Earth Day is about honoring and celebrating the incredible miracle of this living planet. As it should be. However, this day increasingly reminds us of what we have lost and, it appears, what we may yet lose that cannot be regained. The resplendent orb we call home grows sicker by the day, and our species is what ails it. The copasetic climate underpinning our survival is rapidly changing, shifting toward a toxic, diminished and desolate world. A world that will no longer sustain us. And it’s happening even faster and more intensely than the most pessimistic climatologists predicted.
Scientists surmise that over 99% of all life forms to have inhabited the Earth are forever vanished down the one-way street of extinction. Most were taken out by climate change, asteroid impacts, volcanism or competition, but now we humans are the culprits behind what biologists consider nothing less than a new mass extinction, the greatest since the dinosaurs bought it 65 million years ago. While we utterly depend on the natural world to live and breathe, we treat it like our slave or an inanimate object—a thing, not a partner in survival. Human conduct toward the Earth constitutes matricide, the intentional murder of our existential mother. Which, ultimately, becomes mass suicide, the deliberate killing off of Homo sapiens.
You don’t have to be a biologist to figure out that any species that intentionally destroys its life-sustaining environment is populated with a bunch of seriously whacko dudes. And we seem to be getting wackier all the time. Polluting our oceans with plastics and oil spills. Polluting our air with greenhouse gases and particulate matter. Polluting our soil and fresh water with pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. All of which pollutes our souls. And for what? Money, that biblical root of all evil. Indeed, it is.
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Common Good?
The problems we seem unwilling to tackle continue to pile up like the detritus in our landfills, overflowing with the discarded symbols of our avarice and excess. Climate change, overpopulation, pollution, pandemics, famine, resource depletion . . . it’s enough to make a beaming optimist belt down a row of stiff drinks and consider jumping from a high place. Are we so full of ourselves, so hog-tied by our petty egocentricities that we can’t find a way to come together for our common good? Apparently. And that, above all else, may prove our shared Achilles heel—selfishness and greed.
Ants, bees, wolves, geese, dolphins and countless other creatures, tiny and tremendous, have figured out how to work together in support of their common interest—survival. Some argue that they’ve been around a lot longer than us, so they’ve had eons to get it right. We don’t have the luxury of that much time. Why? Because we’re way out over our skies with technology and too far behind with our moral wisdom. The brain is losing its race with the microchip and all that it engenders.
One element of our headlong plunge toward a self-inflicted demise includes slaughtering and brutalizing our fellow animals, the very creatures that possess the wisdom to live in balance with their habitat and form sustainable social groups. We should be learning from them, not butchering them.
For those of you who have already gotten the message, I apologize for the broad sweep of my tirade. I acknowledge there are humans who coexist symbiotically with their environments and actively work to safeguard the planet’s natural resources. Bless your souls. But individuals alone, even in mass, are not sufficient to preserve a global ecosystem conducive to our survival. We need business and government entities to engage in aggressive initiatives that offset the immense damage already done to our Earthly home. Right now, collectively, we seem so self-absorbed and shortsighted as to willingly forfeit the future of our grandchildren in service to our own convenience, comfort and profit. If that isn’t a living (or, perhaps, I should say “dying”) demonstration of a sin against the creator and its creation, I don’t know what is.
Preserving a planet that can sustain human life is the moral imperative of our time. To survive, we must align ourselves with the natural forces that gave birth to us and to all we depend on. Absent that, we’re toast.
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