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Humanitys history is replete with the conquest and conversion of every aspect of the earth. Resistance from the earth is the impetus for our continued destruction.
Miller-Gearhart 1979. The womanization of rhetoric. Womens studies international quarterly, 2, 195-201. Our history is a combination of conquest and conversion. We conquered trees and converted them into a house, taking pride in having accomplished a difficult task. We conquered rivers and streams and converted them into lakes, marvelling in ourselves at the improvement we made on nature. We tramped with our conquering spaceboots on the fine ancient dust of the Moon and we sent our well-rehearsed statements of triumph back for a waiting world to hear. We'd like to think that much as the Moon resisted us, she really down deep, wanted usher masterto tame her and to own her. We did not ask permission of trees, river, Moon. We did not in any way recognize the part of the victim in the process. They were the conquered. We were the conqueror. The more 'fight' they gave the more difficult the task, the more exhilarating was the contest and the more arrogant we became at winning over them. Many of us have heard it too often: 'I like a woman who gives me a little fight.' While there is satisfaction in conquering the real rush comes if she resists and then gives in, if you make her want you, if you convert her, if the trees are big, if you fail first few times to harness the river, if the Moon is hard to get to.

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Humans are a renegade species earth will not endure our rule much longer.
Miller-Gearhart 1979. The womanization of rhetoric. Womens studies international quarterly, 2, 195-201. Somewhere in a dark corner of human history we made a serious evolutionary blunder. We altered ourselves from a species in tune with the Earth, with our home, into, a species that began ruthlessly to control and convert its environment. At that point, when we began to seek to change another entity, we violated the integrity of that person or thing and our own integrity as well. Political speculations about the origin of alienation, theological agitations about the beginning of evil, psychological ruminations about the birth of `the other' and philosophical explorations of the mind-body split-all have shown the futility of trying to determine the cause of our violence as a species. Was it our coming to consciousness? Or some leap from our subjective ego to the recognition of
another subjective ego? The drive to civilization or the drive to death through civilization? Perhaps the creative urge or the birth of language itself or the first time someone claimed private property? Did it occur when men discovered that they had some role in conception and got so carried away that they organized the patriarchy? Is the violence inherent in the nature of the human being, a product of the natural urge to compete or of the hierarchical mindset? Did it occur from something so practical as the planning ahead for survival through the storing of surplus goods? Or from something so ontological as the realization of death and the planning ahead

The evidence is plain that somehow our energy has gone haywire, that we are riding roughshod over the biosphere, that we have no species consciousness, that we produce, reproduce and consume in a constantly expanding pattern that is rapidly depleting our natural resources and driving us to the destruction of each other and of the planet which sustains us. 'Rape of the Earth' is not simply a metaphor, or if it is a metaphor it is one, so strong that it brings into sharp relief both the reality of the female male relationship in Western culture and the separation of ourselves as a species from the original source of our being. The earth seems now to be giving us clear and unmistakeable signals that she will not endure our rule over her much longer, that we are a renegade civilization, a dying civilization which may have passed up its opportunity for survival. We need to come to a halt
against its occurrence? and reawaken ourselves, to refresh and resource ourselves at the lure Wells of, our own origin. Already it may be too late.

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Cannot construe death as bad as it does not actually exist.

Glannon 1993. Epicureanism and death. Monist 76:2, p.222
Perhaps the most frequently cited argument in philosophical discussions of death is the one embodied in the following passage from Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus:

Make yourself familiar with the belief that death is nothing to us, since everything good and bad lies in sensation, and death is to be deprived of sensation.... So that most fearful of all bad things, death, is nothing to us, since when we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not.[1]
From this line of reasoning, Epicurus concludes that it is irrational to fear death, a conclusion that his disciple, Lucretius, buttresses with his materialist conception of persons and his 'mirror-image' argument concerning the temporal and

atomism provides much of the underlying rationale for the thesis that death is nothing to us, what ultimately motivates the arguments that Epicurus and Lucretius advance in its defense is the goal of ataraxia, or peace of mind, which can be attained only through the exercise of cool, dispassionate reason.[3]
evaluative symmetry between prenatal and posthumous nonexistence.[2] While Lucretius reinforces the conclusion of the core argument at (3) with his own argument for the symmetry between past and future. Citing the event of the Carthaginians waging war on Rome, which occurred before Lucretius and his readers were born, he reasons

when we shall not exist, when body and soul,/ of which we are fashioned into one, shall be sundered,/ nothing at all will be able to affect us/ who will then not exist, nor stir our sense."[9] This passage embodies the wall-known 'mirror-image' argument of Lucretius, designed to show that prenatal nonexistence and posthumous nonexistence are on a value-neutral par. That is, neither the time before we exist nor the time after we exist can be good or bad for us precisely because we cannot experience pleasure or pain at either time. Hence the period before we were born and the period after we die are equally value-neutral, a judgment that underwrites the claim that we have no reason to be concerned about death.
"we felt no pain. Just so,

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Humanitys impax are worse than previous extinctions.

Humans destroy habitats and transfer species: two of the best ways to kill the planet.
Walker 2003. Biodiversity update. www.newscientist.com THE best guess of biologists is that species are disappearing between 100 and 1000 times as fast as they were before Homo sapiens arrived. But our impact is different from the mass extinctions of the past. They wiped out whole groups of animals, notably the dinosaurs, whereas humans are picking off individual species. In the past, biodiversity recovered as species spread into new ecological niches, but humans are wiping out niches as well as organisms. Wildlife will have a tough time regenerating.
The winners after the mass extinction that finished off the dinosaurs are about to become the losers. One in four mammal species and

the population of each species is expected to fall by at least a fifth in the next 10 years. Almost all are endangered by human activity. The invertebrates are tipped to dominate the new world order. Only around 0.1 per cent of the 1.6 million
one in eight bird species face a high risk of extinction in the near future: known species are thought to be threatened, though many undiscovered species are likely to be dying out before we even know of their existence.

As global climate change shifts temperatures across the planet, species may not be able follow fast enough. According to UNEP, they will have to migrate 10 times as fast as they did after the last ice age. Many won't make it. Species that do up and leave will move at different rates, breaking up existing communities. At high latitudes, entire forest types are expected to disappear, to be replaced by new ones. During this transition, carbon will be lost to the atmosphere faster than it can be replaced by new growth, accelerating climate change.
The romantic notion of "wilderness" is fast becoming outmoded. Lee Hannah at Conservation International in Washington DC found that human

activity has displaced the natural habitat over two-thirds of the habitable surface of the planet. Much of the undisturbed land is merely rock, ice and blowing sand, already shunned by wildlife. After habitat destruction, the biggest threat to biodiversity is invasion by alien species. These have arrived mainly through trade, tourism and biocontrol. Invasive plant
species already cover 400,000 square kilometres of the US, and are spreading at 12,000 square kilometres a year. At that rate, the whole of the US will fall to outside species within 750 years. Darwin's laboratory, the Galapagos Islands, now has almost as many introduced species as native ones.

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Too late to save biodiversity our destruction will take 10 million years to fix as it is.
Walker 2003. Biodiversity update. www.newscientist.com Even if we stop killing species today, nobody reading this will see wildlife restored to its former glory, says Anne Weil of Duke University in North Carolina. Weil and James Kirchner from the University of California, Berkeley, carried out the first comprehensive analysis of mass extinctions and recoveries. The dent already made in biodiversity will take 10 million years to repair itself.

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Species/habitats are destroyed by the second at the hands of humanity.

Peet 2000. natures destruction, humanitys extinction. www.disinformation.com Humanity is busy killing off the most important eco-systems on the planet at breakneck speed, ignoring all the warning signs, all the evidence of imminent selfdestruction. We are choosing instead the short-term profits garnered by razing the rainforests and old growth forests around the world to the ground.
In 1992 approximately 1700 scientists from around the world, including many living Nobel Laureates, signed a document titled

"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage to the environment and on critical resources . . .and may so alter the world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know."
'World Scientist's Warning to Humanity' in which they stated,

a 240 square mile chunk of virgin rainforest, about the size of the city of Tokyo, Japan, is destroyed every single day. That's 107 acres a minute, or 1.78 acres a second. There remain no more than half of the forests that once covered the earth, as recently as 8000 years ago! Each year almost sixteen million hectares of forest are cut, chopped, bulldozed or burnt away. Virgin rainforests contain 61.8% of all species on earth. Imagine dropping a bomb onto a city the size of Tokyo every day!
According to some figures,

Somewhere between 93 and 1609 rainforest species are going extinct every day due to the destruction caused by lumber, farming, oil, mining, and stripping land for grazing cattle. The amount of rainforest destroyed in 1999 is equal to the total land area of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maryland, Hawaii, and South Carolina, according to figures from
'LoveEarth', a group founded in 1988 to "bring awareness to the devastating effects which humanity is inflicting on the beautiful planet."

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Must evaluate plans plea for life in conjunction with social constructions of death.
Kastenbaum 1996. A world without death? First and second thoughts. Mortality, 1:1. Usually it requires but one learning experience for young children to enhance their understanding of ice cream cone with the realization that it melts. Throughout the broad spectrum of human experience there has developed the realization that all of life melts, i.e. that mortality is a condition of existence. This acknowledgement has been made evident by explicit statements such as For all flesh is as grass. It is also inherent in the energies devoted to erecting symbolic and physical barriers between self and death, both of which were observed during Operation Desert Storm (Umberson & Henderson, 1992). The multifaceted human response also includes the tendency to invest the mortal move with positive qualities, such as the noble death (Droge & Tabor, 1991) sought through suicide and martyrdom. There is an intrinsic mutuality between the concepts of life and death, neither of which are fully comprehensible without the other. Research suggests that concepts of life and death are co-developed from early childhood onward (e.g. Jenkins & Cavanaugh, 19851986; Kastenbaum, 1992; Wass, 1989), and that the challenge of understanding the relationship between being and nonbeing is one of the most significant facets of cognitive and emotional maturation. It is more difficult to make an empirical determination of the interplay between constructions of
life and death in society at large because there is no definitive starting point (such as the birth of the individual) from which to track the process. It would be arbitrary to claim either that constructions of death determine constructions of life, or that causality operates

sociocultural constructions of life and death be studied within the same frame of observation, e.g. what influences one is likely to influence the other.
only in the opposite direction. Instead one might simply propose that

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Death anxiety now exists beyond the level of the individual in legislation/corporation structures. Plan is a product of societys creation of the reality of our deaths.
Kastenbaum 1996. A world without death? First and second thoughts. Mortality, 1:1.
Cross-sections of social history reveal constructions of life and death that are distinctive or even unique to a particular time in the lives of a particular World without death 113 people. For example, death imagery was vivid, frightening, and pervasive in both 14th and 18th century Europe, probably because raw death was a frequent intruder into everyday life (Arie`s, 1981; McManners, 1981). Both periods were also marked by preachings and writings that used the fear of death as an inducement to religious faith. Nevertheless, the nature of these two death-salient cultures also differed appreciably because their high mortality rates and the associated fears were

As the symbols and realities of a culture change, so do its representations of life and death. For example, both the people of the 14th and of the
shaped respectively by late medieval and Enlightenment world views. 18th century would have been startled by Painting the dead: portraiture and necrophilia in Victorian art and poetry (Christ, 1993). In turn, the Victorians would find much that is curious in our current death system, e.g. the mixed blessing of medical technology, and controversy over the definition of deathor deaths (Gervais, 1986; Seifert, 1993). Compiling examples of life/death constructions in various cultural contexts is interesting, but will remain of limited value until connected and guided by theory. One possible framework

all societies attempt to mediate the individuals relationship with mortality. The functions of a death system, whether operating within a tribal or a mass society, include: Warnings and predictions Prevention Caring for the dying Disposing of the dead Social consolidation after death Making sense of death Killing. In practice there are many interconnections and mutual influences among these functions. For
is provided by the concept of the death system (Kastenbaum, 1995). According to this view, example, at a particular phase in his/her illness, a person may be perceived either as a candidate for prevention or for palliative care, depending, in part, on ones conception of death (e.g. enemy or release from suffering). Similarly, the case for physician-assisted death would be seen in a more favourable light if interpreted as part of caring for the dying, and in a less favourable light if

the death systems of many nations are currently undergoing a period of challenge, uncertainty, and change. In the United States, for example, an ongoing series of legislative measures and court decisions have touched upon the definition of death, medical responsibility and patient empowerment in life-or-death decisions, and related issues. The hospice care movement has provided an alternative form of
interpreted as killing. It would appear that terminal care and, in so doing, has led many people to re-examine their assumptions and values. The increasing cost of end-phase care (more people living longer with terminal conditions and having access to more expensive if not necessarily beneficial services) is drawing 114 Robert Kastenbaum unprecedented attention to the dying process from those concerned with public policy and budget

Death-related anxiety, usually considered to be a characteristic of the individual, now seems to have surfaced in legislative corridors and corporate board rooms. At this level, the concern is not so much for ones own confrontation with reality, but with the ambiguities, uncertainties, and options that are arising as life and death move with us into the postmodern world (Walter, 1994; 19941995). Considering the current socio-technological ferment with respect to interpretation of deathrelated phenomena, this could be a useful time to study the ways in which individuals attempt to make sense of their lives and deaths against this background of ambiguity and change. The rise of the counselling movement suggests an increasing readiness to confront issues of
control. loss and death (Davies et al., 1995; Kauffman, 1995).

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Fear of death precludes life. Possessions and attachments to identity cause images of painful death.
Muktidarmha 2003. Death An invitation to life. www.inputmagazine.com There is nothing more certain than death and at the same time, nothing more uncertain than its moment. Most people live as if they were going to live in this world forever. They work very hard with the purpose of gathering a lot of material possessions far beyond the capacity to use them. These possessions become the very cause of trouble, as the mind worries about losing them when the unavoidable final moment comes. The inability to cope with life makes us fearful about death and at the same time our fear to death makes it difficult for us to live a relaxed and creative life.

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The image of painful death is based on material possession and identification.

Muktidarmha 2003. Death An invitation to life. www.inputmagazine.com death is not really a painful physical experience but rather it is a painful mental agony, if we are not trained to experience it, as it is the case with most human beings. Attachments to all different kind of possessions and identification with the little I, are the main cause for the experience of a painful death.
According to great saints and yogis,

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Humanitys materialistic mentality is the driving force behind death as tragedy. Fear of death drives us to come up with master plans to avoid it plan is perfect example.
Muktidarmha 2003. Death An invitation to life. www.inputmagazine.com
Fear is the most disturbing type of emotional mental energy that affects us, weakening our nervous system and all the other systems of our human structure. Fears originate as impressions in our deeper mind due to negative experiences in the past and accompany us for the rest of our lives conditioning our behaviour. They are often pushed under the carpet and not consciously faced, but fears

lurk in our unconscious and sub-conscious minds, creating many of our problems in daily life. From all the fears the most determinant and strongest is the fear of death. It is such a strong fear, that a significant amount of energy goes into trying to avoid death. The scientists of the highly developed countries has been breaking their brains in order to find a way to considerably elongate the life span and to discover the magic for eternal physical youth. Physical immortality is a dream with no possibilities for fulfilment. Everything that has been born is bound to die. sometime in the past we lost a very valuable tradition and our culture became a sense-oriented one. This is why we have an externally developed world but in somehow internally we lack from substance. The secret of lasting cultures and traditions has been a strong and deep spiritual basis and the cause of destruction for the ones that have disappeared, has been the loss of their deep spiritual values. We have enclosed life, reducing it to the five senses and, of course for such a materialistic mentality the experience of death becomes the biggest threat and the most unwanted experience. In this way the most natural event for humanity becomes for us a tragedy that generates strong insecurity and fears.
It seems that

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We should embrace death as another experience of our existence material accumulation has made death something to be feared.
Muktidarmha 2003. Death An invitation to life. www.inputmagazine.com
A balanced confrontation with the unavoidable experience of death is only possible if we have been preparing ourselves for this matter

The quality of our death will be a direct result of the quality of life that we have experienced. For example, an individual whose main interest during his or her lifetime has been only material accumulation, their moment of death will be characterized by a mental difficulty due to identification with the objects they have cherished during the lifetime. In the same way, the person who knows how to live in the present while alive, will be able to be present and embrace death just as another experience of his or her existence without mind projections.
during the course of our life.

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Humans cling to life at all costs regardless of our creation of a poisonous earth. We refuse to embrace the obvious alternative due to bunk notions of our right to be.
Purrbuckets 1996. Mans subliminal god. The church of euthanasia. "The tragedy, the true catastrophe, is that humanity continues..." -Louis Wolfson Somewhere along the line, man got the notion that he, and his life, were essentially positive manifestations of phenomena. Perhaps faced with the elemental void of death, primitive man turned to his immediate experience and clung to it for dear life. Perhaps, in lieu of any abiding reason or causality, man simply felt himself justified to "be." With the inevitable momentum of procreation, each subsequent generation was coddled or bludgeoned into adapting the affirmative stance of their ancestors. Man, even primitive man, has tended to take life for granted. Death was the unnatural thing, the result of malice or mistake, the after-message of the gods, or, in the Christian world, the result of the Fall from the garden... Scientific man now sees that death is the most natural thing in the world, the omega to life's alpha and a necessary precursor to further life. He compulsively examines the inherent biological customs of innumerable flora and fauna, and chronicles in rapt fascination his own, dreary natural cycles. Curiously, though, as man's season becomes more problematic, stalked from within and without by environmental decay and psychological breakdown, he rarely considers his own death as a viable alternative to an existence devoid of meaning or rescue. Contrarily, man seems obsessed with clinging to life at all costs, greedily devouring all resources within reach and pumping out as many clones of himself as possible. He seems determined to affirm his life in a vehement act of self-sabotage, creating in the process a habitat of truly avernal proportions.

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Death is ignored while neurotic life affirmations remain. Here is an allegory to explain this phenomenon from:
Purrbuckets 1996. Mans subliminal god. The church of euthanasia. Some, however, have seen the runaway essence of the whole damn thing: You are among the many passengers of a large bus careening wildly down a twisted mountain road. The bus is being driven by a drunk who is half blind. He and those near the front are also suffering from some sort of intoxication from gaseous emissions. They are also drinking. It is night; not even the moon is out to provide lighting. The main lights of the bus are broken from near-brushes with the steadily deteriorating old guardrails that are the only thing between the bus and a 2500 foot plunge off a sheer face cliff. [18] This allegory illuminates the predicament an enlightened creature encounters when waking one day to find himself woefully alive. Its author, a suicide, sees that the true remedy to this hapless traveler's woes is the one thing that is taboo: You want to stop the bus and get out, but you cannot. To no one else has it occurred to stop the bus. And it seems that those in favor of speeding up the bus are gaining the upper hand... [18] Indeed, not only is death ignored as the way out, but man makes the very thought of it a crime, substituting instead a barrage of neurotic, insular and wholly insupportable life affirmations.

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Our existence is a mistake we hide in hovels of shit to avoid death knowing it will come anyway.
Purrbuckets 1996. Mans subliminal god. The church of euthanasia.
"Human life must be some form of mistake." -Arthur Schopenhauer

Man is a disease. As Schopenhauer once declared, man's existence must be a mistake. He is a germ who thinks himself a king. To any problem, there is only one cause: man, and only one cure: annihilation. That this truth is ignored, mocked and despised is staunch proof of its character. The simple and pure answer to all man's ills is too great for the living coward to ponder, so he hides in hovels of shit and waits for the reaper to take him away after all. How pathetic the sight of a person clinging to life, how laughable the arrogance of the being who prays to the heavens that he is actually glad to be alive!

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Extinction rate soars as birthrate plummets all at the hands of humans.

Wilson 2000. Vanishing before our eyes. Time, 155:17, 29. Biologists who explore biodiversity see it vanishing before their eyes. To use two of their favorite phrases, they live in a world of wounds and practice a scientific discipline with a deadline. They generally agree that the rate of species extinction is now 100 to 1,000 times as great as it was before the coming of humanity. Throughout most of geological time, individual species and their immediate descendants lived an average of about 1 million years. They disappeared naturally at the rate of about one species per million per year, and newly evolved species replaced them at the same rate, maintaining a rough equilibrium. No longer. Not only has the extinction rate soared, but also the birthrate of new species has declined as the natural environment is destroyed. The principal cause of both extinction and the slowing of evolution is the degrading and destruction of habitats by human action. While covering only 6% of Earth's land surface, about the same as the 48 contiguous United States, the rain forests are losing an area about half the size of Florida each year. Damage to intact forests, which occurs when they are broken up into isolated patches or partly logged, or when fires are set, threatens biodiversity still more. With other rich environments under similar assault, including coral reefs (two-thirds degraded) and salt marshes and mangrove swamps (half eliminated or radically altered), the extinction rate of species and races is everywhere rising.

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From the Economist 1998. Sui genocide. 349:8099, 130. Imagine the poetry, the music, of those last few human generations; imagine the moral exaltation of those last few souls, the pregnant richness of sound and light and colour and even of thought in the last months of humanity's twilight. Who would not give everything to know the ineffable sadness and nobility of being among the last? Then, at last, the lights will go out, and the world will begin anew, and the sand will cover our name. That would be a finale worthy of a great race.