Earth Day

So its Earth Day, and everybody that had the opportunity to toke a joint on 4/20 is now stretching that day into Earth Day.  There are of course many sober conservationists too, those who are angry with the over many beating hearts upon the earth.  They feel (themselves excluded) that some great culling or elimination must come forth or manifest itself in order to to right the wrongs and save the earth.  The Earth after all lives, it breathes, it is an entity and it is our goal to love it.  I remember the 70s song in a long lost musical "Zero Population is the Answer My Friend".

I chuckle when I think on that.  It is the same mentality that occurred to Grizzly man Timothy Treadwell who became one with the grizz, you can find his last moments in a chilling sound recording on youtube as he was embraced by nature one final time.  I wonder if he had that moment of clarity that told him in the end, he was one in the only way one can become one with nature.

But then that is the way of nature.  To the Earth life is an infection that needs a cure.  The Earth's core existence or role is to wipe the petrie dish of who we are clean.  Not just humans, but everything.  The evidence? Look at the massive die offs.  Consider the dinosaurs of another age, they were probably the most benign group upon the earth, they were part of nature, they did not seek to control or change their environment, they were every Earth Day advocates dream of how we should be.  How did existence repay their most excellent balance?  It snuffed them out so that I could enjoy some coal fired electricity these millions of year later.  Guess the joke was on them.

At one time life was almost frozen out as the Earth became a giant snowball and dealt pretty much a cold hand to life as the Earth froze the oceans where it could.  Wonderful stuff that.  There was Tambora 70,000 years ago which wiped out so much of the plague called humanity that our DNA from this period shows us as a bottle neck when only a few of us were left.  There have been other calderas, Yellowstone is a favorite that recurs like a trip to Disneyland.  North America will be buried under ash next time.  Dekkan Traps anyone?  Or perhaps Siberian Traps? 6-7000 feet of lava flows pushing out of the Earth giving us 750,000 square miles of lava.  That one came close, 90%+ of sea life and 75%+ of land based species gone, snuffed, poof!.  Or so the fossils of extinct ammonites tell us.

Hurray, its Earth Day.  Pick up your litter, pick up your trash, place all kinds of restrictions on technology, growth, food, reduce populations!  All the wonderful stuff we were told in the 70's with dire stories of imminent destruction illustrated in the fake book "Silent Spring", or predictions of us dying soon.  We want the Earth to be clean and hospitable when it is our turn and we are wiped out.  You gotta love the Earth, such a trickster.