Wasted Calories are Sinful

Just read Slate's review of TC Boyle's new book "When the Killing is Done."  It follows the clash of an environmental engineer trying to eliminate invasive species from two islands and her running battle with an animal rights activist. The title comes from the animal rights activist who calls environmental engineers "Nazis" and states "I'll be civil when the killing is done." The Slate writer has a great line:

The killing, needless to say, is never done. Nature is as murderous as human beings, and neither is likely to change.

As an environmental science writer, I used to cover stories of these sorts of conflicts all the time. They also reveal two worldviews -- one scientific and analytical and the other moral without reason or perspective. As we've become increasingly divorced from nature as a people, we have lost our connection with its inherent brutality. The natural world is all about domination, all about killing and eating things. Our romanticism seeks to restore "order" and "harmony" that never existed. Natural systems are always dynamic and amoral. Everything is food for something else. Wasted calories are the only sin.