i admire rats and cockroaches

I often think about how the animals we find the grossest will probably outlive us. I’m talking about rats and cockroaches mostly, but maybe also crows — I feel less certain about them for some reason, I guess because they seem less physically robust than rats and cockroaches, but I think they might tick the same boxes.

I think the key quality of all of these immensely hard-to-eradicate creatures is the ability to adapt and exploit whatever apex species are flourishing. Like, no matter what humans are doing in terms of housing, food, water, sewage, etc, rats and roaches find a way to tap into it. It doesn’t matter if it’s the desert or tundra, forest or city, coastal or inland, whatever. Wherever humans are, the vermin are also, and they’re doing great.

What I think makes them so much better than us is they don’t insist on being at the top of the food chain. They aren’t in a constant struggle with the landscape and the creatures around them, fighting for complete domination. They prefer to avoid the spotlight, to scuttle about in the shadows, to ride the coattails of the bigger species who do all the hard work in terms of gathering food and creating great living spaces. That’s actually really admirable. Sure, it’s not very noble or elegant, but it’s fucking smart. I bet if humans didn’t have so much pride, didn’t care so much about what others might think, we’d be better at this kind of thing too.

But if and when times get really rough (Mad Max-style), I think it’s going to be the people who can emulate vermin the best who will survive. It’s going to be that ability to shed pride and be content with whatever scraps are found, that will ensure their survival. Or their best chances at it, anyway.

Wasps are just fine by me. People freaking out about them are not fine by me.

At the end of every summer, I get really fucking annoyed with people swatting and shooing and running around ducking their heads like someone is lobbing rocks at them, all because of a few wasps. Nothing ruins a meal on a deck when your company can’t keep up a conversation due to their sputtering and panicking that a swarm of wasps is going to carry them off.

Wasps don’t just fly around looking for people to kill. They’re not antihumanistic (although they would certainly be justified in feeling that way, I believe). They’re just doing their damn jobs, which include pollination, hunting and eating insect pests that destroy fruit we eat, and eating waste and garbage. We need those things.

And birds, bats, reptiles, and amphibians all eat adult wasps, while mice, rats, skunks, raccoons, weasels, badgers, wolverines and other creatures eat wasp larvae. Like all other creatures, wasps play an important role in the food chain.

On top of that, I return a lot of refundable drink containers so I’m around swarms of ravenous wasps a fair amount of the summer. How many times have I been stung in recent memory? Zero. They don’t give a fuck about me as long as I don’t swat at them and make them feel threatened. I suppose I could accidentally put my hand on one while grabbing a can and get stung but it’s never happened. And if it did, so what? Oooooh, a bee sting. Stop the press. Who gives a fuck about a bee sting? Precious wimps, that’s who.

A swarm of wasps probably actually could carry this guy away.

I have a similar soft spot for slugs. No one loves slugs but fuck man, if they weren’t around we would step in a lot of animal shit every time we went for a walk in the woods.

I feel like a lot of people get disproportionately bent out of shape over these little creatures that are an important part of this fucked up world and, at worst, a tiny nuisance for about a week out of every year. The next time you see a wasp, try giving it a fucking hug instead of swatting at it. Maybe it’ll hug you back.

Yaayyy, wasps!

There is no excuse for sweatshops

I don’t like the pro-sweatshop labour argument that it’s a necessary step all developing countries must go through on their way to eventually attaining ‘first world’ status. I think that would only be true if we didn’t know better, if we didn’t know that countries can develop without utilizing inhumane and destructive practices for generations, and that us regular folks here in the first world have indirect control over the fates of those in the developing world.

As it stands now, it’s common knowledge that sweatshops in poor countries are guilty of horrible things like forced labour, deadly working conditions (eg, structurally unsafe buildings, excessive heat, long shifts with no breaks, direct exposure to known toxic chemicals), and a total disregard for waste and pollution.

The 2013 Savar building collapse in Bangladesh is a great example of what I’m talking about. The eight-story building was declared unsafe when cracks in it were noticed, yet garment workers (making stuff for Wal-mart and Joe Fresh, among others) were forced back to work. The building collapsed soon after, killing 1,134 people — all so we could buy cheap clothes.

So what’s the solution for the abysmal working conditions in places like Bangladesh? The answer is easy: we, the consumers, have to stop supporting the systems that perpetuate the harm. We have to look at everything we are buying and ascertain whether that product was made ethically, if the company behind it cared about every step of the production process and not just their bottom line. If we tell companies, “sorry, I won’t buy your stuff if it’s made in a sweatshop,” they will stop using sweatshops, because they’ll do whatever they need to continue selling you stuff. It’s really that simple.

It costs companies more money to do their due diligence, to make sure that everyone below them on the food chain is being ethical and being paid fairly, and we consumers will see that increase in the prices we pay for things. Yeah I know, no one wants to pay more for that cute top or whatever, but if you can afford to buy a cute new top, you can probably also afford to do your part so that people in Bangladesh aren’t being marched into a sweltering building where they are then crushed.

“Nice top!”
“Thanks, I had a bunch of starving, sickly slaves in a rat-infested shithole make it for me before they were killed!”

I think the pro-sweatshop labour argument is primarily made by people who stand to personally profit from the continued use of the system, either at the top of the food chain (like fast fashion owners and investors) or the middle (shoppers who want continued access to cheap things), and that personal profit is why they attempt to continue to justify its existence.

But I don’t believe there is any excuse for the old sweatshop model anymore. We know what is needed to make them extinct, and it is absolutely do-able: people in the middle of the food chain need to give just a little bit more of their time and money to ensure that the people at the bottom aren’t being killed, enslaved, or poisoned to make the stuff for us.