Actually, that would be five ways, or more than five ways, to kill a man, or a woman, or a child, or entire family, or a tribe, or a nation, or a species, or an aquifer, a mountaintop, miles of mountain streams, or an entire ecosystem, or our oceans or our earth's atmosphere.
From the last century: British poet Edwin Brock, whose life spanned 19 October 1927 to 7 September 1997, wrote two of the best-known poems of the last century, Five Ways to Kill a Man and Song of the Battery Hen.
Brock's poem:
There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.
http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/...
Brock's poetry is so last century, when man was the center of the universe, when man, especially white men were what mattered. We've advanced somewhat, we include people of color, we include women and children, we include other species, natural resources, ecosystems, indeed we even embrace our air, our soil, the water beneath our feet, as well as the water in our rivers and streams and lakes and oceans, the scope of what we now embrace is breathtaking, even.
In that vein, Terry Tamminen, former Secretary to the California EPA, easily makes a list of ten killing environmental disasters, using the modes of oil dumping, water diversion to benefit agriculture and industry, habitat destruction, plastics, destruction by fire as oil and gas flooding into streets and rivers explode into fire, destruction of waterways by diversion as well as pollution by runoff from pesticides, fertilizer, sewage, and oil from streets creating dead zones devoid of oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico, mass slaughter by sports hunting of a single species, the American bison, shoddy agricultural methods which overfarm the land and cause soil erosion, greenhouse gas and ocean acidification, groundwater depletion, massive air pollution -- as the vehicles of death.
Chevron Oil Refinery, El Segundo, California: leaking petroleum products.
Destruction of Pacific salmon: water diversion and habitat destruction,
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: plastic debris, stuff like disposable lighters, plastic bottle caps, plastic bags. Fish, birds, and marine mammals mistake plastic for food and die in the thousands every month.
The Oil Pipes of Esmeraldas, Ecuador: breaking pipelines, oil and gas cascading down streets and into rivers. A spark sets off an inferno, devouring cars and homes, burning men, women and children alive.
The Destruction of the Mississippi and Colorado Rivers: Western states sucking up so much water from the Colorado that the 22,000 cubic feet per second that once flowed to the towns and farmers in the southwestern US and Mexico, not to mention the fisheries in the Gulf of Baja, is now almost zero. The Mississippi still flows, but is so fouled with runoff from pesticides, fertilizer, sewage, and oil from streets that it has created a 7,000 square mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Decimation of the American Bison: once upon a time there were tens of millions of the beasts but in the 1800s hunters reduced their numbers to barely 15,000.
The Great Dustbowl: drought and years of extensive farming without soil conservation to prevent erosion, causing the deaths and dislocation of many humans and animals across the center of America for decades.
Ocean Acidification: greenhouse gas production is the prime cause of the changing chemistry of the oceans which dissolve the shells of clams, shrimp, lobster and cause other impacts to fisheries globally.
Emptying the Groundwater: water taken from underground aquifers in California causing the ground itself to subside as much as seventy feet, Hopi Indians, who rely on springs fed by these aquifers, report that their water has dried up for the first time in their 10,000 years of recorded history.
Air Pollution: all American air contains human-made toxins, such as BTEX compounds, fine particles, and other carcinogens, causing 100,000 premature deaths every year and over six million hospital visits for asthma and other respiratory diseases.
http://www.cnbc.com/...
I would venture to say that Tamminen's reckoning may also be a partial list of death by whatever ... one shudders to think what new mode of human and ecosystem destruction lurks in our near future.