I have come before you today to speak on the most insidious form of discrimination eating away at the moral fiber of Humanity today. This is the parent form of discrimination that is the root cause of Racism, Ageism, Sexism, and Speciesism: Familiarism. Outside of the despised minority who actively embrace The Other, the rest of us have a noxious tendency to appreciate and preserve that which is most like ourselves and which we're used to having around, and to dislike, avoid, degrade, ignore, and destroy that which is different or distant. The more that something is outside the sphere of our usual awareness, the more likely we are to disregard the quality of its existence.

"Friends of Deer" react with horror to the idea of the park system's thinning of the growing herds which are eating themselves into winter starvation. Deer are warm, hairy, and harmless, as are their supporters. But ask these same people if they use disinfectants to clean their kitchens and bathrooms and you'll get a hardy "Of course!" Bacteria are microscopic, monocellular, and reproduce by division. We aren't and we don't. By the precepts of Familiarism, bacteria are eligible for genocide while deer must be protected from ecologically sound population control. Of course, the most ecologically sound approach would be to reintroduce wolves into the Metro Park system. But there's a slim possibility that wolves might pick off a few toddlers. Toddlers, being small humans, are more like us than wolves, so our ingrown Familiarism keeps us from restoring the Balance of Nature.

We love children, puppies, and kittens. We dislike snakes and toads. We're disgusted by cockroaches and maggots. We love mushroom omelets, but who'd eat an Athlete's Foot omelet? That's the difference between macroscopic and microscopic fungi. Familiarism rears its ugly head! Other than the members of the Jain religion, we show blatant disregard for the quality of life of things too small to see. We test our weapons on pieces of ground or in the ocean where the lifeforms are different enough from ourselves that we don't have to care about them. We chop weeds because they aren't our domesticated vegetable lifeforms. We build our houses from the bones of trees and the bones of the Earth itself, and never think twice of the suffering inflicted on the original owners and inhabitants of those materials.

We are grief-stricken when a family member dies. The end of "Old Yeller" brings a tear to most people's eye, as do the smog banks over Denver, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. But see a nova in the night sky and you'll remark on the Beauty of the Universe. That's a whole star dying out there! A star that may have planets with high civilizations that are doomed to instant incineration or slow freezing. But they're lightyears away and we don't know them, so why should we care?

I have half-empty containers of left-over food in my refrigerator that have been there for months. These are supporting bacterial and fungal colonies of such complexity that I'm sure they've developed constitutional law and a powerful environmental movement. I'm torn between leaving them there until the entropy in their small systems is maxed out or removing them to the compost heap where they'd experience many dangers but have whole new worlds to explore. Taking responsibility for your impact on all of the lifeforms whose lives you intersect could well become a full-time job. At one end of the scale, you have to worry about making peace with the microorganisms that are trying to kill you. At the other, you have to wonder if ecological disaster isn't just part of Nature's plan for the progression of species on the planet. If the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out, we wouldn't have had a chance to evolve. If we are ethical caretakers of the planet and avoid annihilation, then our potential successors will never get their day in the sun.

So... Go out and schmooze with a slime mold. Party with a pathenogen. Make nice with your nightmares. Eat or be eaten. Eat and be eaten. Ultimately, we have no choice. It's Nature's way.

With a commentary for WCPN, this is Marc Myers.

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