Behemoth

So much human sacrifice and environmental devastation have gone to create a false heaven. 

— from a review of Behemoth by Zhao Liang

Once we sang in the sunshine and blithe, sweet air. But now I grieve upon the shattered Earth

—  a trailer for the film


 Image: Zhao Liang

a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours

This part of Rebecca Gigg's reflection on the death of a whale is a strong taste of the anti-wonder that humans can create:

I read that estuarine beluga in Canada had been found to be so noxious that their carcasses were classified as toxic waste for disposal. Tissue sampling of sperm whales around the world revealed quantities of cadmium that would kill living cells in a lab. (Cadmium, a compound found in paint and industrial manufacturing, and a by-product of burning fossil fuels, causes metal fume fever, fluid in the lungs, kidney disease and cancer in humans.) The most polluted animals on the face of the earth were thought to be American killer whales in Puget Sound, a place where the starfish had been observed actually melting. The data supported a highly improbable hypothesis, even given the levels of contaminants in the area: that the whales had been chewing batteries or drinking flame retardant to supplement their marine dinners.

Additional note, 14 Jan 2016: UK's last resident killer whales 'doomed to extinction'

Getting used to it

If we had to face up to how much we’re destroying the environment and our bodies every day, it would just be too much.

City resident quoted in Inside Beijing's Airpocalypse

"The xapiri float down through the air from their mirrors to come protect us"

The xapiri float down through the air from their mirrors to come protect us…. Their mirrors arrive from the sky’s chest, slowly preceding them. They suddenly stop in the air and remain suspended…. When they arrive, their songs name the distant lands they came from and traveled through. They evoke the places where they drank the waters of a sweet river, the disease-free forests where they ate unknown foods, the edges of the sky where, without night, one never sleeps.

from The Sky is Falling by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2013), quoted by Glenn H Shepard in the NYRB, and from which this blog quoted in June.

Later in the book Kopenawa warns of industrialisation:

The sky…is getting as sick as we do! If all this continues, its image will become riddled with holes from the heat of the mineral fumes. Then it will slowly melt, like a plastic bag thrown in the fire…. If the sky catches fire, it will fall again. Then we will all be burned, and we will be hurled into the underworld like the first people in the beginning of time.

Image of fallstreak by David Barton via ABC