Scientists at the Institute for the Subjugation of the Earth announced Friday that the world could be completely subdued by as early as 2010.

“Years of mankind’s exploitation of this planet are finally paying off,” Dr. Gottfried Snorkhausen, head of the institute, said.  “For a while there, we thought that nature might continue unchecked indefinitely. I can’t tell you what a relief this is.”

Last Monday, John Melew, one of Dr. Snorkhausen’s staff, was working on projections of the earth’s longevity based on current consumption of fossil fuels and pollution rates at the ISE headquarters in New York.  He found that global warming, overpopulation and the melting of polar ice caps was progressing more quickly than the institute had previously thought.  After spending the week doing more calculations, the ISE went public with the announcement, including a best-case scenario of 2010 for the complete exhaustion of resources.

“I’ll never forget the moment when young Melew rushed in to give us the big news,” Snorkhausen recalled, getting a misty-eyed look.  “Several of us were busy dipping ducks in oil and putting toxic deodorant on California condors, as part of our animal extinction program.  Suddenly, Melew burst in.  He was a little winded, since his office was several feet away and he smokes a few packs of cigarettes per day.  But he was eventually able to give us the big news.  Well, we just dropped the ducks and condors and had a big party right then.  We cracked open several cans of tuna with dolphins in it, and just had a great time.  We killed the fatted manatee, so to speak.”

Since the ISE’s announcement, not everyone has had such an enthusiastic response to the news.  The Sierra Club, The World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and others have all taken the institute’s statistics as a call for conservation.  According to a Greenpeace statement, “The ISE has long been a thorn in the side of all who care about our planet and its natural resources. . .  But now we have been given these impartial statistics, and we must decide what to do with them.  Will we rejoice, as the perverse scientists at the ISE are doing, or will we take them as a call for renewed efforts at conservation?”

Snorkhausen snorts with contempt at the statement.  “When I want to find out the particulars of how to make a soy shake or hug a tree, I’ll contact those guys,” he said, one of his associates giving him a high-five.  “The truth is, those organizations don’t bother me, because I know that they’re just so many modern Druids, worshipping in the forest.  But it genuinely irks me when mainstream people, for example Christians and Jews, are deceived into following along with their pagan ideas.”

Snorkhausen has called himself a Christian, and says that his faith informs everything that he does and everything that happens at the institute.  He recalled the time, when he was a biology graduate student in the early ‘60s, when he decided to create the ISE.  He had been arguing with other students about evolution, and according to his own assessment, wasn’t getting anywhere.  “I had an anger problem back then,” he admits.  “Things would be going along well, and everybody had a scientific detachment about it all.  But it only took one comment about somebody’s mother, her hairiness and her penchant for bananas before fisticuffs ensued.”

Following a particularly nasty argument in which fossilized jawbones were used as weapons, Snorkhausen says nearly gave up on biology and went into another field.  However, the course of his life was changed one morning while he sat alone in his room.  He was reading the Bible, something he said that he still does every day, and he came across a verse in Genesis that says, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it,” and he had the idea to create a scientific institute for subduing the world.  “I realized that God made mankind the master of the earth,” he said.  “And it is our job to leave our mark on it.”

A Different Kind of Institute

After earning his doctorate, Snorkhausen began looking for a site to place the institute.  From the beginning, he knew that it would be different.  “Most institutes of scientific research are in the middle of nowhere, but I knew from the beginning that this one wouldn’t be,” he said. He decided on New York as a location, because, as he put it, some very exciting things were happening there in terms of pollution, overcrowding and sprawl.

In the beginning, the only employees of the institute were Snorkhausen and one of his former classmates, Klaus von Inglenschlosser.  “In the early days, we had no money,” von Inglenschlosser said.  “All we could do was go outside from time to time and spray aerosol cans into the sky.  Sometimes we would also buy things at the grocery store with ridiculous amounts of packaging and refuse to squash them down before we threw them out.”

All that changed, however, in the early ‘80s. The US government began to back the ISE, and its capabilities mushroomed overnight.  Neither Snorkhausen or von Inglenschlosser are sure to this day why the government decided to get involved.  “We were an institute with a Christian basis, so it was a shock to us when they started to give us funding,” Snorkhausen said.  “Despite the separation of church and state, I suppose we had some sort of universal message that they wanted to endorse.”

With additional funding, the ISE began quickly to move out of the exclusively scientific sphere. One of their first ad campaigns, “Have Lots of Babies and Send Them to Work in Factories,” was, however, less than successful.  Their posters, which featured pictures of small children in various industrial settings, were torn down all over New York.  “The babies in the coal mine and with the welding torch were particularly unpopular,” von Inglenschlosser said. 

“We stopped with the ad campaigns soon enough,” Snorkhausen said, “because we discovered that they didn’t help us.  People got mad when we told them to do things that would crush the earth and show man’s mastery over it, but then they did them anyway if we didn’t tell them to.  So we decided to leave people alone and let them feed their children to industry, and not make them angry about it by telling them to do something they were already going to do.”

The ISE, burned by this experience of dealing directly with the public, soon shifted to exclusively doing quiet scientific work.  It sent delegations to tropical rainforests, hunting for endangered species.  It produced statistics geared toward endorsing further industrialization and reliance on fossil fuels almost as if it were a factory itself.  The scientists would sometimes take camping trips which included leaving their fires unattended, taking potshots at chipmunks with high-powered rifles, dumping sewage in rivers, and flinging litter out the car window all the way back to New York. 

By 1990 the ISE employed 53 scientists, all thoroughly committed to the Earth’s subjugation.  But von Inglenschlosser was dissatisfied.  “I began to say to myself: something is wrong,” he said.  “It seems that we should be doing everything we can to put the Earth under our heel, but there is just something that doesn’t make sense about it all.  I mean, what if we do get everything the way we want; what then?  We’ll just have to look at our ugly buildings forever.”  He and Snorkhausen agreed that he could not work at the ISE while his mind was in that state, and so he took an indefinite leave of absence.  He has still not returned.  He currently lives in a cabin in the Adirondacks.  He has said that he sometimes cuts a tree down or throws an occasional beer can into the woods, but his “heart just isn’t in it.”

“I have heard his objections, and I think that they’re not well founded,” Snorkhausen said of his old friend.  “Yes, if we get things the way we want, we will have to look at the things we have built.  And some of them are not very pretty.  Go to Russia or Eastern Europe sometime and look at what the Communists put up.  Huge concrete blocks of apartments constructed at random tend to dampen the spirits.

“But the important thing to remember is that they’re a symbol.  Even if apartment buildings or factories or shopping malls or parking lots in the middle of nowhere or statues of businessmen don’t look that good, they still represent the supremacy of people on this planet.  And that is why I get up every morning and do my best to pave all the ground and fill all the sky I can see with smoke.  Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to work.  We’re doing some very interesting things right now with teaching ducks to smoke. For a long time, we had trouble with their not having lips.  But now we're working on some artificial ones that attach to the beak. These are exciting times, but there’s a lot of work yet to be done.”

With a swirl of his lab coat, he strides down the hallway a few steps, then disappears into a door marked POLLUTANTS LABORATORY.  For Dr. Snorkhausen, who has guided the ISE into a golden age, there is perhaps less work to be done than he thinks.