An Ecological Satire Indicts The Real Troublemakers In The Natural Kingdom

Remember Dr. Strangelove? Most of us who saw the film of the same name assumed he had perished in the fumes and fallout of Stanley Kubrick's arms-race fantasy. But Strangelove may have survived, and now may have reappeared, as Heir Doktor's soulless brother, Morton Stultifer, Hon. Ph.D., sanitation engineer and bogus author of The Case for Extinction (Dial Press, $4.95).

The real author is Richard Curtis, who uses Stultifer to satirize a technology gone mad and a society programmed for global disaster. The result is not as successful as the Strangelove statement, but The Case for Extinction does produce several belly laughs that sometimes have the hollow echo of gallows humor. Curtis/Stultifer does best when he stops forcing his jokes and gets down to the serious business of satirizing a subject that is no laughing matter to many concerned Americans.

The book begins with Stultifer's neo-Darwinian foreword, in which he states that "Many, if not most, of the creatures on this planet are weak, ugly, lazy, useless, vicious, lustful or otherwise disagreeable." The professor charges the pro-life lobby with an obsession for saving creatures sentimentalized in animal-cracker boxes: "The noble lion, the ferocious bear, the swift antelope, the quick brown fox...," all of which he regards as welfare chiselers in the Natural Kingdom.

To prove that most animals are better dead than fed, Stultifer reminds us that the harpy eagle has "disgusting habits" and loudmouth offspring who harp ("harp, harp, harp, harp, harp," etc.) across two pages of his text. The three-toed sloth is, uh, slothful; frogs cause warts; the elephant seal is decadent; the hairy white-faced musk-ox sheds fur all over the tundra and is plainly "incompatible with a healthy military-industrial complex."

What, asks the professor, can we decent folks do? His solutions read like a Sierra Club atrocity guide. Destroy the serenity of the elephant seal with sonic booms, eliminate the frog and his amphibious friends with fertilizer fed by nitrates and take care of whatever is left with radioactivity released from "stupendous nuclear reactors on the banks of every American waterway."

Not content with plundering the fauna, the professor proceeds to indict the world's flora in terms that would do justice to a McCarthy investigator. He begins by citing the sexual preoccupation of trees, which are bent on reproduction, and he attacks the "single ginkgo" with special scorn, pointing out its origins in the Far East and deducing that it is part of the Yellow Peril. The only hope is planned plunder.

Abandoning satire for a moment, Curtis proposes a tongue-not-too-firmly-in-cheek solution to the problem of cooling the water from nuclear generating plants. Run it across members of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, he suggests. Their ice-water veins would cool off anything.

He may have something there.