THE
FOREIGN POLICY OF ANTS (2006)
It’s a hot mid-summer afternoon, and the insects are on the
march in my back yard. Small red ants are all over my
newspaper and me.
Human
beings may have more in common with the six-legged freaks
than we think, according to Harvard biologist Edward O.
Wilson. "The foreign policy of ants can be summed up as
follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and
genocidal annihilation of neighbouring colonies, wherever
possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably
end the world in a week."
Who knows, ants may even have their very own Axis of
Weevils.
The red ants are crawling all over my paper, and I flick
them off. A photograph on the front page shows the smoking
ruins of a Beirut suburb. I read that the US is committed
to defend Israel, and Bush is making noises about Syria,
Iran’s ally. The rockets striking Israeli towns are said to
have been made by the latter. US neocons have been itching
for a confrontation with the new Saddam,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and
may soon get to scratch. With the US and Canada in
geopolitical lockstep, there is little doubt that any
expansion of the US war in the Mideast will involve
Canadian troops.
We hardly need to connect the dots. The picture is starting
looking like an adolescent’s stipple drawing of the planet
blowing up.
In the latest geopolitical flareup, the mainstream media
has made much of the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by
Hezbollah, but paid relatively less attention to the real
flashpoint in this conflict: the shelling of a beach in
northern Gaza, resulting in the deaths of seven
Palestinians. (On June 29, the liberal Israeli newspaper
Ha’aretz reported “the detention
of Hamas parliamentarians in the early hours of Thursday
morning had been planned several weeks ago,” well preceding
the Hezbollah
kidnapping of two Israeli troops.)
It sometimes seems that nature’s grandest experiment, the
monkey with the big brain, has gone terribly wrong. Homo
sap appears to be stumbling towards World War 3, with all
instinctual stupidity of a conga line of carpenter ants
heading for a CIL trap.
Ants are obsessed with the three r’s: resources, real
estate, and reproduction. We’re not so different from the
family Formicidae. For all the official cant about
liberation and democracy, it’s now obvious to anyone with
the brain God gave geese that the invasion in Iraq was all
about oil — perhaps not as commody per se, but as the
lifeblood of the US petrodollar, without which the American
economy would collapse. In November of 2000, Saddam Hussein
stopped accepting US dollars for Iraqi oil. In 2004, Iran
has announced plans for an oil bourse of their own. In both
cases, boilerplate from US Conservative foundations and
media outlets promptly followed — talk of dire threats from
WMDs, the need for regime change, and the military option.
Throughout history, the cannon fodder on opposing sides are
usually no more aware of the big picture than the red ants
I watch crawling across the front page. Time after time,
the expendable drones march off under the sway of those
age-old pheromones; national pride, religious fervour, and
jingoistic fear.
The big difference between human beings and ants is that we
wage war on the environment for the same reasons we wage
war on our own kind. Even the wildest, most inaccessible
places on Earth, such as the Amazon basin, continue to
shrink under the assault of global mining, oil and agribiz
industries. The national security mindset ultimately rests
on the resource interests it defends around the globe.
In his book on ants, The
Earth Dwellers, Erich
Hoyt paints an affectionate portrait of the gentle
entomologist Edward O. Wilson, a scholar who seems more at
home with insects than people. Wilson found his love for
living things in ”the gospel according to Charles Darwin,”
and refers to the tropical rainforest “as a cathedral, a
place where the biologist makes pilgrimages, goes to
worship and gape in wonder at the full flowering of
evolution, the place where life is more diverse than
anywhere else on Earth.”
A world expert on biodiversity, Wilson made headlines in
the nineties with his controversial contention that we are
killing off up to 25,000 species a year through our
destruction of habitats.
Whatever the actual numbers for species decline, if we
cannot reverse our murderous mania for resources and real
estate, we’ll have only one small piece of knowledge for
comfort: after we’re gone, the planet’s other inhabitants
will have the place to themselves.
Hummers and hybrids will crumble into rust, as weeds,
flowers and vines consume the streets of our once-great
cities. For the remaining resource-raiders, it will be a
field day. We may be history, but ants will get to
experience the ultimate picnic.
