Book Review on Can Life Prevail?

Can Life Prevail? by Pentti Linkola is a kind of book that will profoundly captivate your thoughts and has an internal force that could equip you to question the existing ideologies of the world. Before I go on lauding the author’s outright candor, I have to say, to lend certain honesty to my review, that I have expected a lot more than this after reading a short summary of the book on Wikipedia, which explains Linkola as someone who advocate eugenics, genocide and abortion as possible means to combat overpopulation of humans on the earth. He also approves Stalinist and Nazi massacres as “massive thinning operations”. He also has suggested that the big cities should be attacked by “some trans-national body like the UN”. These lines are something you would certainly avoid to say if you live in the world of liberals. 

While reading this collection of essays, I have alarmingly sensed the environmentally and politically conservative ideas of the author. His love for nature is enormous – he made a living as a fisherman from a rowboat and sold his fish to local people from a horse-drawn cart, in his native land, Finland until he reached retirement age, he never uses any type of energy-consumed transportation (he once toured around the Europe with his wife on bikes to watch birds and enjoy the nature), he avoids all kinds of devices and modern technology so on and so forth. Also what the author really advocate is to go back to the pre-industrial life with less population and less material development.  

From the first chapter to the last, Linkola is able to point out the facts that I used to overlook when thinking about the environmental issues. Through his experiences both as a fisherman and a person living in Finland, Linkola criticized on the modern-day hygiene phobia, human slavery to machines and modern lifestyle that is harmful to the environment. I cannot agree more on this discourse which goes as “How many believe that human well-being , pleasure and happiness diminish the more we follow this path? And that even if this path were not to lead to ecocatastrophe and extinction, it would still be a gloomy and dreadful one?”

While reading the book, I kept on thinking what kind of new ideas he can offer me. However, as I should have expected, most of the facts are based on his personal observations as a lover of nature and are just Finland-wise. Lack of proper research (except his personal experiences) to back up the major claims he made in his essays, such as distortion of the facts on deforestation by the Department of Forestry Research of Finland and WWF for the financial and industrial interests and the suggestion to stop investing medical technology, research and human labor in saving the lives of infants (and mothers) and instead, channel them towards the care for the elderly citizens who are wiser and more useful to the society. 

Because of the aforementioned subjects, do not think the book is just bemoaning on the annihilation of the nature and eco-catastrophe by human race because there certainly are amusing ideas. “The Cat Disaster”, the invasion of cats to the human civilizations as pets actually had adverse effects on the ecology by destroying the native bird species and other species of small animals. Also that of frail men and tough women is not a myth, but an established fact of human life, hence, granting women as the protectors of Life.   

Most of us (including the scientists and world leaders) do not seem to be aware that the rampant hunger of global capitalism and industrialization has eaten up the natural resources to intolerable extent. But we are either ignorant or reluctant to point out the main factors driving this. From the dawn of human progress as foragers to nowadays, we only develop towards one way –comfort. All the technology and devices we have ever created help our work to be more efficient and effective while eroding the natural resources like oil and gas, the energy of the Sun kept within millions of years ago. In his essays, Linkola has called for the very minimal use of them and adoption towards more bucolic agriculture lifestyle. 

Although he refers to himself as a deep ecologist, it is eco-fascism and radical environmental empiricism that drive his work and his life. With devastatingly provocative remarks as “Human rights = the death sentence of Creation, human rights = the death sentence of mankind”, one will think he is a misanthropist and an outright opponent on the freedom and liberty of the humans. In fact, he is a great admirer of Nature and Life (as the title partly suggests). The analogy of the boat with more people it can carry in the middle of the sea is convincing so much that I become an ardent supporter to decrease the seven billion human population as quick and effective as possible. The hypocritical burden of someone who loves Life is having to choose whether ‘all’ or ‘some’ shall perishes. However, the drastic measures he proposes to reserve the Life on earth, including the political system with Platonic ‘philosopher’ king(s) who will rise to power themselves, subsistence economy, complete abolition of private cars, limited industries and mass localization are reasonable from the ecological perspective, it will becomes ludicrous and useless in terms of freedom and liberty, human rights, and more importantly global or national economy. I felt sad to read the conclusion of the book. I have fully agreed with the author that his utopia is the only sustainable model that can grant our species eternity of Life. But I also know that the chance of his model becoming reality is next to zero in reality.

As the book is more like his collection of thoughts, there are criticisms on veganism, animal rights, foreign policy of the United States and nihilism (yes, I typed nihilism) which will be a little off from the topic but worthy for your cerebration. But for this review, I will leave them out for the sake of space and time and have you think about them and make your own decision as to Can Life Prevail?