Random Thoughts In Honor Of Earth Day
How wonderful it is to live according to nature’s way. Some think free will is better than subordinating oneself to natural law. Some think that it is better to rule in Hell than serve in heaven. But what they believe to be will is in fact ego. Our will is to live in accord with nature’s laws. How could it be otherwise, we ARE nature. Nature’s will flows through us, all that we are is designed to be in accord with nature. We are not separate from nature, we are part of nature. It can never be otherwise.
It is only when we demand what is not freely and luxuriously given that gluttony becomes a sin. But when nature provides us a bounty, it almost seems a sin not to fully indulge in it. Take full advantage of all that is not taken from others. Appreciate the gifts and the blessings that come your way. Feast well. Only do not let it go to waste, and share with others what has been so generously gifted upon you. Gluttony shared is the far greater pleasure.
They say food tastes better if it is made with love. Imagine, then how food tastes that was grown and harvested with a loving relationship with Mother Earth.
I don’t want us to be the species that ruins it for the rest. What we do not consume we poison. Sometimes we do both. Perhaps that is how we shall end, by consuming the poisons we have created.
I would love to get away from civilization by running headlong into nature, and would gladly do so if it were not for my reluctance to further pollute nature with a human presence.
There will come a day when you ask nature to do for you what it has always done for you. You will demand from it food, a hospitable environment, a place to play and a place to relax. You will look for it and it will not be there. It will be plowed under by an Amazon distribution center, a strip mall, or a frack mining site. You will ask it to provide for you like an ungrateful child demanding mother give you what you want, but she will be gone, worn out by the incessant demands and infantile relationship you have demanded that has sucked her dry. And on that day you will realize you are incapable of providing for yourself, that throughout your life you have never provided but only demanded, and you will be left alone like an abandoned child that has no one that will provide for you. On that day, technology, which was your security blanket, will be unable to provide you the sense of comfort you require, will no longer be able to feed you or give you any semblance of security.
Science not in the service of nature is an abomination.
Primitive man lived his life ignorant of science. Modern man lives his life ignorant of nature, to my mind a much greater ignorance.
The White Man gave the Native Americans cheap trinkets and before they knew it, their land was taken from them. Come to think of it, The White Man did it to himself, as well. He offered his race a bunch of shiny gadgets, and in the end it took from them nature.
I ask my inner self what it is most interested in saying, and it is this: the moments I most feel at peace, feel at home, feel happy, are the moments where I hear the rustling of leaves, the lapping of waves, the crunching of snow, or the chirping of birds. It is when I feel upon my skin a cool breeze or the warm rays of the sun. When before my eyes are countless stars, a forest of trees, or a body of water. What makes me happiest is nature and all that it provides. All else is mere augmentation. A new baseball glove or a football was always secondary to having a field of grass to play in. The fruits of civilization are nothing if they detract from the one true source of joy. If they poison the water, fill my ears with dissonance, cover the smell of flowers, they are an evil. If they distract, if the screens divert my gaze from the heavens, they bring me unhappiness. Yet day by day we tear down the sources of our happiness and well-being in order to build distractions. And day by day we fritter our precious moments of life away from nature, working in order to be able to pay for more things to distract ourselves with. The most primitive man had at least this: he was never distracted from his true relationship to nature. If he sweat and toiled, he did so in nature, with a clear understanding of why he did so.
How can we hope to achieve wisdom when we do not spend our nights staring up at the stars but instead down at our screens? Whatever knowledge we gain we lose in perspective. Primitive man had a far greater understanding of his place in the cosmos than we ever will.
Capitalism and nature are incompatible. No man can serve two masters, at some point — and that point is now — he must choose which he shall serve, and which shall serve him.
Man has triumphed utterly over nature. Man has eradicated and driven to extinction or near extinction any animal that is a threat to him. Man has learned to grow food to excess. He has learned how to cure many of the diseases and imperfections the natural world has created. Our intellect has created technology, and technology has made us masters of this world. Man’s only real danger now comes not from the outside world but man himself.
But for all that man’s penchant for technological solutions has been able to assist in man’s struggle against the natural world, it is a horrible tool in his struggle to coexist with nature. And it is, sadly, the only tool he has in his toolbox that has been properly maintained. Whenever man has encountered a problem, he reflexively reaches his hand for that old familiar implement.
It is my goal to walk quietly through nature, and stamp loudly through the minds of my fellow man. I wish to leave the wild things as they are and upend the comforting ideals which clog humanity’s critical faculties. It was not my original intent to be any more disruptive with people than I am with nature, but the former is under attack by the latter, and my desire for peace and repose requires that I speak up.
The natural world needs nothing from the market. Trees do not need loans, birds do not need money, and rivers do not need investors. The market, however, takes everything from nature and gives nothing in return. The market can’t afford to leave the natural world alone because there is no profit in it. Where nature exists it must be altered in order to convert it into capital. Natural lawns make no money for anyone, and so people’s lawns are turned into chemical dumping grounds so that new industries can be created where none are needed. In the end, the market will take everything from nature and, giving nothing back, will destroy it, and in turn, itself.
Nature will be the ultimate decider of our fate. But while we may idealize her, if we abuse her, she will be a cruel judge in the end.
They have replaced the wisdom of your ancestors with corporate values. They have buried the storytellers of the past with Disney fairy tales. The lessons, struggles, and sacrifices of those who came before you have been washed away in a sea of forward thinking. The root cellars and summer kitchens and the numerous other ways humans used to adjust to nature without being at war with her are forgotten. Nature’s laws are abandoned while economic laws reign supreme.
The intellect always seems to be taking humans away from nature. It fashions porcelain and plastic, and antiseptics and antibiotics. Nature to the intellect is an unpleasant enigma it knows it can never solve. The intellect, without a heaping side order of humility, is ecocide.
For every farm-raised animal you don’t eat, you leave room on this planet for a wild animal to walk free.
If you are incapable of finding beauty in nature, if you do not look to nature for the answers to all your problems, if you somehow believe you can escape from nature, you are simply looking for an escape from reality. This makes humans the most foolish of all of nature’s creations, lower than the dung beetle, more moronic than a monkey, dumber than a donkey,
The Earth is your mother, not your whore.
You ever been to a park where seagulls or geese have crapped over absolutely everything so you really don’t even feel comfortable walking anywhere and you just kind of wish the whole species weren’t part of God’s plan for the Earth? That’s how every other species feels about us. Instead of crap, which biodegrades in a matter of weeks, we leave cigarette butts which last for years, plastic bottles that last for hundreds of years, and uranium, which will hang around for hundreds of thousands of years.
I saw a flock of geese flying overhead tonight and my first thought was “How can I make the world more hospitable for them?” Because that’s what it’s come down to. Humans no longer share a planet with other species, they own it and are thus responsible for all that lives.
It is my goal to take as little from the Earth and give as little to corporations as possible. The one is my mother, the other a cancer that eats away at her.
We are too afraid to feel the Earth’s pain, because it is so immense. But once we do, once we open ourselves up to it, we shall open ourselves up to its power, as well.
We tore into our mother earth, extracted her stone and steel to erect monuments to our greatness because we did not wish to admit we’re fragile and mortal. We took from our future to build monuments to the past, abandoned a renewable existence for illusions of immortality. In Greek mythology, Kronos devoured his children in order to keep them from growing up and replacing him. We are doing the same, destroying our children’s future so that we might live one more day.
We live in a society where corporations have full rights in our courts and full voice in our government while our planet has neither rights nor voice. In order for nature to speak to us, we must listen, and incessant chatter drowns out the voice we long to hear. Nature holds ultimate power, and yet human laws have sought to subvert that power until the day when nature must violently usurp the unjust and irrational rule of human beings. We human beings were created to be rational, created to be the greatest expression of natural law. Should we fail in that role, nature has a long history of correcting such failures. If we cannot speak for the earth, if we sever our allegiance to it, nature will do what it has always done, and it will act without compassion or regret. Nature is superior to humanity, shall ever be superior to humanity. If we do not learn how to serve, then all our intellectual achievements will come to nothing.
Capitalism was the best system ever devised for humanity’s struggle against nature, but it is the worst ever devised for co-existing with it.
Once the dangers man faced lay outside of himself, in nature. Man needed to battle nature in order to survive. But man has conquered nature. Now his primary threats are the mindsets, institutions, and technology he has created. Man is now man’s greatest enemy. The enemy we must defeat if we wish to survive is no longer outside, he is within us all.
When the seas can no longer support life, when the last forests have been clear-cut for timber and agricultural interests, when climate change becomes an undeniable catastrophe and nature a ravaged monstrosity we shun, remember that this was your choice. You chose it in the smallest of ways countless times. It was a choice you made with every plastic bottle of water you purchased. It was made every time you said “plastic’s fine”, “I need a bigger car”, “I want a big family”, “I’m building a new home in the country”, or “I’ll take a bacon cheeseburger”. It didn’t just happen and you weren’t powerless to make a difference. You matter, but you chose to listen to those who told you you didn’t.
In all ways possible, corporations are trying to put themselves between you and nature. They would rather you listen to birds on the internet than in the woods. They would prefer you buy a grapefruit peeled and place in a plastic container.
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that human beings will either be nature’s greatest creation or its worst abomination. I’m aware of the dangers of extreme choices, but times of crisis sometimes thrust them on us. Sometimes there is no middle ground or — more accurately — the middle ground is where the greater danger lays. Sometimes the realistic options, or the odds of success and failure of each, need to be faced quite clearly, and the temptation of some middle ground is nothing more than an illusory temptation. An excuse for inaction.