Wednesday, April 24, 2024
This Monday was Earth Day 2024, and the theme was Planet vs Plastics. It is a day to remind us of the fragility of our lovely planet, which we are slowly killing with our indifference to her state. She has given us so much; she feeds us, clothes us, shelters us, and lets us enjoy her sometimes unimaginable splendor and beauty and wonder! In this vast and unending universe, she is one of supposedly billions of planets; we will never know, since we live in a time of innocence where our galaxies, stars, suns and moons and dark matter, are concerned! According to scientists, we are only aware of about 15% of the worlds, of the universe!
According to research, Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and became habitable during its first 500 million years. Again, according to research, we Homo sapiens evolved around 300,000 years ago; meanwhile, our ancestors have been around for about 6 million years, in all their different forms. These are all big numbers, too big for me who didn’t do too well in math at school. But if you look at the age of our planet, we are the new arrivals, the latest kids on the block, so to speak.
All the different geological periods she went through, and the punishment she endured, from shifting tectonic plates to asteroids slamming into her, to the dinosaurs, didn’t deter her from growing and shifting and changing into the beautiful garden she would eventually become, and which we humans would inherit!
The early inhabitants held her in awe, making gods out of the forests and seas and mountains, and also of the elements that made them. They respected her, appreciating her gifts and her power to change their fortunes in a blink, with hurricanes or earthquakes or volcanoes or droughts, and so much more. So they worshipped her for the wonder that she was to them!
Today, we don’t care anymore. By today I mean, since the Industrial Revolution to the present day. Our abuse of her has only increased with population growth and expansions and exploitations and greed and callous indifference! We have polluted our rivers and streams and seas. We have deforested her; we have invaded her core with machines and chemicals and left her wounded, not mortally; but give us another couple hundred years, we will eventually destroy her!
I realize that progress has a cost, but, as far as I’m concerned, plastic should never have been invented. In my opinion, plastic and carbon emissions are two of the biggest contributors to the slow and steady decline of Mother Earth.
In the Jewel we can personally see the results of the abuse we have heaped upon her. Go to Crooked Tree and see the dying lagoon, the dried-up ponds that were there for centuries. Go to the coral reefs and see the bleached coral formations, which if rejuvenated, will never return to their former glory and beauty. Plastic is strangling our animals, birds, mammals and our sea life; we have to be careful when we eat fish these days, that we aren’t consuming plastic. We are littering; cruise ships dump their waste in our pristine waters; well, maybe not so pristine anymore.
The ice caps at both poles are melting; flooding is becoming a threat to towns and cities and communities around the world, unstoppable and unrelenting. And we do nothing! We have the power to at least slow down the inevitable, the inevitability of the extinction of our planet and us, in the process. The billionaires are building rockets to find new worlds to inhabit and start a new life on; they maybe know something we common folks turn a blind eye to.
In 300,000 or so years wandering this earth, we humans have managed to destroy her as much as we are destroying each other. In the larger scheme of things in this universe, we really don’t matter, but we are leaving a blueprint for what comes next. Maybe a more advanced civilization will evolve, and will look at our history in disbelief, at our stupidity for not appreciating the most incredible gift we ever inherited, Mother Earth!
There is no redemption, in my opinion. We will keep on abusing and disrespecting her until she breaks down. Then we will abuse her some more. What does that say about us?
Happy Earth Day!
Glen