Plenticiding the Sixth Extinction : more Hunger Plan than Auschwitz

I do not think some/much/most/all of humanity is setting out to totally eliminate particular non-human species as the Nazis tried to do to the Jews and the Hutus to the Tusis.

Except for the smallpox virus, I don't think Humanity has ever tried to deliberately kill off all of a particular species of life at one go.

So no sins of plenticidal commission here.

But Humanity has always been perfectly willing to turn people out of their homes in dead of winter while burning their villages, bedding, and food stores, killing their animals and poisoning their wells.

The plenitude of global Commensality

Thankfully , the human pruning of the plenitude of nature (the plenticide of The Sixth Extinction) is unlikely to be ever complete.

WWII's plenticide was against compassion as well as the right of all to exist

It is well known that WWII was a deadly assault against the plenitude of the many different human ethnicities and classes.

Nazis and Communists and Japanese militarists all acted as if the human gene pool was a fetid swamp , better off drained of all Jews, Romas, Polish intellectuals ,Russian Kulaks, Chinese peasants and the handicapped.

They argued that at an abstract level, mainstream Science supported their interest in a program of active genetic pruning - and they weren't really wrong.

Plenticide : a working definition

Plenticide means reducing the gene pool - but not your own gene pool. It means reducing the species and the species strains - but never your own strain .  It means reducing habitats - but never your own habitat.

It is just good old fashioned pre-Darwin selfishness dressed up in new post-Darwin science talk.

Henry Dawson's "wartime penicillin for ALL" : plenitude enough to re-unite a humanity divided by a plenticidal war

Wartime's  other  Manhattan Project

It was a very hard saying, this constant call of Dr Henry Dawson that we needed abundant penicillin - now !

Abundant enough to save all in the world who would die without it.  And we need it now.  Particularly now, in the middle of this all-out total war called WWII.