Just finished watching David Attenborough’s excellent dvd series “Planet Earth” for the third time. I have been a fan of his since I was a kid. I used to watch him on television and take notes, and my copy of “The Living Planet” is annotated and scribbled over. I fantasized about marrying him some day, but alas…
Anyway, I think that the series should be required viewing especially in this day and age when notwithstanding the devastating effect we are already having on the environment and our world, big money continues to destroy habitats and endanger species globally.
We as humans, or perhaps I should say as Westerners, are so far removed from the day to day struggle to survive. I’m not saying that I am not thankful that my children are safe, that food is abundant and easy to get. What I am saying is that we take it for granted, and we take this earth for granted. As if we have earned the right to take and take and take. Although I am not a religious person, I think I recall a passage in the bible where God instructs man to be a caretaker of the animals and the world. Instead we are driven by greed and worse, by gain, by the acquisition of wealth which in actuality means nothing. What is money but paper imbued with a transitory meaning?
There are still places on this earth where man has not gone. Wild, remote places of heart-breaking beauty. I am in awe that we have not laid our poisonous hands on everything, but slowly the devastating effect creeps closer, like oil on the water. We must preserve, cherish, put something above our own selfish desires. It breaks my heart to think that my son and daughter may know nothing of the tenuous, beautiful, world we still have today and the animals that share it with us. That tomorrow, the films may be all that is left.
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If things continue the way they’ve been going all that will be left is one huge stinking pile of bat guano teeming with cockroaches and giant centipedes. Not that that isn’t interesting and spectacular but think about it. No elephants, no frogs, no snow leopards, no blue whales- larger than any dinosaur that ever lived- and we have them now. In our time. Ours.
To own anything means to take care of it.