The Screaming Planet
“I woke up and heard the lambs screaming. I woke up in the dark and the lambs were screaming.”
The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris
Why call a website The Screaming Planet? It sounds like the title of a bad 1950s science fiction movie. Sadly, the day-to-day reality faced by many of the animals described in my stories is anything but fictional.
On the wall of my home there’s a picture of the Earth as it used to be, the famous Earthrise photo taken by the crew of Apollo 8 as they circled the Moon, December 1968; less than a year before Neil and Buzz walked the Mare Tranquillitatis, leaving in the powdery dust foot prints that may take eons to fade.
It’s a picture from another age, of what was, rather than what is: the Earth before the oceans became a dumping ground for discarded plastic and abandoned fishing lines, for nets and toxins that now kill at random. And before the continents turned to concrete deserts, stripped of their ancient forests and jungle. It’s a map of a land inhabited by the ghosts of the many creatures that have died under the mechanised wheels of the juggernaut that was, and still is, the industrial age.
I’ve often been tempted to scrawl a caption beneath the picture, something along the lines of: What have we done? So far I haven’t got round to it, maybe because I don’t have an answer to that particular question. Nobody does. So the picture goes unchallenged, a silent accusation that no one can refute: the human race – guilty as charged.
It’s an accusation that reminds me of the final scene from the original film version of Pierre Boulle’s novel, Monkey Planet. On discovering a fallen Statue of Liberty, half buried in the sand and washed by radioactive waves, the character played by Charlton Heston drops to his knees and exclaims: “We finally really did it! You maniacs! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!” We are in the process of laying waste to the planet, not through the use of nuclear weapons but through over-population and over-consumption.
In the Earthrise photo, the planet looks serene, a paradise floating in the firmament. The reality is very different. I am reminded of the photo every time I see a holocaust truck on the way to the abattoir, each member of its cargo well aware of the fate that awaits them.
If the Earth has a voice it is that of anguish and torment, a chorus of screams arising from the many animals that are put to death in slaughterhouses every hour of every day; or which suffer lives defined by captivity and abuse in factory farms, zoos and circuses.
We can’t deny the truth, even if we choose to cover our eyes so we can’t see, and cover our ears so we can’t hear.
We all live on a screaming planet.
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Artist oil painting by kind permission of Alexandra Klimas: www.klimas.nl
