"Eight-Armed Revenge" by Christopher Fox Graham

"Eight-Armed Revenge"

By Christopher Fox Graham

For Sedona Public Library's Spring/Earth Day Celebration

Inspired by The Klute's poem "Whale War III"

Dear Bipeds,

you are almost at the point of no return
so we’d like to get some things
off our arms

now you mammals
and we cephalopods
have been at war
since the first sperm whale
and giant squid
grappled in the deep
dueling tooth to tentacle

your fishermen hunted our cousins
and our krakens plucked sailors
from your ships
but this cold water war could only last so long

you see, Bipeds,
times are changing thanks to your recklessness
and when the mass extinctions begin
we want you to know
who’ll be taking the driver’s seat

you’ve been dumping your garbage
into our home for far too long
farming our prey to extinction
turning us into delicacies like sushi

we understand fishing
we’re predators, too
though we don’t know how salmon, cod, or tuna taste cooked
fresh and raw, they’re scrumptious

now the chemicals are inexcusable
so we stay away from shore
but in the middle of the endless ocean
islands of trash float ignored
except by us
we’re learning how to your trash like tools
we didn’t need Prometheus
just Poseidon
when the first of us
learned how to reshape a soda can
into an arrowhead
and make fishing spear
your days of hegemony were numbered

The Deep Horizon oil spill was the last straw
one bridge too far,
one drop in the bucket too many
so now we’re arming

you’re not destroying the environment
you’re destroying your environment
and if you pump too much CO2 into the skies
something will evolve to thrive on it
life always finds a way to survive
but know, Bipeds, that that species
may not be yours
98 percent of the species who have called this rock home are extinct
Mother Earth doesn’t care which one of us rules
and to her, extinction is a hiccup
and there is always an understudy
ready to take the starring role
and evolve into the dominant species

we’ve seen it many times before
your dying rainforests aren’t the first
we remember the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse 300 million years ago
when your ancestors were still cold-blooded amphibians

we watched continents drift and volcanoes erupt
we had front row seats for a dozen meteor impacts
at the end of the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Eocene and Neogene Periods
we dined under the waves as the bodies of dinosaurs washed out to sea
as the mice that would eventually become you
took over

now you’ve decided to join the Thunder Lizards in the fossil record
so we’re putting you on notice that this is our time,
this will soon be our world

so when you’ve suicided yourselves into history
and wiped the surface clean of all the major predators
we, octopuses, squids, nautiluses and cuttlefish will begin our migrations to land
flopping tentacles onto dry land
planting flags made your leftover refuse
and declaring these continents as ours
evolving into land creatures
over the next millions of years
building cities and civilizations
and teaching our children from the moment they hatch
if you’re going to pollute your world
you going to get what you deserve

but worry not, Bipeds,
even in your deaths,
you’ll still be useful
millions of years from now
as we pump what remains of you
into our gas tanks and rocket ships
and sail out into the stars
away from this graveyard of the fallen
this tomb of species who failed to learn


From "The Future Is Wild:The Tentacled Forest Part 3"


Octopuses regularly move across dry land in tidal pools searching for food and escaping aquatic predators. Generally nocturnal, this one was video taped in daytime.

The wit and wisdom of cancer

The video is associated with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group which I found fascinating today, simply because it pushes environmentalism to one of the furthest extremes. It a way it's a cartoonish representation of Agent Smith's in "The Matrix:"

"Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."

I don't things are that bad by any means. A professor of mine once said that if human beings ruin the environment and destroy life as we know it, the planet won't care. Earth has suffered mass extinctions on a global scale hundreds of times and if we kill ourselves and 70% of life, the planet will just start over. Sucks for us, sure, but we learn the hard way.

From "Extinction," John Baez, 8 April 2006:

The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, 440-450 million years ago at the end of the Ordovician Period.
27% of all families and 57% of all genera went extinct.
This was the second biggest extinction of marine life, ranking only below the Permian extinction. There was only life in the seas at this time, and more than one hundred families of marine invertebrates died, including two-thirds of all brachiopod and bryozoan families. One theory is that as the continent Gondwana drifted over the south pole, there was a phase of global cooling, and so much glaciation took place that sea levels were drastically lowered.

The Devonian Extinction, 375 million years ago at the end of the Frasnian Age in the later part of the Devonian Period.
19% of all families and 50% of all genera went extinct.
By this point there were plants, insects and amphibians on land, fish in the seas, and huge reefs built by corals and stromatoporoids. The continents of Uramerica and Gondwana were just beginning to move together to form Pangea. The extinction seems to have only affected marine life, but 70% of marine species went extinct! Reef-building organisms were almost completely wiped out, so that coral reefs returned only with the development of modern corals in the Mesozoic. Brachiopods, trilobites, and other sorts got hit hard. Since warm water species were the most severely affected, many scientists suspect another bout of global cooling. There may have also been a meteorite impact, but it seems this extinction was not a sudden event.

The Permian-Triassic Extinction, 251 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period.
57% of all families and 83% of all genera went extinct.
At the end of the Permian there was one supercontinent, Pangea. There were many sorts of reptiles and amphibians on land, together with many plants, especially ferns but also conifers and gingkos. There were also complicated coral reef ecologies undersea. After the extinction, we mainly see fossils of one species of reptile on land: a medium-sized herbivore called Lystrosaurus. We also mainly see fossils of just one species of sea life, a brachiopod called Lingula. Eventually other species seem to reappear - the so-called "Lazarus taxa", named after the Biblical character who returned from the dead. Clearly they must have survived the extinction event, but in very low numbers.
This was the largest disaster that life has ever yet faced on our planet.
Perhaps 90% or even 95% of all species went extinct. (The figure of 83% above comes from some papers by Sepkoski, who tried to calculate the number of families and genera that died out in each of the Big Five extinctions.
It took about 50 million years for life on land to fully recover its biodiversity, with the rise of many species of dinosaurs. Nothing resembling a coral reef shows up until 10 million years after the Permian extinction, and full recovery of marine life took about 100 million years.
The causes remain controversial: some scientists blame an asteroid impact, while others blame severe global warming and a depletion of oxygen in the atmosphere due to prolonged massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia - we see signs of these in lava beds called the "Siberian traps". On the other hand, Benton and others argue that the rise of carbon in the atmosphere at this time is only explicable if there was also a catastrophic release of methane from gas hydrates under the ocean.

The Triassic-Jurassic Extinction, 205 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period.
23% of all families and 48% of all genera went extinct.
By the end of the Triassic there was again a variety of reptiles on land and in sea. But the reptiles were completely different from those at the end of the Permian, and the biodiversity had not completely recovered: for example, there were no truly large predators. There were primitive conifers and gingkos; ferns were not so dominant as before. There were also frogs, lizards, and even the first mammals.
The extinction at the end of the Triassic destroyed about 20% of all marine families, many reptiles, and the last of the large amphibians - opening niches for the dinosaurs of the Jurassic. The cause of this extinction remains obscure, but it's worth noting that this was about the time when the supercontinent Pangea began splitting into Laurasia and Gondwanaland, with massive floods of lava in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province - perhaps one of the largest igneous events in the earth's history.

The Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction, 65 million years ago at end of the Cretaceous Period.
17% of all families and 50% of all genera went extinct.
By the Cretaceous there were dinosaurs and flowering plants on land, many new insects taking advantage of the flowering plants, and modern fish. Continents were beginning to resemble the current configuration. In the disaster at the end of this period all the dinosaurs died out, as well as many species of plants, diatoms, dinoflagellates, ammonoids, brachiopods, and fish. Often called the "KT" extinction, this was the smallest of the Big Five - it's mainly interesting because it led to the rise of mammals, and in particular, us. As explained above, many scientists believe this extinction was due to an asteroid impact at Chicxulub. Another popular theory is that it was caused by the enormous volcanic eruptions which formed the lava beds in India known as the "Deccan Traps". Either way, we know it took 10 million years for biodiversity to recover from this mass extinction.