Falling Short

When the Killing’s Done,” by T.C. Boyle, 2011

This book is about animal rights, invasive species and the conflict between the two.  It is fundamentally a battle between a driven National Park’s Service spokesperson/biologist and a rich and reckless PETA-type extremist.  It is set in the Pacific Ocean strip between Santa Barbara and Oxnard, California, including Montecito and Ventura – places where the Channel Islands National Park can be seen on a clear day.  Their desolate beauty is the focus of the book.  The islands intertwine with the characters’ lives, along with a pretty sad history of their own. As Boyle shows, the ocean and the weather care little for the puny lives of humans.  Shipwrecks.  Dead animals.  Failed businesses.  Fatal accidents.  Confrontations and thoughtlessness. 

Thump!  Just dark cultural humor?

Boyle is sort of a Tom Wolfe with a deeper take.  He always writes about the somewhat ridiculous lives and foibles of upscale liberals or counter-culture types.  Which is a political decision in itself, as right-wingers seem invisible to Boyle.  Here two types of liberals are pitted against one another.  His accurate and detailed descriptions include every current middle-class lifestyle reference he can, including their meal and clothing choices.  For ‘laughs,’ the lead characters are vegetarian and pescatarian.  The almost impossible task set before the Park Service is restoring the Channel Islands to their original state before humans – that is before rats and wild boar were let onto the islands.  These invasive animals are to be killed in the interest of the many bird species that breed there, and this sets up a conflict with a local animal rights group.

Struggles to revive species or against invasive plants and animals are going on all over the country, forcing trade-offs and battles.  But they are only a small part of the overall picture.  My ‘beef’ with Boyle is that his cultural micro-view trivializes the bigger issue of species extinction, turning it into a deadly comedy, as if this micro-brew of PETA types flailing away at the Park Service was the story.  Cruel factory farming of animals, cow feedlots, pesticides, over-hunting and over-fishing, zoos, circuses and aquariums, fast food, mono-cultures, fur, animal agriculture itself – all are part of a massive extractive profit system working nature and animals over, like huge masticating jaws.  Animals and fish are commodities to be ‘harvested.’  Just as human labor is a commodity to be ‘used.’  At this point, animal agriculture threatens the planetary environment through global warming and every living thing on earth.  This is not hyperbole.

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This is a chronicle of the power of nature and unintended consequences, along with human idiocy.  Boyle always writes a cracking story, no matter his topic.  As to what side to take in this battle, the reader is pulled from one to another.  But the fanaticism of the rage-oholic animal rights activist comes in for the most fire by Boyle and anyone paying attention. Yet can the earth go back to a time before humans, as intended for the Channel Islands by the Park Service?  Perhaps in small, localized ways.  But ‘invasive species’ – whether plant, tree, animal, insect or fish – will multiply as capital chugs along, the climate changes, humans continue to multiply and the modern ‘Pangaea’ continues to function.  It is only with an overall response based on eco-socialism and transitional ideas like the incomplete ‘New Green Deal’ that the whole process can be slowed or stopped.

It certainly won’t happen through the National Park Service as it currently exists, or blinkered outfits like PETA.   

Ref:  The author has been to the Channel Islands twice, which some call 'the Galapagos of the U.S.'  Go!

Reviews below related to this subject:  “Budding Prospects” (Boyle); “Back to Blood” (Wolfe); “The Sixth Extinction” (Kolbert); “Green is the New Red,” (Potter); “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” (Berkoff); “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (Reeves); “The Vegetarian” (Kang); "Fear of an Animal Planet" (Hribal).

And I bought it at Normal Books, Athens Georgia

The Cultural Marxist

March 25, 2019