Naked Gaia floating face down in a pool of contaminated fracking fluid; laying stiff and cold among felled timber; choking in the fetid smog rising above massive smoke stacks. I am here to tell you, these things don't bother Mother Earth one bit. In fact, she is more like your landlord than your mother, she doesn't care about you, she would just as soon you fall in a bubbling pool of acid in Yellowstone Park, where you, your sneakers and your precious electronic equipment would dissolve in minutes. She doesn't care about any of her tenants, nor about the composition of her atmosphere, the disposition of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, disposable diapers, plastic cutlery, asphalt, acid rain, whales, etc.
Perhaps you are a conservative, in my favorite sense of the word, a person who prefers to conserve resources. I am with you on that. In James' refrigerator story, the true protagonist is obviously the cheese, not to mention the senseless electrons sloshing back and forth to keep the whole contraption running.
Mother Earth is doomed to be consumed by the dying sun, about 4 billion years hence. She is about 4.5 billion years old already, so Gaia is well into middle age. Gaia is one of those girls who has been partying since she was 17, drank heavily during pregnancy (not her fault, she did not even know she was pregnant until she was already a billion years late!), can't keep track of her children, and blames them when their step-fathers beat them.
Fun facts about your native planet:
- The "climate" was once so warm that Antarctica was a steamy tropical forest. But only during the summer! Each winter the whole place would still freeze solid. Despite this abuse, Antarctica developed a splendidly adapted ecology.
- Extinction events are common. Mother Earth brings home men that knock her around from time to time (meteors). She is prone to fits of volcanic rage, and unexplained spasms. Whatever life forms are in her hapless brood at the moment bear the brunt of her emotional fits.
- The composition of the atmosphere has ranged widely since life began on Earth. No one will admit it, but some scientists suspect that carbon levels had become dangerously low for plant life before the discovery of fossil fuels. People who grow very valuable crops are sometimes known to release CO2 canisters into their greenhouses to speed growth.
- There is no such thing as pollution. There are things that some people, plants or animals find objectionable. Other people, plants or animals don't care. See India for example. See oil spills that return to normal faster with less human intervention. There are micro-organisms out there who see pollution as a meal.
- There was a time when idling a Honda Civic in Los Angeles reduced the amount of particulates and products of incomplete combustion (smog) in the air.
- There was a time when tar balls often washed up on Santa Barbara beaches, now since all the oil has been pumped out of the Channel, there is much less oil seeping up, and fewer tar balls.
I would love to see Mother Earth occupied by a much reduced number of highly conservative humans, with space exploration as a priority, but I don't see a path to a future like that. People are highly attracted to apocalypse myths, and I believe it has to do with facing our mortality. How can the Earth continue after I am gone? It doesn't seem possible, it is too painful to contemplate. An environmental apocalypse has simply replaced various religious versions, it scratches the same itch, but is not stigmatized in our culture the way religion is. It is also a way to indulge in extreme misanthropy and self righteousness that I find distasteful. I think it is fine to be a local misanthrope, to form an opinion of those persons whom you are in frequent contact with, but to raise it to the level of condemning all of humanity, to protect the environment, which you are powerless to help and which takes no notice of you either way is going too far for me.
Thanks James, and thanks Sam J.
“What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.” - Ecclesiastes 1:3-4
"It is one of the great weaknesses of reasonable men and women that they imagine that projects which fly in the face of commonsense are not serious or being seriously undertaken."- Margret Thatcher
Bravo again Lynn. Well said! Yes, this notion that human beings can destroy the earth is nonsense. Vanity. Even if Humanity were ever to succeed in making the entire earth uninhabitable for their own species the planet itself would still be there. The earth would abide and life would continue. As you observed Lynn, nature itself is much more capable and much more likely to create the conditions that would extinguish Humanity than any works of man. If our President set the government to the task of destroying the ozone layer on purpose to give all the evil, racist white Republicans skin cancer, they couldn’t do it. But if and when the Super Volcano in Yellowstone ever erupts it’s curtains for the USA.
As you say all these apocalypse myths that have been promulgated have had an extremely pernicious effect on our society. Our economy is being destroyed and the bonds that hold our society together are being purposely dissolved by our Leftist elites, often under the pretext of “saving the planet.” Some of these "enlightened" people even wish to drive humanity to extinction: vhemt.org (the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement- Crazy as it sounds they’re serious!). Much of our millennial generation is struck with a fatalistic apathy, convinced they will be dead before they are 65 due to an ecological disaster. Consequently they have adopted a live for today and don’t bother to save for tomorrow ethos. Well I’ve got news for them, much of my own Baby Boomer generation was likewise indoctrinated to believe the same, only we found out that the end of the world is not something you can count on. Now many of my fellow Baby Boomers find themselves facing old age with nothing saved for retirement. Likewise the millennials will be facing an economic collapse rather than an eco-disaster brought about by so-called anthropogenic global warming. Although the weather won’t be much different, they’ll be likely to notice it more since they’ll be homeless vagabonds.
Its’ not all bad on the horizon though. I look around where I live and everyday see quite a few millennial couples with two or three small children in tow. Young white women with white kids. Imagine that? Not everybody is ready to give up, roll over and die. Another upside is that we can thank feminism, the Green movement, VHEMT, and all the rest of the anti-civilization Leftist cabal for inspiring non-maternal Leftie white women to remove themselves from the gene pool.