Someone has left a newspaper on this train. It is open on a story about how avocados are being cultivated so they don’t have stones. It seems that modernity has left people too busy or too impatient or too listless to want an avocado with a stone in it that they have to remove with their own hands. So farmers – or scientists or supermarket bosses or whoever it is that masterminds these sorts of things – have been cultivating stoneless avocados en masse to sell to supermarkets, who will then sell to us, the seemingly spiritless modern human, homo ignavus.
I always think deeply about these sorts of stories when I hear of them: when I hear that they’ve cultivated Brussels sprouts to make them sweeter so children won’t hate them, or that peaches were once salty and cherry-sized before they were genetically modified over time to suit our needs, or that carrots were once naturally purple in colour before we made them orange; when I think about these things I wonder how such manipulations might have upset the balance in nature. You know how we’re told that when the bees die out, humans will soon solemnly follow them to extinction? What if avocado stones are of similar importance to the equilibrium of human existence? Avocado stones might be the only thing keeping us from some sort of plague – bubonic or biblical.
Suppose that avocado stones, discarded on the floor of the South American forest by – actually, I wonder which animals actually eat avocados in the wild? Llamas? Bats? Jaguars? Well let’s just say jaguars. Suppose that avocado stones are poisonous like cherry and peach pits and, having been discarded on the floor of the South American forest by jaguars for centuries, have been keeping indigenous flora and fauna populations under control the entire time. And suppose that the lack of these discarded cyanide pills on the forest floor will result in prodigious growth in the populations of the aforementioned flora and fauna. This will include some species of plant, insect or animal that, in larger numbers, will have some sinister impact on the environment around it. This is what I suppose when I read the story about avocados being cultivated without stones.
Perhaps this overbred species will outgrow the South American forest and begin to spread out into other habitats. The arrival of these invasive species might result in the death of other species in those habitats, like those colonialist grey squirrels did when they all but wiped out red squirrels in Britain. This will upset the food chain, which will ultimately bring about the extinction of humanity through famine.
Or maybe we are talking about Japanese knotweeds or Triffids that will grow beyond the limits of their forest and then begin wrapping their leafy tendrils around the civilised world, entrapping us in its web of chlorophyll gossamer or merely poisoning the air we breathe.
But I suspect we are talking about some sort of insect here – probably a mosquito, that agent of disease; conveyor of Zika, malaria and viral encephalitis; bloodsucker and butcher of man. These insects, whose breeding will be unchecked and unlimited by the lack of avocado stones, will start the process of wiping out humanity by knocking off about two thirds of the world’s population, like the Black Death revisited.
But the mosquitoes won’t do it all. They’ll just set the wheels in motion. The ensuing panic will do the rest. Man will kill off man. Survival instincts will kick in and society will fall apart. We will compete greedily with each other for the Earth’s remaining resources. The world will go up in flames and mankind will go down fighting amongst itself. There will be hatred, desire, jealousy, covetousness, theft, destruction, fear, riots, looting, annihilation, murder, war, anarchy, nihilism, and then… nothing. Nothing of us will exist. Our legacies: history, art, architecture, civilisation itself, all of these things will be wiped out. All that will be left is nothing. Nothing of humankind. And this is what I think about when I read the story in the paper that someone left on the train, the story about avocados being cultivated without stones.
But then I think about it a little more and I think that avocados without stones would be a very fine thing.
Othmar's Trombone 