destruction?
http://www.theguardi...nster-destruction

Is this all humans are? Diminutive monsters of death and destruction?
New research suggests that there was never a state of grace. We have always been the nemesis of the planet's wildlife
George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 24 March 2014 16.30 EDT

You want to know who we are? Really? You think you do, but you will regret it. This article, if you have any love for the world, will inject you with a venom – a soul-scraping sadness – without an obvious antidote.

The Anthropocene, now a popular term among scientists, is the epoch in which we live: one dominated by human impacts on the living world. Most date it from the beginning of the industrial revolution. But it might have begun much earlier, with a killing spree that commenced two million years ago. What rose onto its hind legs on the African savannahs was, from the outset, death: the destroyer of worlds.

Before Homo erectus, perhaps our first recognisably human ancestor, emerged in Africa, the continent abounded with monsters. There were several species of elephants. There were sabretooths and false sabretooths, giant hyenas and creatures like those released in The Hunger Games: amphicyonids, or bear dogs, vast predators with an enormous bite.

Prof Blaire van Valkenburgh has developed a means by which we could roughly determine how many of these animals there were. When there are few predators and plenty of prey, the predators eat only the best parts of the carcass. When competition is intense, they eat everything, including the bones. The more bones a carnivore eats, the more likely its teeth are to be worn or broken. The breakages in carnivores' teeth were massively greater in the pre-human era.

[. . . It gets worse]

Not only were there more species of predators, including species much larger than any found on Earth today, but they appear to have been much more abundant – and desperate. We evolved in a terrible, wonderful world – that was no match for us.

Homo erectus possessed several traits that appear to have made it invincible: intelligence, co-operation, an ability to switch to almost any food when times were tough, and a throwing arm that allowed it to do something no other species has ever managed – to fight from a distance ( *the increasing distance from which we fight is both a benchmark and a determinant of human history). It could have driven giant predators off their prey and harried monstrous herbivores to exhaustion and death.

[. . . . . .]

Emphasis, etc.

* I have always though that 'hunters'-for- Sport?? epitomized the disdain for Anything-not-Me--but especially re ALL other creatures (despite our interdependence.)
(Then comes the beer-bust, fart-jokes and related testosterone auto-reflexes.)
Modern 'hunting rifles' possess every techno (but servos? ez add-on) to easily track, red-dot and kill the hapless Real-animal who is fun to kill today.

I presumed that mere Industrialization/crass-materialism were the larger culprits over the RMS-suggestible feckless masses, their superstitions and rote behavior.
Much too simplistic, that:

At the Oxford megafauna conference last week, I listened as many of the world's leading scientists in this field mapped out a new understanding of the human impact on the planet. Almost everywhere we went, humankind erased a world of wonders, changing the way the biosphere functions. For instance, modern humans arrived in Europe and Australia at about the same time – between 40 and 50,000 years ago – with similar consequences. In Europe, where animals had learned to fear previous versions of the bipedal ape, the extinctions happened slowly. Within some 10 or 15,000 years, the continent had lost its straight-tusked elephants, forest rhinos, hippos, hyenas and monstrous scimitar cats.

In Australia, where no hominim had set foot before modern humans arrived, the collapse was almost instant. The rhinoceros-sized wombat, the ten-foot kangaroo, the marsupial lion, the monitor lizard larger than a Nile crocodile, the giant marsupial tapir, the horned tortoise as big as a car – all went, in ecological terms, overnight.

Well, we've known since just past tyke-hood that there are many Assholes amongst the adults (and those who never graduate to that stage.)
These data suggest that--it didn't take technology to make us perpetually imagine selves as Siva: Look, I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds
--Oppie (via the Gita, et seq.)

So I must oppose Hawking's 'wish'--that we escape to other worlds! (when this one has been ravished beyond resuscibility--that which we race towards, full-speed.)
Never-mind the other cosmological factors we can extrapolate, too.
I fervently hope that, should there be other creatures 'abroad?--a very-large Broad'--that they are nothing like us/and are also advanced enough to SHUN/also quarantine-forever
this species.

'Course if they are Like Us/are they exceptional? or ... The Standard Devolution everywhere??
Which evidence: would open a Whole New definition of Cosmos-schmertz as would drive any remaining Sanity into a bat-shit-grade implosion.

Fingers are thus crossed: that we be Outliers. And are never allowed to commute.
We'unses are Stuck with being The Incorrigibles, these data strongly suggest.
(Kinda makes extinction a treat, eh?) Weird: what a Fantastic Planet this place might have been.. ...
The Fickle-math-finger of n! at Work?

Can we now answer that opening query, You want to know who we are?
Ain't no emoticon for That 'answer'.

Hyenas have some lovely qualities IIRC (I just can't think of one of them, now--and maybe the author was daft in the first place.)

(Not sure if it would be good for my psyche to find out lots more about parasites--especially about just How? omnipresent they are.)
Then add-in the many pounds of microorganisms inside us, jot down some worldwide numbers (maybe those were in Life on Man?)
...sprinkle with essence of Jewel Wasp and
.
.
. run screaming from the room; choose IV-feeding Only and ponder that, 'we' are Never Alone
(nor may we count-on being in-charge of our alleged-own machinery, on any given day.
Gaea must be a Sadist, I say!

Gently prised a tick from one of the cats, the other day. Confirmed I had Not broken off its ugly little head, as it tried to walk away.
It resides in a 10 ml vial in the freezer (in case there should be {sigh} symptoms..) So far so good.

Thanks-I----think; not Nice to realize that the regal, 'We are not amused' is, merely literal :-/

BUT: Does this absolve our kleptocracy and its legions of gullible, infested-Supporters ... from their Crimes?
I say Nope; can fight Crime on only one scale-of-abstraction at a time.

(People who have never seen the little book, which opens with an aerial view of a couple having a picnic on the grass.. each page being magnified by 10X,
from atomic nucleus to--the pair--to the size of known-universe (that finite-but-unbounded Thing):

Ain't got no Scale and Relativity (or, with the Jewel Wasp: any sense of the Recursive.)