The Laws of Nemo
- Paul Watson
- il y a 6 jours
- 6 min de lecture
By Captain Paul Watson
“I am not what you call a civilized man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not therefore obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!”
— Captain Nemo, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Captain Nemo was the great fictional hero of my childhood. I envied not only his freedom to roam the submarine realm, but also his detachment from the madness of his own species. He could choose between siding with people or with the wild, and he understood that the honest freedom of wilderness was preferable to the contradictions and deceptions of the anthropocentric corpus iuris civilis—the human‑written body of law that places humankind above all else.
Nemo grasped a hard truth: the very trait that lifted us to dominance over nature is the trait that may destroy us—our extraordinary ability to adapt. It helped us survive an ice age, spread across every continent, exterminate species that stood in our way, and reshape landscapes that did not conform to our desires.
In our quest for conquest, we have anthropocentrized the planet, imposing upon it the unilateral laws of humankind. We have stolen the homes of countless species and claimed them for ourselves. Nowhere is too deep, dry, low, wet, high, or forsaken to be invaded and “developed” for our profit and pleasure.
We forget that humans without animals and plants are humans without anything. Life is interdependence. Every extinction, every local extirpation, every acre of habitat lost loosens our grip on ecological reality and draws us closer to our own demise.
We have survived wars, famines, plagues, disasters, and personal tragedies by relying on certain adaptive skills—perhaps too well.
First, we forget easily. Forgetting helps us move on.
Second, we live in the present with little regard for long‑term consequences. That lets us take what we want, when and where we want it.
These traits served us when our numbers were small and resources abundant. If we depleted one valley, we moved to the next, and the plundered habitat eventually healed.
We do not see one species, but competing subspecies of the same
A third skill we share with wolves and hyenas: we hunt and cooperate in packs. Our packs became tribes, then nations. But tribalism fails when there are no frontiers left. The pastures are all occupied, yet we cling to the illusion of separateness. This separateness breeds conflict and prejudice. We do not see one species—Homo sapiens—but competing subspecies of the same.
Today we divide ourselves with colored flags and draw geometric absurdities across lands and seas, raising barriers between people. We purchase passes from governments to cross lines that do not exist in nature. Each border is another larger prison where new laws assert control.
This is why I love the sea. Only on the briny deep—beyond the stench of land and man—does any remnant of freedom remain. On land, existence demands conformity to imposed rules. Confined, we adapt to diminishment. We accept impoverishment as normal, and because we forget so readily, we convince ourselves it has always been this way. We tell ourselves our lives are richer and safer than our ancestors’, and we project an even richer future for our children.
Consider this: in 1965, had I predicted that within thirty years people would buy water in bottles—and that it would cost more than gasoline—I’d have been laughed from the room. Yet we accepted it without noticing our adaptation. We forgot the era when water ran clear from taps, wells, and mountain streams.
Once, we didn’t wonder what poisons tainted our meat and fish, or what pesticides, herbicides, and radiation bathed our vegetables. We’ve forgotten that era too.
And so, we continue, accepting less and calling it more. We trade quality for quantity, and the sheer quantity of human lives cheapens their quality.
For those who can’t accept this and see no escape, frustration, anger, or madness loom. We dismiss each atrocity as an aberration, forgetting that aberrations are becoming the norm. Daily violence against nonhuman life—animals, plants, habitats—is so ubiquitous that we accept it as part of the “environment” we’ve adapted to. We forget the multitude of beings our single species has erased from Earth forever.
We forget that belugas swam Long Island Sound a mere three centuries ago. Today, a few hundred cling to life in a St. Lawrence tributary, the remainder confined to the high Arctic and still hunted. We forget that walruses once hauled out on the shores of Nova Scotia and Maine; not one survives now in the Atlantic. We forget that “polar bear” is a recent name; two centuries ago it was simply the white bear, common through eastern Canada into New England—now confined to the far North.
We remember the slaughter of tens of millions of bison on the Western Plains, but who recalls the eastern bison that migrated between the Great Lakes and Georgia—larger, coal‑black, and destroyed by 1825? We forget the Oregon bison, gone by 1850. Few in Oregon even know it existed.
The oceans fared no better. Steller’s sea cow—the leviathan of sirenians—was exterminated within years of its discovery, gone by 1767. The sea mink vanished by 1880. The Atlantic gray whale—once the “scrag”—was wiped out so thoroughly it came to be considered a myth; before it disappeared, the Basques erased the Biscayan right whale. The Atlantic, once called the Sea of Whales, has watched centuries of butchery. And the killing goes on—minke whales in Norway, pilot whales in the Faroes, endangered fin whales in Iceland.
And fish? Hundreds of species vanished in the last century alone—Parras pupfish, Utah Lake sculpin, Lake Titicaca orestias, harelip sucker, thicktail chub, New Zealand grayling—names most will never hear. Even as commercially prized fish hover on the brink, we reach for scapegoats. We blame seals, birds, the weather—anything but ourselves.
Nature is an abstraction in our value system
We drift toward our demise like innocents, absolving ourselves with faith in either God or technology. If we don’t kill directly, we kill indirectly—through toxic pollution. The orca, belatedly adored after persecution, is not safe from our fouling of the seas; pods in the Pacific Northwest are collapsing under pollution, their numbers falling. And what do we do? We count dorsal fins from the beach, fill notebooks, and beg governments for help—while too few lift a finger to stop the harm.
The late misanthropic writer Edward Abbey warned: “It is not enough to understand the natural world: the point is to defend and preserve it.” Yet we who do not hesitate to slaughter thousands in defense of oil will do little to defend the wild.
Why? Because nature is an abstraction in our value system. If it were not, we would fight for it—kill for it, as we have killed for every anthropocentric belief under the sun. We have butchered millions in the name of the Prince of Peace and assured ourselves our gods approved.
This is the world Nemo fled—a world whose anthropocentric values have only intensified since Verne’s day. Verne wrote before a century of the bloodiest wars, before the human population surged into the billions. He wrote when Jack the Ripper’s six victims defined a notorious serial killer; today routine industrial slaughter of life—human and nonhuman—unfolds at scales once unimaginable.
The laws of ecology do not bend to rhetoric or borders:
The Law of Finite Growth: all growth has limits—the carrying capacities of ecosystems.
The Law of Biodiversity: ecosystem resilience depends on the diversity of species within it.
The Law of Interdependence: our survival is utterly dependent on other species.
No species has ever survived long while violating these laws. Overpopulation erodes diversity and habitat, leaving fewer species and failing systems—until the crash comes. And a crash is not an abstraction: it is starvation, competition, pandemics, thirst, and the brutal inward turn of humanity.
Leonard Cohen wrote, “We are lost among our suffering and our pleasures are the seal.” We have built an industry to distract us from real threats. Keep us entertained, keep us amused—but don’t make us face that our greatest enemy may be ourselves. Even the internet’s “reality” will fade into irrelevance when Earth’s capacity to support us is spent.
This is where Nemo was headed—back to a world where the laws of ecology still had meaning—and he did as Abbey urged: he defended nature against humanity. In the end, he failed. Perhaps those of us who follow the wake of the Nautilus will fail too. But if we do, we will not go as T. S. Eliot’s hollow men—“not with a bang but a whimper.” We will at least have resisted.
The only legacy that endures is not what we create but what we spare
As a biocentric conservationist, I worry less about the next hundred years than the next thousand—or million. A millennium is a blink to Earth. One thing is certain: the planet’s lands and oceans will abide long after our memory is gone. Our stone will crumble, our iron will rust to dust, our art will rot, our music will fade.
The only legacy that endures is not what we create but what we spare. Like Nemo, I believe the noblest endeavor is the preservation of species and biodiversity. A bird or insect saved today may evolve into tomorrow’s continuum of life. That is an achievement measured in eons.
Captain Nemo knew his allegiance lay with the creatures of the sea and the laws of ecology. He rejected the lex scripta that puts profit and property before life, nations before nature.
That was Nemo’s law—and perhaps, just perhaps, he was right. And the rest of us are wrong. It’s worth thinking about.
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