One theme that we’ve touched upon several times before is
the general movement of mass, which manifests in humans as a constant expansion of population and material power and the
destruction and displacement of everything around it, increasing a general instability.
These movements can have interesting and unpredictable effects. For example, a rapidly expanding human population also carries with it a rapidly expanding food supply, itself a form of life co-evolving with the human population. Rows and rows of crops provide plentiful fuel for not just humans, but insects and other animals which happen to seek out a particular crop.
In turn, the instruments of destruction expand to exclude unwanted competitors to the foods. Pesticides are developed on a mass scale to wipe out the scores of insects that now occupy mass rows of crops, and so the pesticides themselves disperse en masse into the environment, generated cumulative effects that induce mass movements of their own.
One mass necessarily
depends upon another. A population is displaced to accommodate another, and
this displacement generates another mass, which encourages accumulation in
another mass to consume or destroy what has been created. Round and round this energy
goes, relieved only by mutual destruction. Consider the biblical plague
imagery: the waves of attacking locusts, which are grasshoppers set free in a
warlike milieu of expansion and pillage after having their populations exposed to drought, or water displaced en masse by an expanding human population, which itself has readied the fuel necessary to perpetuate the locust swarm in the form of mass crops.
