George Carlin played with words like Zeus played with thunderbolts. In this video he asserts that the planet Earth will do just fine without us humans and our overblown sense of self importance.
Our notions of “saving the planet” are arrogant and misguided. We have not even mastered taking care of one another let alone taking care of the complex eco-bio-cosmological entity we live on and call Earth.
I have often wondered about our true place in the grand scheme of things and how cocky we have become since our over sized frontal lobes started pressing on the rest of our brains.
We cling to the planet like a fungus or, as Bill Hicks so eloquently put it, “a virus with shoes” and we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we exist above and beyond the environments we have created and live in. We remain largely ignorant of the fact that they sculpt us as much as we do them.
Even domesticated pets have most of us beaten into submission, lazing at home all day while we go out hunting for food on their behalf.
And that is before infecting us with mind altering parasites.
The fact that in our own bodies bacteria outnumber our body cells 20 to 1 and that aliens might view us as nothing more than hosts for microbes blows my mind and reminds me of Tom Robbins’ notion that, “Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.” — Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)
Not to mention the plausibility that we are helpless pawns in corn’s strategy to dominate the world as author Michael Pollan points out in this TED talk.
Our self appointed place at the top of the ecological hierarchy is an intoxicating illusion.
The sobering reality is that 90 percent of all living creatures that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct, irrespective of their ecological social standing, and it is probably safe to say our chances of contributing ourselves to that statistic are very high, but at least we are in the apparently unique position of being able to be aware of this fact.
We are not destroying the planet, we are merely making it unlivable for ourselves and the host of organisms we depend on for survival, but there are other organisms capable of rapid adaptation to these new climates and long after we are gone as a species they will bring about the next generation of planetary ecological systems and the planet, no longer called Earth, will go on and on and on and on and the human shit stain we are leaving behind will gradually be washed away by toxic (to us) rain.
As Kafka allegedly once said to Max Brod, “there is hope, just not for us.â€.
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