by KaiserJeep » Wed 09 May 2018, 10:48:00
Every time dohboi starts one of his "killing the planet" threads I have to chuckle just a little bit. He has made a giant assumption - an all too common human assumption - that the dominant species of the planet is somehow invasive and not an integral part of the environment.
I appreciate a pristine wilderness without visible signs of humans as much as anybody. It provides solace and healing and peace for me. Then I return to the Silly Valley and I am surrounded by people and residences and malls and vehicles. At night, the amber glow of yet another human city reflects off the clouds with soft artificial light, and said golden clouds float across the inky blackness punctured by the hard pinpoints of the stars.
Earlier this past year, the Earth was tilted just correctly so that the ISS was orbiting in full sunlight, brilliantly illuminated by the sun, with total darkness below. I watched as it traversed the visible horizon from one side to the other in less than two minutes, a brilliant, multi-colored sparkling gem. That too was beautiful, although it was completely the work of man and not nature.
It came to me that we humans are part of the world, not apart from it. Jungles, mountains, and the pristine high deserts that delight me so much are no more rightuous than is the suburban squalor of the high tech Silly Valley. The orchards and fields and dairy farms that were replaced by houses, people, vehicles, and pavement were not natural either, and even back as well before the Spanish invasion which preceded the creation of the USA, the native Ohlone and Yahoo tribes lapped flints and cropped squash and beans in the semi-arid grasslands and scrub of the already ancient valley that would one day crop silicon chips and software.
There exist large boulders on nearby Mt. Umunhum (the Ohlone indian word for hummingbird) that have been recognized as the places where pre-historic Mammoth bulls sharpened their tusks, preparing for battle to determine which bull would cover the fertile female that sparked the conflict. On that same hill, there is the remnant concrete structures of a former USAF Distant Early Warning radar, and nearby are the empty missile launchers of Nike missiles, intended to destroy attacking Soviet bombers coming over the horizon. The ancient megafauna site and the US Air Force base are one and the same, occupying the same patch of ground, different layers of history 20,000 years apart.
As for the long history of humans, we have the pre-Clovis culture identified in nearby archeological sites, the mysterious event that de-populated the North American continent, and the Asian human migration over the Alaskan land bridge during the last glaciation. Now there are cities that glow golden at night, and the jewels of satellites in the sky.
The idea that anything that humans do is "killing the Earth" is absurb. We are as much a part of the ecology as any other species. If collectively we have an impact that is visible from space, who are we to be so presumptuous as to call it unnatural, or a departure from Nature?
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001
Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.
Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0