earth. I suspect there would be far fewer people on Earth had I been able to get my message (“Stop! Go back!”) to the first billion humans, but they were determined to create battalions and battalions and battalions.

I would love to include additional humorous asides in this short essay. Alas, although I was frequently referred to as the funniest instructor on campus—I was a funny Guy—I was better suited to spontaneous humor than to telling canned jokes. In addition, I rarely remembered my humorous anecdotes a day later, much less many years after the fact.

An example is telling. After my life on campus came to a close, I became a well-known public speaker. I delivered presentations on four continents, and additional, scheduled presentations were interrupted before I had an opportunity to begin in Africa and Asia. 

After one of these talks, I attended a gathering at the home of my host. Among the guests were several people who had heard me speak earlier in the day. One such guest handed me a little dispenser of dental floss, which elicited from me a confused look. “Why?” I asked. My interlocutor explained that I had told a story about environmental activist Edward Abbey, who, many years earlier, had responded to his physician’s giving him a short-term, terminal diagnosis with, “I guess I won’t have to floss my teeth anymore.” A few hours after my presentation, I no longer recalled the story I’d told.

Thereafter, I began regularly to use the common expression: “I don’t recall what I had for breakfast.”

I have solved this particular problem, however: I no longer eat breakfast. I still floss my teeth at the end of the day, though. My memory is fading fast, but I still have all my own teeth!

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