Note: I had planned on not posting this, thinking that I'd missed a window, but now I'm told DK GreenRoots is an ongoing thing. So maybe there's no harm in me posting it now.
The last video in this diary is the same one I posted as a P.S. in my diary night before last. I’m leaving it in for those who haven’t seen it. This is the long over due diary that goes with it.
* Thanks to Land of Enchantment for the DK GreenRoots emblem.
This unbelievably beautiful blue orb we call earth is everything to us, yet it is far less than it for so long seemed. For most of human history we did not recognize much in the way of earthly limitations. The planet’s territory, resources and capacity to sustain us seemed more-or-less infinite at a global scale, and as a practical matter and generally speaking it was...until recently. The handwriting was on the wall as early as the Industrial Revolution, but we came slowly to the reading of it. It has only been within my lifetime that we have begun to awaken in any real sense to what it means to exist on a finite planet whose inexhaustible resources are no longer any such thing.
I have childhood memories of summer nights lying on a still-warm roof gazing out at the stars and feeling infinitely small. I didn’t grow up to be an astronomer or anything (though I did work on the Hubble Space Telescope), but I never lost my fascination with stars. I’ve always marveled at them, how many of them there are and how unfathomably far away. The realization that the sun itself is a star, and a small one at that, put the extraordinary distances in perspective for me. I remember being even more astonished to learn that because of how far away the stars, the light that reaches us from them is an ancient artifact by the time we receive it. These simple matters of fact have always seemed worthy of deep contemplation to me. The scale of it alone - it’s a lot to grok
Our entire world is but a cosmic speck of dust floating in the overwhelming and unimaginable vastness of space. And a tiny speck we are.
And yet all of our history and all that preceded it has unfolded right here on Shakespeare’s stage, right here on this very small but very precious pale blue dot.
Clever monkeys that we are, we succeeded in overpopulating the planet, while poisoning the environment and laying waste to precious resources in the process. We didn’t know any better for the longest time. We’re clever, but not that clever - we are forever having to be saved from ourselves.
Buckminster Fuller believed that we’d always prove sufficiently clever and inventive to outsmart any conundrum with which we were faced. He ventured that notion with respect to the energy crisis, which has been foreseeable since at least the early sixties when he made that observation. As much as I love the Buckster, I fear that his thesis has become more and more tenuous over time. It’s one thing to be clever, it’s another thing to be wise.
We now know better than to continue our wasteful and destructive ways, but we can’t seem to stop ourselves. It all boils down to the fact that we as a society are greedier than we are either clever or wise. Actually that’s unfair. Most of us don’t deserve it. Most of us would have our leaders behave as responsible stewards of the planet upon which we dwell and depend. But there is a small minority of us who have seized virtually all the wealth and all the political power, and they are blinded to ecological reality by their malignant greed. Most everybody else has read the writing on the wall, but not those powerful few who would ignorantly doom us all and whom we have foolishly continued to tolerate at the levers of power.
Some argue that the planet will find a way to always bounce back Gaia-like from any of our puny insults, restoring any ecological unbalance we cause, that she is great and we are small and that we will never destroy the biosphere.
Even the guy who developed the Gaia theory doesn’t believe that any more. The planet, or rather the planet’s ability to sustain us, is more fragile than we commonly imagine.
"Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty - but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That's where life is; that's were all the good stuff is."
Loren Acton, American astronaut
We know so much less about these matters than we like to think that we should at least be cautious in our assumptions. Global Warming science keeps showing how much we have underestimated the consequences of the damage we’ve done to the environment so far. And nobody knows when, how or if we might trigger a deadly feedback loop...but it’s a distinct possibility. We should be tiptoeing cautiously not rampaging like elephants. The destruction of the biosphere has to be allowed for as a possibility, and that possibility, along with science and reason should drive our policy...irrespective of any other consideration - including financial - most especially financial. Science, reason and responsibility are non-negotiable going forward. They have to be.
Special thanks of course and as always to the brilliant Sarah Brightman for the song Deliver Me (previously recorded by The Beloved).