Earth reveals her surprising fragility to us loud
and clear as we notice her barely suggested curve around the horizons
on
a clear day. She really should mean so much more to us than she
seems to. We should stop raping her. For decades
I have watched the stacks, standing
erect where we should kneel,
incessantly vomit what must be
our version of reverence into
her pale blue sacred halo, that relatively shell-thin layer of
air with which she gives us license to live. I could never keep from revolt
each time I would track the signs of industrial sewers snaking first
into the rivers and then into the oceans, or at the sight of ships far
below dispersing the stains of environmental atrocity in their wake
thinking themselves invisible in the middle of
nowhere. Nor are we the only victims of our own
parasite stupidity; there are also the creatures that we so
readily condemn to our own blindness while probably knowing less about
them then they do about us. Genesis, as poetic or as
literal for its time as one would care, gives us dominion over
the
animals but too many of us are reading dominance where responsibility was written.
There is a little
hope in that we have started reducing the diarrhea of environmental insults that our self
declared divine presence imposes on our celestial hostess, but
I'm not convinced that it has been anywhere near enough or fast
enough. While we publicly aspire to being awarenesses of
highest origins, we certainly don't act the way that instruments of
such
ancestry would. Instead we cast
all fate to the winds of abandon and dream of release from accounting. While we have lately begun
regulating to protect the ozone layer, exactly how many countries are
subject to these regulations? And how many billions of
recklessly discarded refrigerators loaded with freon still await their appointed moment of rupture
buried shallow in the dumps of the world? The poison pill is in
Mother Earth's womb; and somewhere down the road an assured coup
de grace may well lie in wait for us, the day when we should run
out of UV protection and start having to live indoors while no food
grows in sterile soil outside.
Come the invisible
horsemen. The chemical
complex keeps winning
every round while our immune systems continue their accelerating
downhill race as a result. AIDS, cancer, reduced sperm and egg counts in the privileged agricultural and ranching
communities most exposed to the good
things from the labs,
you name it, these are just the first and most visible signs and waves of
victims.
The humming birds may soon have to go, and when they do then we will
have to go with them. We neither see nor hear because we neither
look nor listen but instead continue diving headlong and hemming like
toward the gates of perdition. Our food chain is becoming a
synthetic brew foaming at the mouth with chemicals we know little and
sometimes even less about. Do we really need nuclear
winters? The toast-inertia is already in many of the
embryos from where there can be no return along the evolutionary marathon of miracles, and the inevitable degradation that must
follow such upsets had already locked on us even before cloning was
discovered. Will the out of control spread of genetically modified
seeds matter? Will their vendors ever be held to
account?
Oh, Lady Earth will survive us alright, at least until the Sun maxes
out, but exactly what are we leaving for our children in paradise
between now and then? Even primitive First Nations commanded: taking only what
you need along and for your journey, otherwise leave the land as you
had
found it. Such would be a very wise law I would think,
but they don't make the laws and we only think that we do. Should
forestry companies be limited, just one percent more each year,
to cutting only what they had planted? That at least would project a
reasonably attainable end of at least one form of devastation that the human infection on the planet has spoken its
presence with. Those who
insist on believing that all is infinite on our warm and blue
planet, on whose lovely face we have been falling around the Sun for eons, should listen to an old Vangelis
song called 'Albedo-0.39' and try to listen between the
lines. Then they should try to continue fooling themselves
when no one is looking.