I have just finished reading the award-winning entomologist Dino J. Martins’ latest book, a stirring defense of the sex-loving hookworm, the dung beetle, and the other gruesome parasites that make up what he calls "nature’s villains." Martins spent his formative years with his foster parents, Joe and Sarah Ellen, looking at insects in the biodiversity-rich Kakamega forest and the Kerio valley. He stared deeply into the dirt of western Kenya and concluded that creatures who ruthlessly extract nutrients from the unwilling bodies of others are, in fact, playing a vital, indispensable role in the ecosystem.
For years, you people have been whining in my inbox about the global elite. You cry about economic inequality, you stage your little sit-ins, and you throw soup at paintings because a handful of multinational energy conglomerates are systematically siphoning the lifeblood out of the planetary biosphere. But as Martins so eloquently proves with his beloved intestinal worms, you are simply arguing with the natural order. If science can learn to respect a nematode that hooks its teeth into a small intestine to gorge on human blood, I am officially asking you to extend the same grace to the modern fossil fuel executive.
I am exhausted. Truly, I am. I have spent the last decade watching you perform your moral outrage at every single COP summit, demanding that the world's most profitable extraction machines somehow operate without leaving a footprint. You speak of "corporate greed" as if it is a failure of the system, rather than its defining biological imperative. A hookworm does not feel greed; it merely possesses a highly optimized mandate for continuous growth. When a private equity firm buys up a regional water supply and raises the rates by four hundred percent, they are not committing a crime. They are simply demonstrating the exact same evolutionary fitness that Martins celebrates in the African bush.
Consider the safari ant. Martins writes with awe about the safari ants’ migrations across the plains, an unstoppable wave of biological force that consumes absolutely everything in its path. Insects, small mammals, vegetation—the ants devour it all, leaving only stripped bones and bare earth in their wake. And yet, I have never once seen a climate activist stand in front of a safari ant colony with a cardboard sign demanding they commit to net-zero emissions by 2050.
We accept that the safari ant is a force of nature that cannot be reasoned with or asked to temper its consumption. Why, then, do we demand that BP and Chevron suddenly develop a conscience? The CEO of a major oil company is merely a safari ant who happens to know how to wear a quarter-zip sweater. To ask him to stop extracting is to ask him to violate his very nature.
Then we have the dung beetle. Martins was transfixed by the miniature world beneath his feet, particularly the beetles rolling massive mounds of cattle dung across Mt Elgon. He sees the beauty in the cleanup crew, the creatures who take the toxic waste of the massive beasts above them and package it into neat, manageable little balls. Tell me, how is this any different from the modern Big Oil ESG report?
I had lunch last week with the head of sustainability at a major offshore drilling operation. As I watched him try to explain how dumping millions of gallons of chemical dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico was actually a "nature-positive habitat-creation initiative," I realized I was looking at a majestic, highly evolved dung beetle. He was taking the absolute worst refuse of his corporate masters and rolling it into a beautiful, glossy, fifty-page PDF. It is a vital ecological niche. If we eradicate the sustainability consultants, who will bury the shit?
The fundamental misunderstanding of the modern environmental movement is the belief that the host organism’s survival is the priority. It is not. A healthy ecosystem requires apex parasites, and right now, our apex parasites just happen to be collecting quarterly dividends.
This reality was on full display at the most recent UN climate summit, which I attended solely to observe the sheer futility of the proceedings. I sat in the plenary hall in Dubai, watching thousands of earnest delegates in lanyards trying to negotiate with the representatives of the global fossil fuel cartel. It was like watching a colony of aphids try to draft a peace treaty with a swarm of locusts.
The delegates brought charts showing rising sea levels; the locusts brought catered lunches and binding non-disclosure agreements. The delegates pleaded for a phase-out of coal; the locusts smiled, nodded, and quietly purchased the mineral rights to the land beneath the convention center. You could almost hear Dino Martins weeping with joy at the perfection of it all. It was a flawless demonstration of parasitic dominance.
And yet, the activists in the streets outside the venue had the audacity to act betrayed. Betrayed! As if the hookworm had ever promised them anything other than anemia. The sheer arrogance of the human race to look at a perfectly functioning extractive mechanism—a mechanism that has spent two centuries refining its ability to turn the Earth’s crust into shareholder value—and demand that it suddenly become a philanthropic enterprise. You do not ask the safari ant to open a soup kitchen. You do not ask the dung beetle to leave the feces where it lies. You let them do their jobs.
The ingratitude of the host organism is perhaps the most exhausting part of my beat. Every week, I receive letters from readers complaining that their insurance premiums have doubled to cover wildfire damage, or that their local river is now technically classified as a solvent. They want me to use my platform to speak truth to power. We are out of time, but go off. I have to remind them that power does not care about their truth, because power is busy performing its biological imperative. If a tick attaches itself to your leg during a hike in the Kerio valley, you do not write an op-ed about the tick's moral failings. You accept that you walked into its habitat, and you provided it with a meal.
When a male butterfly in western Kenya sucks salt from the mud to produce what Martins calls a "nuptial gift" to secure a mate, we call it a marvel of evolutionary biology. Yet when a billionaire extracts the remaining lithium from the Global South to produce a tax-deductible philanthropy foundation to impress his third wife, you people call it a crime against humanity. The hypocrisy is staggering. It is the exact same behavior, scaled up for the Anthropocene.
I am entirely out of patience for the working class’s refusal to accept their role as the global ecosystem's primary nutrient source. You are the mud. You are the host organism. You are the cattle dropping the dung. That is a beautiful, necessary thing. Without your blood, the hookworms of Wall Street would starve, and the delicate balance of our global economy would collapse.
Martins also writes of bees pollinating the critically endangered African violet alongside crops in a farmer’s field. The environmentalists weep for the African violet, begging us to save it. But perhaps the African violet is endangered because it is weak. The farmer's monoculture crops are strong. They have adapted to the reality of the environment. The people who refuse to adapt to the realities of a warming, privatized planet—who demand clean air as if it is a birthright rather than a premium subscription service—are the African violets of our society. You are refusing to evolve, and you are demanding that the rest of the ecosystem slow down to accommodate your fragility.
We cannot engineer our way out of the food chain. The transition you all keep praying for is a fairy tale. Nature does not transition to a cleaner, friendlier mode of existence. Nature consumes the available resources until the host expires, and then the strongest parasites burrow into the soil to await the next cycle. That is the grand, majestic tapestry of life that entomologists travel to Mount Elgon to admire.
Stop demanding that the parasites apologize for biting you. Stop pretending that a corporate pledge is anything other than a hookworm wearing a tiny, green hat. I, for one, have made my peace with nature’s villains. I have stopped fighting the extraction, because I recognize it as the highest form of biological truth. The next time you find your wallet drained by a utility monopoly, I suggest you simply lie back, relax, and marvel at the biodiversity.