our terrible world: Pollute earth to make it worse

by The Author

Satire

Get a headstart on your AP English Language and Composition Summer Reading assignment with this article from The Pacific. 

So this is to all you readers out there in the audience. In some big park there’s this sewage dispenser. I was sitting there, as one does, outside of this sewage-smelling dumpster station, with this scientist type named JB. So as we’re squatting in our little hovel with JB shining his flashlight in my eyes, I see— well, I don’t see because he’s shining it in my eyes. But there’s a bat.

“I like bats,” JB tells me.

Now it may be a bit judgy of me, but JB is dumber than a bag of rocks. He thinks his little beeping gizmo that he put on this bat is going to “tell him where it goes.” Obviously some LED taped to a bat is doing nothing of the sort.

Of course, when we’re sitting in our little den of foul-smelling sewage airs, all of JB’s other bat-friends get the bright idea to fly in and get lights taped to their legs too. Joke’s on him; I strung up a net right outside with glue on it for the bats to get their wings gummed up and stop pestering me.

So what does all this mean? Why are some scientists wasting time and money pretending to prove that bats eat insects or scream at everything to see? Really, “echolocomochacroaka” or whatever is about as valid a theory as Australia or Wyoming existing. I screamed at JB for three hours before he made me sit in that grimy shanty, just to prove him wrong. The sound didn’t “bounce back” or “fund a stimulus package,” if that was even a thing that could happen.

JB is just one of so many chemist… no— biolog… no… JB is just one of so many scientists who fear that humans make too much light and noise. Even right in this dumpster of a sitting spot in some kind of park, he thinks nature is being messed up by humans. Is he blind? Ignorant? The only kind of park we need is a parking lot. Last week the Walmart was too crowded and I couldn’t buy an Orbeez Soothing Foot Spa. Problems o’clock.

There are many benefits of parking lots, and so this is sort of the claim this piece is making. This is it. It is what it is. So for starters you have all those insects burning up on the streetlights. If you set the traps for bats around the edge of the lot as well, then that’s two birds with one stone. If you throw bits of parking lot asphalt at the owls coming in to eat the trapped bats, then that’s three birds with one… piece of asphalt.

Back to the matter at hand.

Alright. So this two-bit dunce JB hears me badmouthing his light-on-bat deal, and he gets all hyper about proving what lights do to animals. Turns out he rigged up some contraption to flip the color of all his lights in this sewage dispenser. KAPOW! Now they’re red! And so we’re in some shoestring-budget horror movie I guess is his point. That’s scientists. This is what they’ve gone and done with all our money that the government stole and gave to them.

There we are in this red light, just standing there, no bats or anything ‘cause they’re stuck in my glue net if you remember. So I sorta shuffle my feet and he coughs, and then I check my watch, and KAPOW!

We’re still in the red light, nothing happened. This whole demonstration has got me a bit exasperated because JB’s too dense to figure out where the bats went and just says, “See how the insects have stopped flying through?” and I know he’s being facetious because the insects are obviously asleep. You sleep at night. Duh. As I said, he’s a dunce.

That’s enough of JB. By now just this one guy had proven my theory of how paleolo— no… archae— no, that’s not it. This one guy had proven my theory of how scientists are in league with Big Nature. 

Well anyway the other day I was reading this sort of ode to a thesaurus or whoever, and doing that thing where you read the words on the page but don’t realize until you get to the end that you weren’t paying attention to any of it. It reminded me of my dictionary, so I flipped through my dictionary until I found an interesting word to describe scientists: “Umwelt.” 

Now that’s a disgusting word. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds bad, so it probably applies to scientists.

What other talking points do I have… let’s see… ah, yes. In some study I didn’t read much about but saw the numbers from, at least like 99 thousand percent of Americans and pre-Americans (Europeans) live in light-empowered regions. The sky is no longer stained by the Milky Way for these lucky guys. Billions of light particles try to invade our atmosphere, but American light is so powerful it outshines the brightness of the stars.

And here are all these scientists trying to say this is bad for nature and wildlife. But birds are so dumb they just fly into our lights and die because they “can’t flap around for eight months.” I say good riddance, and get those pesky oversize insects out of American air. I’m all for fossil fuels to smoke ‘em out, but wind power’s got benefits against ‘em too. Slice ‘n’ dice. But this is saying nothing of baby tur… maybe I won’t get into the baby turtles.

I was talking about all this to another of those science-types. Tellin’ ‘em about how light just proves the idiocy of natural specieses. So what does this imbecile go and do? Put a bunch of lamps in a random field in Switzerland. Now I’m not the one to rain on a parade, so out I go on the next flight. Guess what? Turns out the scientist just wanted to count how many bugs there were. Irregardless it was all counterproductive and a waste of my time. Getting my rear end soggy in the damp grass at night while this guy prowls around his Swiss flowers and lamps with night vision goggles was an experience. Next time he’s standing near a parade, you can bet I’m out there with the cloud seeders.

So this is what the scientists have told us about light, and what it means. How about sound? Is there too much of a wall of sound for the beetles? Will the 200-decibel crickets outside my window up and die if a plane passes overhead, engines grinding up pigeons?

I was hiking with some pretentious dimwit who pulled one over on me with a parlor trick about how many planes flew overhead when we were on the trail. But I still got the last laugh, and his wristwatch, if you catch my drift.

So what’s the significance? Well, what he told me’s the problem with them planes, see, them planes are “too loud.” The trees, how angry they are. The cockatoos and the jays and fishes and orangutans, how indignant they become when any noise happens upon their unsuspecting ears. And that’s the scientists’ stupidity in a nutshell. Anyone who thinks fishes and orangutans are more important than airlines is trying to sell you something.

As I was rolling coal in my pickup down to the pawn shop to get rid of this fool’s watch, I saw some dullards rigging up a sound system on an empty road. I hop out, black smoke still billowing from my idling chariot, and there they are. Scientists. Only scientists would stand around playing loops of car sounds on a fake road. I try to stay open-minded, so I ask them what’s up.

They want to measure how many birds fly by a noisy road. Like my English teacher kept asking me when I got F’s on my essays, so what? If animals can’t deal with humans, then they’d better find somewhere else to go. For all I care, they can go live in the rainforest in lowland Bolivia. I asked the scientists what the datums were for. They wanted to write some kind of an article, and that’s basically the exigence here. I had to beat these guys to it before they wrote up a super biased and ignorant take on human society. 

Because of how animals are blind to reality and because of their ever-annoying nature, they always get in the way of progress and humanity. You could feed a bird dog food and it would just gobble it right up. Lizards, salamanders, manatees, what do these have in common? I think they look gross. They look umwelt. But creatures that have been roaming about these habitats can’t just disappear.

We have to make them. Our influence must be inherently destructive and homogenizing. If we can stop the scientists from rotting both our brains and theirs, mayhaps they might realize that Big Nature has tricked us all. Many think polluting the world with “unwanted senses stimulus packages” or whatever they said is bad. Some think we shouldn’t “remove natural sensitives” from the “undulating sensescapes.” What a load of bunk. My bogometer is triggered.

Let me clarify with a more forwardstraight call to action. We must pollute the Earth. With microscopes, cameras, speakers, satellites, and recorders, scientists have deluded us. They have used technology to make the plain cloudy and the true false. And there would be so many benefits to polluting the world.

Summers in my town are a few degrees too cold. Global warming would solve that. The sun is too bright. A permanent cover of smog and haze would solve that. Birds tweet and caw incessantly, causing needless noise pollution in the spring. With enough deforestation, the birds will have no homes and die. And the fireflies, those umwelted fireflies, causing so much light pollution at night. These insects fly about, infesting every nook and cranny of an otherwise idyllic hamlet. Pesticides and noxious fumes would drive them out.

As the only species that can come close to fixing my problems, it falls on us to marshal all of our power and influence to protect me, and my uniquely important worldview.

So what sort of rhetorical devices am I using here with this whole animal thing? Pathos? Nah. Rhetorical questions? Those are for amateurs. I spit straight facts.

Written by: Wesley Andrus, Reporter

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction, not straight facts-tion. No real persons or events are described within and the views described do not reflect those of The Gauntlet or the author, however much you might want them to.