Owed to the Earth
February 17th, 2010
We are pleased to host a guest post today by a young (well, at least younger than me) friend of the blog, Dave Terrance. His full moniker will be revealed when he launches his own blog in the near future, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, here is his emotive response to the misanthropic worldview (or should that be Gaia-view?) of many in the Green movement:
“When you look through the fossil record of our earth, you will find that about 99% of the species of plants and animals that have existed on this planet are now extinct. Nature doesn’t care about us, nature doesn’t care about tigers, polar bears, buffalos, dodos, penguins, 1000 year-old redwoods, etc. etc. Nature doesn’t care about biodiversity. If a planet-killing meteor was heading for the earth, nature wouldn’t lift a finger to stop it.
It could be easily argued that the only thing that has ever cared about our blue planet is Homo sapiens.
Life is, in a way, a laissez faire system where various organisms compete for resources by adapting to their surroundings and exploiting niches through evolution. The most successful organisms are rewarded with continued existence, the others are condemned to extinction. Life creates order from chaos.
Humans are the only species that would intervene on behalf of another to save it from extinction. A lion wouldn’t care if it slaughtered the last gazelle.
Humans have managed through adaptation to rise to a point where we are not struggling on daily basis merely to exist. We have created order from the chaos. Now, being in this position, we look out over the earth and place value on it, we place value on life itself. I don’t know about you, but I think that is pretty important. We place value on something that the universe we live in couldn’t care less about.
Now some people are mad that we have risen to this point, and would like to see us pulled back down into the daily struggle to survive, at the mercy of the cruel world we live in. They celebrate poverty, and would like to have half our children die before the age of five, our women die in childbirth, and healthy people be struck down by curable diseases. And in the end they hope that we will become extinct too, just one more set of bones laying in the rock. And then there will be no-one left to care. No-one left to fight on behalf of life.
I don’t know what fuels this self-loathing. Maybe in killing God? Some think we have become the oppressor that God was – and now our existence oppresses this earth so we too must be destroyed. We have tasted the fruit of knowledge and we must pay, because we have dared to succeed. We dare to reach for immortality. We have dared to rise out of the dirt and have an impact on this earth. One thing is certain, not one creature, not one plant has zero impact on the environment, zero impact is the same as zero existence.
Life is precious, and has value, because it is rare. As far as we know this planet holds the only life in existence in this universe, and at this point, we are the best chance that life has of continuing in this universe, of defending existence from oblivion. We are the masters of adaptation. If we don’t make the mistake of giving up on ourselves, of thinking we have gone too far, that we have ‘progressed’ enough, of letting those among us who want humans to have ‘zero impact’ have their way, we will help life to spread throughout this universe. That will surely make an impact.”
