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Why Worry About The World?

This article is more than 10 years old.

This anthropomorphism, this self-centered attitude, this pure selfishness, is for the most part the condition of man (and woman).  And yet, some of us, sometimes, see it otherwise.  There are those who are terribly empathetic, feeling the pain of others, even non-humans, almost physically, and another set that takes a scientific view, objective and cool.

So, with objectivity in mind, I dredged up, from my time as editor of the Winchester Star in the 1980s, an editorial that tries to bring in a longer perspective.  Despite the fact that The Star was a humble local weekly in Massachusetts, I realize, looking back, that in many ways that editorship was the best job I ever had:

Why Worry About The Fate of the World?

I used to mourn for the earth.  I used to worry about its well-being and was protective about it the way a father feels about his child.

Polluters, exploiters, developers all drew my hatred.  I even felt a twinge of bitterness toward each and every automobilist for spitting his little trail of exhaust into my beautiful air.

I anthropomorphized the planet. I thought it was like me, but helpless, unable to defend itself against the brutality and indifference of man.

I watched as the fields of my youth were transformed into suburbs and witnessed the scorching of the land in places like Secaucus, N.J., where factory dumping has turned the surface black, yellow, and gray.

I heard David Brower, ex-president of the Sierra Club, say, as he squinted at the hazy New Mexico horizon, "This sky used to be crystal clear."

Strip mines, left by careless coal companies, their innards exposed to the sky like fallen warriors, rent my heart.  Even 10,000 years from now nothing will grow there.

Corporations expressed and continue to express indifference to the fate of the groundwater beneath them.  Those who drink from the tap in Winchester know that there is something wrong down there.  Community after community in Massachusetts discovers that pollutants, traveling underground with the flow of aquifers, have entered its drinking water.

The state says that to clean up the harbor costs too much and continues to dump raw sewage there. Corporations risk lawsuits rather than bear the direct cost of cleaning up their chemical mess. Municipalities point to Proposition 212 and say, "What can we do?"

Businessmen apologetically cite bottom lines to be met and dismiss the problem. The federal government cynically states "there is no significant danger" to various levels of pesticides sprayed on the food, radioactivity released into the atmosphere, sludge let into the sea.

And the human population reaches toward five billion, straining every resource.  The Nepalese are deforesting the Himalayas.  Everyone is voraciously fishing out the seas, exhausting the land of nutrients with aggressive farming techniques, killing off one species after another by viciousness or lack of understanding.

And all this used to anger me immensely. In my youthful idealism, I saw no reason why people couldn't do things neatly the first time and not destroy what is around them. Get out of your cars, I thought, and walk or ride a bicycle.  Build cities close in, so that people can walk from one end to the other, and build rail links between them so people don't have to drive.  Eat simple food produced locally.  Live modestly.  Make simple things.

But the destruction kept on and I cried for the earth.

Lately, though, I've begun to see things differently. I have taken what might be termed "the long view."

Species have always come and gone on the earth since life began in Precambrian times more than two billion years ago.  In the great Permian Extinction 230 million years ago, 95 percent of all species disappeared.  No one knows why, but something changed in the environment that made it sufficiently hostile, and many forms of life died out.

Again, at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago, large number of species died, including the dinosaurs.  This extinction led to the ascension of mammals and eventually man.

Extinction is the history of life.  The fate of individuals is known.  Only the longevity of species is in play.

Species that die out are often those too specialized to make a rapid change in reaction to changed circumstances.  The environment shifts until some can't take it any more.

One would be hard-pressed to argue that man is not specialized.  We have computer repair people for specific brands, carpenters who will not lay bricks, cleaning women who don't do floors.

We cannot stand direct contact with most of the environment without clothes, central heating, and air conditioning.  Most of us can't walk between the place where we sleep and the place where we work.  Even our work is only peripherally related to obtaining nourishment.  We rely on a specialized mechanized distribution system to produce what we eat.  And some farmers don't do pigs, and some don't do corn. Specialization is man's middle name.

Not so the cockroach.

"Mammalian species last, typically, two million years," says Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes. "We've about used up ours.  Every time Leakey finds something older, I think, 'Oh! We're overdue."

Every 150 million years the sea floor renews itself entirely.  On land, plains open up and let in the sea, continents crash into each other and form mountain ranges, and old mountains are worn down and buried.  Layer after layer of sediment covers each era as it passes.

Man can do many things to the surface of the earth and to its air, but the land of today will be nothing more than an interesting layer in the earth of tomorrow, and the air has always changed.

We couldn't have breathed the air of 500 million years ago, and we may not be able to breathe the air of the future, maybe the near future.

Future geologists, if there are any, human or otherwise, will look at a layer containing this brief span of time called the Industrial Age, and notice higher concentrations of trace elements and perhaps radioactivity.  They will form opinions as to what caused the great Quaternary Extinction and scratch their heads in wonder.

What we do to the environment is not destruction, merely transformation.

We are changing the earth. The earth doesn't care. It isn't human.

28 May 1987

© 2012 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc.  All rights reserved.

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