PLENTICIDE - not Ecocide or Mundicide

Plenticide is the deliberate 'pruning back' of 'excessive' anything (and everything) - simply because some/many/all people feel totally overwhelmed by abundance, either some of the time or all of the time.

Abundance of choice, abundance of complexity, abundance of competitors, abundance of debate and of decisions, the list goes on ---- plenticide happens because of primal fear from one or all of these reasons.

It needn't involve killing humans or even living beings - killing ideas and choices will do just as well in providing these plenticiders with their sought for relief.

A nuclear war or a big comet might destroy all life on it and even destroy its atmosphere forever - but this mundicide - death of a planet's life - because it was not a selective pruning back but rather a total loss of life and choice.

A tiny bit more deliberate is the incidental killing of lifeforms as human activity expands - ecocide - because we have been warned repeatedly that expanding these activities will lead to these deaths.

Criminal neglect or culpable negligence seems to be the terms we are looking for to describe these planet-wide crimes.

Fear of overwhelming abundance

But plenticide refers to deliberate plans to kill lifeforms to deliberately reduce variety, debate, competition, complexity.

So the Holocaust system took up a well known insecticide Zyklon-B  and used it to kill off human 'competitors' (Jews , Romas, Slavs) as well as farm bugs - because they felt both made life much more chaotic and  complex for the German nation during WWII.

We fail ourselves if we only call such killing a genocide, because that says only what/who was killed and not really why.

That 'why' comes down to plenticide...

If GOD is COMPLEXITY, He's not necessarily on the side of the BIG Battalions

Michael Marshall

Bacteria, like man-made proximity fuses, are very small but not necessarily simple.

Man-made polymer plastic molecules - or the world's largest molecule (the one large molecule of cell wall that wraps around and protects a bacteria's interior) - are big but not necessarily complex.

Modernity was naif in most ways, particularly when it came to the paradoxes of lifeforms.

It had a simplistic hierarchy of size and complexity - and could never stop from conflating the two.

Ever bigger and bigger hydro dams and cannons and skyscrapers  and battleships and on and on could always be trusted to get Modernist Man's juices flowing.

But inside a bacteria's tiny genome are packed a surprisingly large number of highly varied genes.

They don't program , for example, for 40 pounds of relatively undifferentiated muscle like you might see on the average male human.

Yes, its big, its butch, its bulky but frankly its like knitting : knot one purl one, knit one ,purl two - for billions of iterations.

By contrast each of a bacteria's hundreds of gene complexes can hide a completely different form of metabolism - those guys can eat a surprisingly wide variety of food stocks - thing that frankly we don't see as food.

That is why they have hung on on Earth for four billion years through extreme heat and cold, or poison gases and resource famines ; surviving millions of years of droughts and ice ages in deep sleep only to emerge alive and ready to rock and roll.

But us ?

Yes we're big.

Big like dinosaurs and all the other extinct mega fauna - and just about as vulnerable to even minor changes in our feeding regimes.

In our post-modern AGE OF COMMENSALITY we are beginning to accept that Life's tiniest beings have much hidden complexity under the hood that we are only just beginning to learn about.

Bring back the Dr Martin Henry Dawson from 1927 into the research labs of today and he'd hit the ground running - nothing we have uncovered in 85 years since would really throw him for a loop.

Been there, done that.....