THINGS TO COME: SQUIRRELS

So, this might be happening…

Reportedly based on an idea by Timur Bekmambetov (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Night Watch) and possibly to be directed by Ethan Maniquis (Machete), Squirrels, if it actually secures enough funding to get made, will tell the terrifying story of Mother Nature looking for revenge on the people who done her wrong. According to Bleeding Cool, the synopsis goes like this…

When a young man’s estranged father is killed under suspicious circumstances, he returns home for the first time in years to get to the bottom of the mystery. Hoping to uncover some logical explanation, he instead finds his mom’s sleazy new boyfriend, a natural gas company buying up the town, an angry female sheriff who happens to be his ex-girlfriend, and an army of flesh-eating squirrels hellbent on destroying everything in their path due to an erosion of their food chain as a result of environmental destruction by the gas company.

That’s right, folks, the latest threat to mankind is anti-fracking squirrels! That’s fracking as in the hydraulic mining technique by the way, not the oft-used expletive from Battlestar Galactica. Although, thinking about it, I suppose it’s quite possible squirrels might not be fans of thinly disguised profanity either, who knows? Either way, it’s still vicious evil anti-fracking squirrels which, as we’ve noted before, probably wouldn’t surprise St. Thomas Caninas at all.

The decidedly human St. Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, would likely have been sure to accept the wisdom of the Catechism on the matter, particularly the part where it riffs on Pope Paul VI’s Gaudium Et Spes. “Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection.” it states, “For each one of the works of the ‘six days’ it is said: ‘And God saw that it was good.’ ‘By the very nature of creation, material being is endowed with its own stability, truth and excellence, its own order and laws.’ Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God's infinite wisdom and goodness. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things which would be in contempt of the Creator and would bring disastrous consequences for human beings and their environment.”

So if it could somehow be proven that fracking creates man-eating squirrels, then obviously that would represent a disordered use of our natural resources and we should find a better way to accomplish what fracking does. But if it doesn’t result in bloodthirtsy yard-rats, or any other kind of disastrous consequence, then fracking could be an okay practice as part of our stewardship of God’s creation. Which is it? Personally, I haven’t done enough research to know an answer to that yet. All I know is that God instructs us to make the effort to find out before we get started. Reasonable enough given the threat of ravenous rodents hanging from our bird feeders, don’t you think?