Does Earth Really Need Human Beings?

THE INDIFFERENT EARTH

Guess what! Earth doesn't really care about our heated controversies. Global warming? Ho hum! Nuclear holocaust? Not a problem. Our issues, not Mother Earth's.

Now, before my friends in the environmental and disarmament movements start sending me hate mail, let me tell you what I mean.

Early one morning, recently, while walking on the beach in southeast Florida, I had a revelation. As I felt the waters of the Atlantic Ocean crashing against my ankles, and as I gazed at the sun glinting off the waves, I sensed the spirit of the Earth smile at me in a benevolent yet patronizing manner. And I realized once again how small and petty we are.

I contemplated the Atlantic, calm and peaceful in its gentle tropical morning greeting, and it was easy to forget its hidden power. The Pacific (meaning "peaceful") Ocean had recently unleashed a tsunami that devastated Japan. A grim reminder that, for all of our arrogant technical capacity, Mother Nature still has us beat. By a mile!

IT'S WE THAT NEED THE EARTH

So I stood there in the gentle breezes and again felt awe at the potential power of what I saw. And I realized: Earth has an almost unlimited power of self-renewal. Our planet doesn't really need us human beings. It's we that need the Earth.

That may not sound very profound, but it hit me like a ton of the crustacean shells littering the sand through which I was walking. It was for me a new way of looking at the paradigm.

In our hubris, we believe ourselves capable of permanently destroying our Earth. But we overestimate ourselves and underestimate the regenerative power of the Earth.

Usually, as a devotee of sustainability and environmental reform, I have accepted the concept that homo sapiens were given a pristine planet and that it's our responsibility to maintain and protect it for its own sake. But what arrogance! Earth doesn't need us to protect it. Earth is perfectly capable of protecting itself.

WHAT'S A MILLION YEARS OR SO TO PLANET EARTH?

It might take a million years or so, but so what? What's a million years to planet Earth? If we are actually stupid enough to foul our nest to the point of our extinction, Earth will yawn, stretch, take a million year nap, and awake to a glorious sunrise without us, and to new life forms and new intelligence crawling out of whatever new swamps are sure to develop. We'd be long vanished by then, but does the Earth really care? Not really!

It took eons for our planet to become hospitable to our life form. If, in our misguided sense of self-importance, we continue to kill each other off, either slowly with wars over our ideological discordance, or rapidly with weapons of mass destruction, the only thing really at risk is human survival. Earth would do quite well without us, thank you.

And now that our astronomers have uncovered proof that there are many thousands of other life-sustaining planets out there in the universe, our little claim to fame feels especially trivial and insignificant. The universe won't give a damn if human beings make their home unsustainable. If we become a mere blink in our planet's history, we won't be missed.

DO WE HAVE THE WILL?

This outcome might not be attractive to us from our individual points of view, from that of our children, or that of our species. But we do have an alternative outcome possible. For our own sake, not the Earth's, we still have time to turn things around. The only question is whether we have the will to do it.

#Climatechange #environmentalreform #thefuture #renewal