CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A Civilization May Yet Die

A Dugong near Marsa Alam in Egypt. Photo by Camille Ménard, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

As our power-mad president tapped out that genocidal threat, a whale shark in the Persian Gulf was navigating waters it has known for millennia. It is the largest fish alive¹ — the size of a school bus, spotted like a galaxy, moving with a gentleness that is hard to reconcile with its scale. If a diver comes too close, it curves its huge body to avoid them. Its wide-grin mouth is fangless. It feeds on plankton, with no capacity for threat, and yet its lineage survived the dinosaurs.

It may not survive us.

The ceasefire announced this week between the United States and Iran is scheduled to last two weeks — the duration of a single pay period, or the bloom of a rose. The timeline of the creatures that swim the Gulf waters is measured in millennia. Sixty million years in the case of the endangered whale shark. Fifty million in the case of the dugong.

I’d never heard of a whale shark or a dugong until I looked up the Gulf’s most precious species. Like large, bristled manatees, the dugongs have more in common with elephants than any whale. The Persian Gulf holds the world’s second-largest population of them. In the fragile waters now crammed with oil tankers brimming with billions of liters² of oil and war waste from 40 days of reckless destruction, the dugongs graze on seagrass in the shallows. Indeed, biologists report that they eat in such deliberate, complex patterns that they........

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