One of my most memorable interspecies encounters was many years ago with an orangutan in a nature reserve in Sabah on the island of Borneo.

As they do when unthreatened, this kind and trusting animal gently held my hand and, mournfully, it seemed, looked me straight in the eye as if to say, “really nice to meet you despite everything your lot has done to ruin my life”.

Her friendliness and vulnerability heightened the dread, the sorrow, and the guilt that I felt about the devastating effects of savage capitalism, not just on habitat loss for such “people of the forest”, but on all habitats and the knock-on effects on global warming. And it marked the beginning of my mounting fury and my disgust with the tiny subset of humanity (mainly in the West) that is largely responsible for our planet’s dire predicament and has the power — but refuses — to prevent the looming catastrophe (e.g., the August 2025 UN treaty on plastic pollution).

In terms of the richness and diversity of plant and animal life, the freshness of the air, and the deep blues of plastic-free oceans and pollution-free skies, baby boomers like me have been around long enough for the comparisons between what it is like now in these and other respects and what it was like where and when we grew up to be glaring and stark, depressingly so.

In my case, the bright colours of such contrast come from the colobus monkeys at the bottom of our garden in the highlands of Kenya where I grew up, the flocks of aptly named superb starlings, the lilac-breasted (rainbow) rollers, the helmet crested guinea fowl, the Thomson’s and Grant’s gazelles, the pink flamingo that garlanded the lakes of the Great Rift Valley and all of the other animals of paradise which as a child I took for granted.

For reasons set out in articles like Julian Cribb’s, in places where they were once plentiful, many of these beautiful creatures — and others like them — now exist in vastly reduced numbers, sometimes only in small, furtive bands, or they have fled in search of ever-diminishing places of safety and are endangered.

I say this because the mass of statistics that convey the speed with which animals and plants are being lost (forever) or decimated, the glaciers and permafrost are melting, the atmosphere is warming, the land is being destroyed and the seas are rising, has become part of the background cacophony of capitalist business as usual as it crunches its way inexorably through what is left of our planet.

The avalanche of such information can overwhelm and induce a kind of disaster fatigue that habituates us to the prospect of self-annihilation.

In the process, the increasingly desolate world that we inhabit is being normalised and our anger defused.

Thanks to Chomsky, we know that the manufacture of such consent is deliberate. The Machiavellian "masters of the universe" are adept at keeping the oppressed majority so preoccupied with survival, so cowed by the fear of losing their jobs or falling ill, so distracted by popular culture and identity politics, and so misinformed and befuddled by the mainstream media, that they do not have the resources, the energy, or the will to revolt and express their rage.

Or their rage has been channelled against soft targets like dark-skinned immigrants and refugees and away from anything that might undermine consumption and profit, as is happening now under the Trump administration in the US and in parts of Europe.

And for those of us who can tear themselves away from the soothing emptiness of social media (etc.) and are able to look further, the bad news statistics on climate must compete with the plethora of bad news statistics on genocide and starvation and ethnic cleansing and crime and poverty and inequality – all in the carefully controlled spaces allocated to these subversive types of information by the corporate media.

In 2021, Chomsky noted that about three years earlier, Oxford physicist Raymond Pierrehumbert (a lead author of the then current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report) had warned, “it’s time to panic… We are in deep trouble”. Chomsky added that “what has been learned since [about global warming] only intensifies that warning”. The cause for alarm is, of course, heightened by the growing threat of nuclear war and by the suppression of debate about these matters in supposedly democratic societies.

Hastened by the lingering aftermaths of the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing, and increasing hostility between the US and China, since 2021, the global condition has worsened significantly. Enough to make Chomsky conclude in early 2023 that unless the US could be persuaded to co-operate with its adversaries and capitalism could be overthrown or “defanged”, there was little hope for survival.

In the two years since then, like “rats racing across the ruined landscape with dollar signs in their eyes” ( Roy, 1997, p. 143), fossil fuel corporations and their government partners in crime have accelerated the pace of our wild gallop towards the precipice.

The modest purpose of this essay has been to suggest that our resistance to the losses conveyed by the overwhelming numbers to which we have grown accustomed will be stronger if we can personalise those losses; if we can calibrate their significance against our recollections of the wonders of the worlds that we knew when we were growing up.

Anything that helps “to defang [and mitigate] the savagery while recognising that dismantling the anti-human capitalist order is a longer-term and continuing project” ( Chomsky, 2023) is worthwhile.

The talismanic Pete Seeger antiwar song of the 1960s that is the title of this essay is both a lament and a rallying cry whose time has come again – for sustained resistance against the three main fangs of late-stage capitalism: global warming, the increasing risk of nuclear war and the rise of authoritarian rule.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.