An Earth Day Musing

On Earth Day it’s worthwhile considering the relationship of humanity to the natural environment. Personally, I see it as a kind of very troubled marriage in which one partner (us) has finally come to understood how bad its behavior has been and is finally resolved to do better. Though not completely better, and certainly not just yet.

Carrying this relationship analogy forward, perhaps we might also consider the possibility that this relationship can never really be resolved in a way that favors ourselves. And perhaps, just perhaps, (and I admit this is a somewhat adventurous suggestion) that the ostensibly offended party—nature—is not actually the hapless victim that we humans generally suppose, a party that has been horribly ill-used for want of an ability to defend itself. That perhaps it is us, the destroyers of countless species of flaura and fauna, the creators and dispensers of an ever increasing number of industrial, chemical, radioactive and even biological wastes, that is being manipulated to achieve a transcendental end of nature. Rather like one of those insect matings in which the heated up provider of a needed substance is drawn into a brief but intense pleasure fling and that cavalierly dispensed with upon finishing its appointed task.

So here’s what I think this whole human thing on planet earth might just really be all about. Every once in awhile some mechanism has to appear that allows a new order of life to come forth. Sometimes its a visitor from outer space, a meteor-born virus or a big chunk of massively destructive rock. Sometimes its a huge burst of volcanism or the loosing of a gazillion tons of trapped methane gases from under the oceans. And sometimes, perhaps, its the apparently self-serving but actually nature-serving activities of a quirky short-lived species. Like ours.

This notion, of course, presupposes a planetary intelligence, a Gaian intelligence, manipulating us in ways that we can never fully understand, and if we did understand might make us feel rather less important in the scheme of things than we usually suppose. It also suggests quite strongly that once we have fully completed our assigned task we might become fully expendable.

Unsettling in many ways from the human species perspective, this. Still, I find the notion rather appealing. Because considered objectively, it makes humanity seem truly productive, truly generative, truly worthwhile, while from the standpoint of our apparent effects on the natural order into which we were born we seem instead cruel, destructive, incredibly stupid, and as those early 19th century environmentalists, the Romantics, proclaimed us to be, plain vile.

Progenitors of a new, more exotic and complex order of planetary life rather than a greedy despoiler of the present living order. Ultimately sacrificing ourselves to advance the objectives of our Planetary Mother. It works for me.

Happy earth day.