Or

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER

Read:

Terry Tempest Williams book “Erosion”, Salman Rushdie’s “Languages of Truth” and HH Dalai Lama’s “A Call for Revolution” for a wider perspective of humanity and Mother Earth and “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson for the more anthropocentric attitude.

Consider:

The Earth is somewhere around 4,500,000,000 years old. Humans and their ancestors have been walking around the planet for about 6 million of those years. Homo sapiens in its modern form evolved 300,000 years ago from Homo erectus. Human civilizations started forming around 6,000 years ago. That is, the Earth has been here a lot longer than the first ancestors of modern humans or any human civilizations, and any and all platitudes that proclaim Earth was created and exists for human life are delusionary at best. The notion that Homo sapiens are the highest form of life, superior to every other form of flora and fauna on Earth, is hubristic madness.

            Many, many, many life forms have come and vanished on Earth during those 4,500,000,000 years, some of them recently, alas, because of the anthropocentric actions of mankind growing out of his/her swollen-headed hubristic fantasy that Earth is a resource instead of a mother of all life, not just human life. Many people, including two old friends, Doug Tompkins and Yvon Chouinard, have done their best to address this fallacy. Check this: https://www.tompkinsconservation.org/ and this: https://www.patagonia.com/ownership/  even knowing it would not be enough. Doing the right thing for the right reasons has a value that endures beyond the action in the moment. May we all do as well, that is our best.

            Each time I have rafted the Colorado River down the Grand Canyon, at its narrowest point (56 feet) I have run my hand along the Vishnu Schist (the oldest exposed rock on Earth, several billion years old years old) and something about its smoothness and density and color communicates the relativity of its age and mine, and one of the ways that I have learned to (or at least choose to) think about that relativity is that a human life is like a snowflake falling on its journey to its source which never ends or an Aspen leaf that grows from a larger dynamic, has a life which ends falling from its tree in a return to that larger dynamic that never (so far) ends and of which the Earth is as small a part as a snowflake is to the Earth.

            And this is not new information. In the 18^th century Thomas Malthus wrote this: https://evolution.berkeley.edu/the-history-of-evolutionary-thought/pre-1800/the-ecology-of-human-populations-thomas-malthus/

            The population of Earth when Malthus issued his warning was around one billion people. In 1900 the population was about 1,600,000,000. By 1960 it had grown to 3,034,949,748. By 2000 it was 6,143,493,823 and today it is more than 8,000,000,000.

            Mother Earth cannot sustain that many people, nor shall it for much longer (one of my grandsons is of the opinion that humanity will be gone in 50 years).

            The best each of us can do is to live each moment mindfully with the right intention, the right thought and the right action, all with love and compassion and a smile.