The longer I live, the more I despise the human species; we are not Homo sapiens, we are Homo naziens, mass torturers and murders of life.
Pro-“lifers” are some of the worst mass murderers, notably those driven by religion and hatred.
We know our greed, over population and pollution is destroying life, yet we continue raping and murdering unimpeded.
The Great Auk and the Culture That’s Killing the World, And Towards a New Culture That Listens, and Resists by Justin McAffee, Oct 25, 2025, Collapse Curriculum
I do not pretend to have all the answers. I write about collapse, about resistance, about the urgent need for alternative ways of living… but I do so as a student, not a sage. The deeper I go into these questions, the more I encounter my own limits. I’m still learning how to see clearly through the layers of ideology, still unlearning the lies I’ve been taught about progress, freedom, and civilization. There is much I don’t know.
But there is one thing I know with absolute certainty: the culture I was born into (the culture of industrial civilization) is murderous. It is unsustainable by its very design. It devours land, air, water, and bodies, and it calls this consumption “growth.” It silences the world it depends on, turning living beings into commodities, turning ecosystems into dead zones, and calling the aftermath “development.” It is a culture at war with life itself.
One needn’t look far for evidence. Take the Great Auk. A magnificent, flightless seabird once native to the North Atlantic, driven not to extinction, but to execution. The last of its kind was strangled to death on a barren island in 1844 while trying to protect its final egg, which was then crushed under a boot. It was killed not for food or survival, but for collection, for science, for curiosity, for ownership. Like so many other beings, it was murdered because our culture saw it as an object, not as kin.
Most of my fellow scientists appall me with their cruel abusive ways of study and work. One example: Telemetry, chasing, drugging, capturing, invading with devices, then tracking other beings is an unforgivable invasion and disruption to their lives and lives of their offspring.
This is not an isolated story. It is the pattern. The Auk is joined by a chorus of the disappeared, forests that once stretched unbroken for thousands of miles, rivers that once ran clear and full, wolves, whales, frogs, butterflies, entire peoples. Each disappearance carries the same fingerprints. Each silencing echoes the same ideology: that life exists to be used, controlled, or discarded.I blame religion for dementing the minds of humans into believing they are king of the world, master of other species to do with what they want, same as the religious propaganda leading men to mass abuse, rape, and murder women and kids
Whatever else we debate (strategies, tactics, visions for the future) we cannot waver on this truth: the world we live in is being systematically destroyed by the dominant culture, and unless that culture is confronted and dismantled, the killing will continue.Until we kill all of ourselves which is coming faster than anyone can imagine
The Great Auk: A Life Once Common as the Sea
Penguins in Europe? Who would have thought? Yet there was a time when the Great Auk was everywhere. Not just a rare curiosity on some remote rock, but a presence thick as waves, steady as tides, numbering in the millions in North America and Europe.
Early sailors spoke of islands so covered with them that one could walk from one end to the other stepping only on their backs. Their cries mingled with the surf; their bodies filled the air with the rich smell of salt and oil and life. They were, by all accounts, unafraid of us. Why would they be? For millennia, nothing had ever hunted them. They had no reason to run.
When I read those old accounts, I imagine standing among them, their black-and-white bodies gleaming in the mist, their eyes bright and direct. There is something unbearable in that image, something that cuts through time. To think of such abundance, and then to think of the silence that followed, is to glimpse the scale of what has been lost, not only a species, but a whole way of being in the world.I grow ever more horrified every year, at the silence on my hour long walks. Not a bird to be seen, or heard. Some spring walks are even silent now. Still most humans don’t observe it, and if they did, don’t give a shit.
The slaughter began slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the way destruction often does. A few taken for meat by passing sailors, a few more for feathers, oil, and eggs. Then came trade, and with it, scale. Ships arrived to strip entire colonies bare in a single season. Their eggs were trampled underfoot as men filled barrels with salted flesh. The Auks’ very tameness… what we might call their trust, was used against them. They were clubbed and strangled where they stood, unable to flee, their bodies piling up on the rock.
By the early 1800s, they were already gone from Europe. Within decades, gone from the Western Atlantic. And still, the killing went on… not for food now, not even for use, but for collection. The few survivors were hunted for museums and private cabinets, as if the culture that killed them also needed to own the evidence of its crime.
The last two were caught on Eldey Island in 1844. When they struggled, the men held them down. When they cried out, no one listened. When it was over, an egg lay crushed beneath a boot.
What haunts me is not just the violence, but the structure of it… the way it followed a pattern I now recognize everywhere. The Auks were not killed out of hunger or desperation; they were exterminated by an economy that sees living beings as stock to be liquidated. The people who killed them were not monsters; they were employees, sailors, consumers. They were us. And the logic that drove them to take until nothing remains, has never gone away. It has only become more efficient, more global, more mechanized.
When I think of the Great Auk now, I think of oceans empty of whales, forests without songbirds, skies stripped of insects. I think of how easily abundance can become absence when we live as though the world exists for our use.Religion is at fault for that. It’s hideous for anyone or any religion to teach that humans are the supreme being on earth, and that god created all for us to rape, murder and destroy. The Auk’s extinction is not just history… it is a warning. And I fear we have not heard it.Even if humans did/do hear it, our ravenous species does not care. We stupidly are easily propagandized to believe God will fix all our rapes, destruction and pollution. Not!
Not Extinct, But Murdered: The Auk as a Cultural Casualty
The Great Auk did not simply “go extinct.” That word—extinction—is too clean, too passive, too scientific. It implies inevitability, like an unfortunate natural outcome in the grand cycle of life. But this was no accident of evolution or shift in climate. The Great Auk was hunted, butchered, and driven from existence by our culture. What happened to the Auk was not extinction… it was murder.
And that distinction matters.
It matters because how we speak of the dead shapes how we understand our own culpability. Saying the Auk “went extinct” absolves us. It masks the hands that gripped its neck, the boots that crushed its final egg, the ledger sheets that tallied up its corpses as inventory. It conceals the systemic violence behind euphemisms and abstractions. “Extinction” hides the killers. “Murder” names them.
This culture (industrial civilization) is not a neutral backdrop to the Auk’s story. It is the primary actor. It is the worldview that renders living beings into resources, that severs us from kinship with the wild world, that speaks the language of extraction fluently and silences all others. The Auk was simply in the way of profits, of fashion, of scientific curiosity. And so it was removed, as so many others have been, with the cold logic of economic utility.
What makes this more harrowing is that the Great Auk was abundant. Not fragile. Not rare. It existed in the millions. Its range spanned continents. It had weathered ice ages and ocean storms… but it could not withstand us. And if a species so numerous, so well-adapted, could be wiped out in a matter of decades by market forces and colonial appetites, what hope is there for the more delicate threads of the living world?
This is the deeper tragedy… not just the death of a species, but what it reveals about the culture that killed it. The Auk’s fate was not the result of evil men doing evil things. It was the predictable outcome of a system that reduces everything to inputs and outputs. A system that views the world not as a community to belong to, but as a warehouse to pillage.
The Great Auk is gone. But the culture that killed it is still very much alive.
No Anomaly… The Great Auk’s Fate Is Ongoing
The Great Auk’s story is not exceptional. It is not some dark footnote in the past that we can learn from and safely move beyond. It is a pattern that continues, accelerates, and intensifies with each passing year. To treat it as an anomaly is to deny the systemic nature of the violence. It is not that we once killed the Great Auk and now we’ve learned better. It is that we have never stopped.
Today, we witness the same erasure of species after species, habitat after habitat, voice after voice silenced in the name of civilization. Amphibians vanish from streams poisoned by pesticides. Entire migratory paths are erased by dams, roads, and concrete sprawl. Insects, the unseen laborers of every living system, collapse under the weight of industrial agriculture. And it’s not just nonhumans. Indigenous peoples notably Palestinians and their neighbours being slaughtered by United Nazi States of Israel to steal their beautiful lands, oil and gas and other resourceswho resist the destruction of their homelands are displaced, criminalized, or killed. Poor communities choked by pollution are treated as collateral damage. The same logic that murdered the Auk is still active, still lethal.
“That’s the price of progress” we are told. That the deaths are unfortunate but necessary. That these sacrifices are the price of a better future. But a future built on erasure is no future at all. It’s a slow-motion collapse expressed through the vision of rose-colored glassesand gallingly hideous rape religions.
What makes it even more insidious today is the scale. The men who clubbed the Great Auk were sailing wooden ships. Now we have fleets of factory trawlers scraping the ocean floor into lifeless deserts. We have mining operations visible from space. Oil pipelines that stretch across continents. Algorithms that decide which forest gets razed next. The violence has become abstract, institutionalized, automated. But the victims are still made of flesh, fur, feather, and blood.
And perhaps what’s most chilling is how normalized it has all become.Not to me, but I avoid religion like the raping plague that it is. I see humans at bottom of all species. We are vile mass rapists and murderers, and will never stop because of our religion rotted souls. If there is a god, which I believe there is not, humans are god’s most evil mistake We have learned to look away. We have learned to accept empty forests, silent springs, polluted rivers, and mass extinction as the background noise of modern life. The killing goes on, and most of us barely flinch.Since I was a child, I’ve found life hideous torture, not just because of the many rapes I endured by hideous married Christian white men, but also because I find destruction of everything (including a livable climate) by our species unbearable to witness. Everything I love has been destroyed by humans. Everything. It’s unforgivable. My life has been laden with grief, day after day after day, grieving Homo naziens’ anti-life rule by religion.
But if we are to have any future worth living in, we must name this for what it is. Not anomaly. Not tragedy. Not accident.
THIS IS OUR CULTURE.
Our culture is a way of being that cannot stop devouring the world.
The Great Auk serves as a mirror held up to the present.
Towards a New Culture
Like I mentioned at the beginning, I don’t have all the answers. But if this culture is killing the planet (and it is) then we must begin to imagine and build a culture that doesn’t.Religions and their evil propaganda and lies will never allow it. Not just reform this one around the edges. Not just tinker with its emissions or improve its efficiency. But dismantle it. Leave behind its death-drive. And replace it with something rooted in life.That’s anti religious and the arrogant sods running religions and raping kids, will never allow reason, compassion, conservation and protection of others species, air, lands and waters … something sensible and “rooted in life.”
What would such a culture look like?
To begin with, it would be a culture that listens. A culture that recognizes that the world is full of voices… not metaphorical ones, but real voices: of birds, rivers, trees, wind, stone, soil. Voices that speak in rhythms and patterns, that warn, that offer, that plead. A culture that doesn’t silence these voices, doesn’t reduce them to background noise, but enters into relationship with them. A culture that honors limits. That asks permission. That knows that taking a life is a sacred act, not a transaction.
It would also be a culture of resistance.I’ve been resisting humanity’s hideousness all my life. All it got me, was raped endlessly, frac’ed for years and now to be frac’d for years more, and shunned by many.
Because we’re not starting from scratch. We’re living under a system that will not voluntarily stop its destruction. We’re not waiting for better values to slowly trickle in through education or policy reform. Anyone who cares about the planet, who cares at all about life beyond their own heartbeat, who hears even the faintest call of the more-than-human world, must confront the truth: this system will not change unless we force it to.
Resistance is a lot of things. One of those things is refusal. Refusing to participate in the lies. Refusing to call this way of life “normal.” Refusing to act like shopping and screen time are acceptable substitutes for community, for connection, for meaning.
Resistance means saying no to the destruction, and yes to something older, deeper, wilder.And that is why Palestinians resist Israel’s crimes, genocide, and thefts.
This will not come from politicians. It will not come from CEOs or think tanks or tech startups. It will come from people like you and me who decide to turn away from the machinery of death and start listening again. Listening to the land. Listening to the grief. Listening to the rage. And listening for what still wants to live, if we would only stop killing it.
We don’t need to have all the answers.
But we need to turn toward life, and away from this culture of death.And, stopping the war on marginalized populations and women and girls must happen first. Human population must be reduced. Abortion must be legal globally; human over populating everywhere is insane. Women and girls must be allowed birth control, notably if in rape religions. But, too many men, thanks to misogyny taught via religions, hate women and girls, hate women and girls having any rights including to our own bodies, and love rape, so over population will continue destroying life on earth.
We need a culture that does not mourn the Great Auk only in museums, but hears it still, in the wind over the rocks, asking us what will we do to protect what remains.
Whatever you and I have to learn, let’s begin and continue to learn it. Whatever we have to do to stop the murder of the planet, let us do it. Thank you for being on this journey with me.
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