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Death By A Thousand Cuts And Bruises
By Sally Dugman
Around a mile to two miles from my house where there is just an untampered with small, healthy and pristine forest and a few single family homes scattered here and there throughout it, a new development is being planned. It looks like this:
This image on the right above shows the coming structures. And it will be sprawling on and onward across the destroyed natural landscape as more and more of the local natural environment over time is commodified, and used for an unbridled economic gain by a greedy developer, jobs for carpenters and homes for an ever nonstop bulging population.
In addition, please don’t try to convince me that we don’t have an increasing overpopulation problem as our kind keeps on dismantling more and more of the natural world across most of the entire habitable part of our planet for both human wants and needs while the extinction rates; poisoned air, water and land (from wildfires, industrial pollution and further manmade causes), and other outcomes show the overall succumbing ruination and loss.In fact, nobody can build any further in my part of town unless tearing down a house here and building something else like an an apartment building in its stead. It is because we already have already lost all of many areas of acres upon acres of meadows, forests and marshlands to development.
In fact, the few (two to three) remaining acres of forest existing here in my part of town and in view from my house, which is located in an old, single family housing neighborhood wherein many of the homes were built in the mid-1800’s were chopped down and the land was recontoured a few years ago to put in a huge parking lot and three apartment buildings where there used to be a diversity of wildlife teeming there, including two bard owls. (Now our neighborhood has little wildlife — no snakes, chipmunks, squirrels, butterflies, other pollinators and few birds.)
This outcome is despite my efforts to Improve life’s chances of successfully surviving due to my nonuse of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer and other manmade substances and with my deliberate goals as always prominently intact as is covered here: ‘The Likeminded Sea Captain and Me!', posted here: https://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2025/07/20/the-likeminded-sea-captain-and.
In my mind, though, this situation of the disappearing biodiversity happening in my town and across much of the entire globe is like the first year law student dilemma of death by a thousand injuries, which goes something like this:
An unruly passenger on a jet is trying to break into the locked cockpit to reck havoc. The result is that many other passengers with plastic food knives, plastic forks, the stiletto heel parts of high heel shoes, a set of knitting needles and other objects all assault him and he, subsequently, dies from many cuts and bruises. So who gets charged with being the murderer of him in a court of law — the last person who attacked him just before he expired? Everyone? No one?
In relation, the weight of manmade items far exceeds the weight of biomass on the globe, I read a few years ago. So who am I to blame for environmental ruination in my surroundings while forever chemicals and other pollutants like fecal material and heavy metals dwell in our water supplies, on our land and in our air?
Is it greedy entrepreneurs who build more malls, office buildings and housing, along with parking lots; people who choose to have large families even when they, actually, can financially manage to afford them; polluting industries such as Bayer with its pesticides and GMO atrocities; landscape firms and individuals who fertilize lawns, entire yards and farms that wind up creating ocean dead zones; plastic companies, other chemical groups, big business, everybody or nobody?
Personally, I don’t blame any particular groups or singular individuals. After all if people compositely were willing to give up something deemed ultimately dangerous like fossil fuels (that will some day run out anyway) or plastic, they’d do so. That would surely kill the market for these goods.
So in the end, I look at our problems as societal in scope and do, myself, whatever I can to live “low on the totem pole”. In my case, this means that I let run out rather than use a $500 jet travel chit given to me as a present by relatives, sold my Prius back to a Toyota dealership rather than own a car, avoided a modern air conditioned home, only travel by vehicle for the most part when necessary (i.e., to medical appointments, the grocery store, a local restaurant or a fairly nearby friend’s home and the like), purchase only what I need and that is useful like food, toothpaste and yarn so that I can make clothes for birthday gifts and so on.
I’m fortunate to know others who choose similar self-curtailment as it is heartening to observe. This is because it provides some hope that humanity may pass the hurdle of end days caused by overshoot and collapse as discussed here:
The educational failure to address overshoot - in conversation, Bill Rees (shortened with subtitles) and here: 'Self-termination is most likely': the history and future of societal collapse | Environment
caused by our human over consumption and development
All considered, I’m aware that “the can has been kicked down the road” of dealing with our destruction of both nature and manmade structures, too, such as is happening in Gaza. Our economic patterns rely on such behaviors despite many warnings such as this one from a Quaker economist, Kenneth E. Boulding, "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
In the waning years of my life, I won’t have to watch the broken and unraveling end stages of our current unjust civilization setup between the starving masses living in paucity in slums and their extremely wealthy, greedy, self-centered counterparts. I’ll be already dead by that time.
However, someone, meaning all of us adults, needs to prepare the current very young youngsters to have the skills and understandings to be able to make it through the bottleneck and harder times to come when resources and energy supplies are in trouble from our current collective wanton ways. Can it be done? It had better be!
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Sally Dugman writes from and lives in a region in central Massachusetts, USA.
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