Once upon a time, in a land of windswept vistas, colored rocks and sun-swallowing canyons, there was a very wealthy arms dealer who sold chemical weapons to everyone who needed them. Toxins and poisons, airborne and waterborne, they managed to transport these agents of death to all those that needed the power to kill – they didn’t take sides. Like most arms dealers they were far too necessary to get in trouble for making them available in the first place.
One day the arms dealers piled up a delivery on the doorstep of a paying client, and went out to lunch with some business contacts a few doors down. While they were enjoying a few brews and a hardy tapenade, the chemical weapons started to leak down the doorstep, into the canyon and through the ravine to the river below. The toxins soaked the stream. They would have spread through the gills of every fish and waterways of the entire state if it hadn’t been for the work of the orb weavers, who for purposes of their own, had constructed a silken dam across the river to catch dragonflies. As it happened, the web caught the majority of the toxins, saving the fish and wildlife and people from its destructive powers.
The hardworking spiders didn’t understand chemical weapons, or weapons of any kind actually. They didn’t recognize the danger that their work had averted, and continued to tend their creation as they had every morning since the beginning of their world. An orb spider spins silk from its most precious internal resources and it will often re-ingest the material when removing and repairing damaged work so as not to waste what’s needed. That’s what these spiders did when their web was coated in chemical weapons, swallowing the poisons, rubbing themselves in poison, coating themselves inside and out in the toxins that were meant to kill.
Not surprisingly the spiders became very ill. The began to drop off the web and didn’t have the energy to make repairs. That’s when Alison Cuthbert found them. She was looking for insects for her third grade science project when she came across the sickened spiders. Concerned, she placed them in a separate jar to look at later. She talked to her father who was an entomologist, to her grandmother the veterinarian, and to the zookeepers in the city but no one knew the right way to heal orb weavers who had digested chemical weapons. She did her very best to treat them with the right medicines. And some of the spiders got better. And some of them didn’t.
Meanwhile, the story of this important web, preventing chemical weapons from spreading into the water system, made it into the news cycle. People started to appreciate orb spiders in their gardens, and talk over coffee about why chemical weapons were allowed in their community at all. News story after news story showed pictures of the healing spiders, and the spoiled web that had saved humanity. Maybe it was a bad idea to sell and make chemical weapons in the first place?
At first the arms dealer was grateful for the eight-legged media heroes, and the cute photos that dominated the news of recovering spiders in towels. At first they donated to Alison’s remarkable recovery efforts, making sure she had all the dead flies and eye droppers she needed. Then the arms dealers began to get a little bit uncomfortable. The story had stayed in the news longer than expected. What if these spiders made everyone keep talking about how dangerous chemical weapons were? What if they made the people write their congressmen and demand that chemical weapons not be delivered over public roads any more? Or worse, what if they demanded they never be made at all?
Fortunately the arms dealer knew just what to do. He had taken no classes at all on avoiding problems, but he had a solid background on keeping problems out of the public eye. Just look at how well dispersants had fixed things in the Gulf? He demanded that the Department of Everything force Alison to stop treating the spiders and that authorities release them into an unknown location, where no one would know if they died. He didn’t need any cameras following the bugs into another stream and catching their probable deaths on film. Trapped between a bad idea and a forceful politician who needed weapon money, the department of Everything called Alison and said they would come for the spiders in two days.
“They aren’t ready!” She exclaimed. “They’re spinners are still healing. There unable to make silk, and without a web they’ll starve!” She said anxiously.
The DOE had learned long ago not to argue with the arms dealer, so even though they knew better they tossed their heads. “Spiders don’t need webs to survive! You’ve compromised these arachnids by keeping them in a jar too long already. If you don’t give them to us in two days time, we’ll come and take them now. We know best. We’re the Department of Everything.”
Alison knew the spiders couldn’t live if they were taken away now. She was only 8 years old but she knew orb spiders needed webs to survive. She guessed that the arms dealer was putting pressure on the DOE to make a bad situation easier. But I cannot tell you what happens next because the ending of this parable is getting written at this very moment and the way the winds blow on this issue will affect the way the spiders survive, the way the DOE is seen and the web that supports the fragile network of wildlife in general.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave changed the way people thought about reality for thousands of years to come. Lets hope we can change these six bad decisions.
