Every. Item. Sorted.
As I walk through the zoo with my one year-old daughter, I reflect on my sometimes strong negative opinions of the zoo. Even the San Diego Zoo, which is an absolute world leader in equitable and fair treatment of its captives.
As much as I say I am against zoos, I notice how remarkably rich the experience is for my daughter. Given I’d do anything for her, the oppression on display for her enrichment and empathetic development seems validated. I do not have the power to stop zoos, and my membership perpetuates it. So for her sake, I love the zoo.
A nearby mom voices her conflicted opinion to another mom while our children all coo at the same elephants. I love that my children get to see elephants, but I hate that these elephants are all trapped, she says.
I reflect on this comment and the spattering of signage throughout the zoo educating the attendees about the wild spaces around the world where these animals are plucked from. I realize how rapidly antiquated these signs must be becoming as the acceleration of dwindling wild spaces continues to plague the planet.
20 species a day go extinct. That is almost 1 million (or 1/6th of all living species) in my daughter’s lifetime that will be gone. Here for millions of years, and gone in tens of thousands of days. In my own experience, I can point to places I first witnessed 20 years ago that have suffered visible fates. That we are all not freaking out about this gives me dread.
For the most part the animals on display at the zoo seem content. But I watch a particular Sloth Bear (Melursus Ursinus) nervously pace its living quarters. He has a bald spot with an open sore on his back that I suspect came from his anxious gnawing. My heart breaks. I can see his own sentience (the same one you and I have) knows he’s far from home and trapped someplace foreign. But what he doesn’t know is that his home is likely under assault of being gone (or actually is gone). The nearby signage points out his South Asian native wilderness. This might be a palm oil farm now. Or a suburban sprawl like the one I live in, on this side of the world.
A zoo is a poor place for wild animals to be kept in cages. But there is a likely scenario where zoos play a critical role in keeping wildlife protected for the next 100+ years. In this case, zoos will end up being the hero for protecting so many species that would otherwise be extinct. That is what their signage should actually say: Hey this Sloth Bear guy, which is only half interesting to your sensibilities while you despondently take a photo, is fucked. We are going to try to keep his next 30 generations of off-spring alive so his tribe may be free again one day. So please, put your beer down and pay close attention to what is really happening here.
Maybe their ancestors will travel on Elon’s rockets to Mars. Maybe Elon’s rocket will be the Biblical Noah’s Ark of the next millennium for our human cyborg descendants that will inhabit it. Every remaining animal paired as male and female to perpetuate their species on the new regenerative forests in Mars. By then these pioneer travelers will all be sourced from the zoo.
Or even better, maybe humans will take our foot off the gas and return some vital spaces and resources back to these magnificent and holy creatures, because occupying Mars is much more expensive than restoring diversity on Earth.
Maybe the truth of this cataclysmic universe of cooked crucible guts (that we enjoy a momentary microscopic protection from) is that everything eventually has to die.
So screw it. Zoos are awesome. To live is to suffer. And today my whole world, my daughter, gets to have a nice time.
The day is ours.
—
There are two historical events in my mind that play into my interpretation of how the modern world became sorted into what it is today:
In 1900 a Canadian with a fourth grade education named Joshua Slocum single handedly sailed the circumference of the world. His recollections of the cultural diversity of a non-globalized world are worth reading if you haven’t. 14 short years later World War 1 would break out and the mad dash of military tanks would deploy to decide what currency, language and corporate law would be the sole arbitrator of this new emerging global economy.
The second is a quote by Churchill, I think around 1944, when it was declared all land had been found.
These two references give insight into the instruments of how we would judge most everything (through the Sterling Pound, English, and Commonwealth Law) and, in the case of the Churchill quote, how much of everything physical there was to judge.
Since then we have had about 80 years to examine every square inch of the planet as a global economy. Complete with submarines, airplanes, boats, cars, tractors, and chainsaws. All to scrutinize and determine what is valuable and what isn’t. Precious metals belong in the state owned coffers. Beaver anus belongs in La Criox sparkling water. Tigers belong in Texas. Sugar cane with the help of insulin belongs in my love handles. It’s not all for nought, a descendant of mother wolf belongs resting at my feet.
Yes, some of the sorting of resources has been saved by this ruthless complex. Things like National Parks, Wildlife Protected Areas, Marine Sanctuaries, and the god forsaken places that are still too cold and too far to reach for now (ie Wilkes Land, Antarctica). But these also serve a purpose in their own right.
Tourism for those pockets of diversity that are worth money and generate revenue for local economies by people visiting. But also, we all know diversity is critical for survival. So yes, even spaces left untouched are lifelines, bits of earth’s lungs left, so we can go on sorting the rest.
As I walk through the zoo I notice how curated, organized, and choreographed the entire experience is. Every item is sorted. But I realize, that to observe nearly the entire planet how it is now, is to see that everything on this planet has been deemed its value, and moved to a place on the planet where its value is most realized. Just like this zoo.
Marketing Efficiency Hypothesis is a theory used in investing that states asset prices reflect all available information. By its nature, all assets are perfectly priced despite whatever you may think. We tend to walk through the world with ideas that this should go there, or why is that there when it needs to be here? But this is all inherently single-sided. The Earth’s entire terrafirma at this very moment is Marketing Efficiency Theory realized by the entirety of humans on a global scale. Everything is reflected as being exactly where it is because it is the most valuable being there, based on the cumulation of every human’s arbitration of where everything belongs.
Go look around and observe this.
For however long, nature guided the course of where and why things are where they are. And since 1944 to today, humans have done the same as a global economy in a remarkably short amount of time (30,000 days?). Humans are efficient little buggers, and the world is so tiny.
I am not opining that this is good or bad. I’m saying go see this magnificent piece of art that is on full display at this moment in time. It is as remarkable as a giant volcano erupting. Or the Northern Lights. Or the Guiness Book of world records for the tallest LEGO tower.
If you are living today you get to see the 25,000 miles in circumference of the planet’s trillions of pounds of resources organized in the perfect intricacy of human’s dominion and value over it.
You don’t need to travel to Sweden to see it. It’s right in front of you everywhere you look.
—
I read recently that there is little to no lycopene in tomatoes. This is worrying, as lycopene is critical, among other things, for prostate cancer prevention. A cancer that has been accelerating for men in recent decades. I happen to be a man, so I am concerned about lycopene.
I went down a rabbit hole about it, (mostly into the world of GMOs) and came across a news article of a recent acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer. If you’re not familiar, Monsanto made Weed Killer, a product we now know is so toxic to fish and birds and kills beneficial insects and soil organisms that maintain ecological balance.
The mechanism by which Weed Killer works is it does a particular thing to the chromosomes (?) of weeds that determines what parts of the plant shuts off in its growth. This discovery, allows the right (heavily resourced) entities to potentially begin sorting out the medicinal properties (lycopene) of a vegetable while still being able to grow a beautifully ripe end product (tomato). Hence for a pharmaceutical company like Bayer this is an incredibly compelling value add to their existing product offering of having distribution, factories and laboratories to distribute the world’s existing medicines, and sort out the even harder to get ones.
Plants have innate critical nutrients that our own bodies evolved to be completely dependent on over the course of our symbiotic relationship on this planet. We are made of plants and have survived because of their medicinal properties. To absolve this truth is to live in a world where 50% of people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime because they lacked the vital medicinal properties from the foods they thought they were getting it from.
Oh wait, that is the world we live in now.
—
If the last 100 years were a mad dash to find, value, and sort the world’s physical items to where they would best serve their purpose. The next hundred years must be more of the same, but on a molecular level.
In the case of the tomato business, a producer leaves money on the table by not being able to extract the medicinal properties (lycopene) of the tomato from its satiable utility (of being calorific, good on salads, and an enjoyable experience). The producer has been giving us a 2 for 1 deal this whole time and they are tired of getting shafted.
A wise proprietor would devise a tactic to find the right partner to split the two problems a tomato solves (medicinal and satiable) into two different business deals. One is for the grocery store to serve giant gorgeous ripe tomatoes for your eating enjoyment (devoid of required medicinal attributes). And the other is for the medicine you will need to stave off your early demise because you didn’t get it from the plant.
Maybe we will all have to pay twice now for the same product. But maybe we’ve been paying twice for things all along.
It’s been an awesome day at the zoo. My child’s brain is flooded with new experiences and she is exhausted. I pack her up and we head home.
I silently commit my being to giving her the best tools I can. My hope for her, more than anything, is that she has a heart that is capable of seeing and loving in the deepest sense of possibilities. That she shows compassion for everything made helpless and weak by this modernized world. That she knows the decisions she makes in life have agency, meaning, and deeply matter in how the world around her is shaped.
And probably that she grows her own tomatoes.
One day I will say I have given you all I can. It’s on you to go forth to fight for the things you love. To be kind in your dominion of the Earth, and fair in how you decide things are to be sorted.