No, my friends, I have not turned New Age on you all. Now I have been branded as “objectionable” by the blogosphere, I have a reputation to maintain. But, ever since, as a young boy, I read a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called “When The World Screamed” (one of the Professor Challenger stories) I have always been fascinated by the idea of the planet as a living, integrated, and possibly sentient entity.
“In his 2010 book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Plant, environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global warming that it’s no longer recognizable as the Earth we once inhabited. This is a planet, he predicts, of “melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat.” Altered as it is from the world in which human civilization was born and thrived, it needs a new name -- so he gave it that extra “a” in “Eaarth.” The Eaarth that McKibben describes is a victim, a casualty of humankind’s unrestrained consumption of resources and its heedless emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases. True, this Eaarth will cause pain and suffering to humans as sea levels rise and croplands wither, but as he portrays it, it is essentially a victim of human rapaciousness. With all due respect to McKibben’s vision, let me offer another perspective on his (and our) Eaarth: as a powerful actor in its own right and as an avenger, rather than simply victim. It’s not enough to think of Eaarth as an impotent casualty of humanity’s predations. It is also a complex organic system with many potent defenses against alien intervention -- defenses it is already wielding to devastating effect when it comes to human societies. And keep this in mind: we are only at the beginning of this process. To grasp our present situation, however, it’s necessary to distinguish between naturally recurring planetary disturbances and the planetary responses to human intervention. Both need a fresh look, so let’s start with what Earth has always been capable of before we turn to the responses of Eaarth, the avenger.” (Click here for the rest)
Click here to read the Conan Doyle story
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The secret word is Sister
IMHO, Karma is a bitch. And we make it every day.
ReplyDeleteSo as things look now there will only be enough for the very rich to have any quality of life. Well, not enough for even them, but ...
I'd suspect a conspiracy, but I don't believe these people are particularly smarter than I am. Unless they are the alien overlords, who secretly rule the planet. That makes more sense at some levels than the fact that pure greed and stupidity have taken us this low.
BUT the trend in business has been to remove the need for human intelligence and innovation from business and industry. To reduce human labor to an interchangeable commodity.
but that CAN be explained by greed and stupidity.
I think I've just refuted my earlier conspiracy theory comment. All that is required is a lack of a renaissance education and an extreme short sightedness. And throw in a religion with and apocalypse escape clause.
I should have scraped my ethics and sold those Y2K certified kitchen appliances and built my bunker.
I once read an old pulp sf story that took the living Earth thing to the limit. The world is wracked by cataclysms only to finally burst asunder because it was just a star dragon's egg.
ReplyDeleteJerry
Oh yeah, two Frank Hurbert books, take that idea also. Whipping Star & the Dosadi Experiment. Stars were sentient beings, BUT they were linked to other life forms. The star was a "Life Wave" while humans were "Life Nodes". But if we trul destroy the planet; we're doomed too.
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