Human nature is at once both afraid of change and constantly changing. Nothing remains the same even from moment to moment. We are all mortals, we are born, we grow, we consume, we defecate, we are organisms. As humans, we take it a step further. Unlike other organisms, we also acquire, use, and purge. We collect and we destroy. We do little to help save us from ourselves. We hurt each other, we are forced by our society to be cruel to one another. We package and preserve, we dispose of wastes. We generate a lot of waste.
Nature is messy and disorganized, but within this over natural chaos there is in fact, order. We try to order ourselves and each other through discipline and schooling. We look down upon those people who seem to be messy and we are embarrassed about our own mess. The trouble here is, as organisms, we ARE a mess! What we’ve done to our environment and out planet at large is a further mess and one which we cannot escape, so we send it away.
This system creates a form of pollution unrivalled by any other organisms in our world. As such, we are destroying ourselves by destroying our planet. Humanity, despite growing in population to ridiculous proportions, is slowly committing suicide in a way that takes generations. We therefore must figure out how to create methods of space travel and go to other worlds for the purposes of creating a new home and eventually destroying that one too. We do what we can to destroy our very nature.
But let’s begin at the beginning, shall we? Ok. For starters, we exhale carbon dioxide. We inhale oxygen. Oxygen is a natural pollutant. We destroy our upper ozone layer and create a lower one, where instead of protecting us, we choke on it. It’s no secret that the ozone caused by so many pollutants has caused a rise in asthma and other respiratory diseases.
At the root of the problem: money (photo by Cindy Lopez)
We have another problem. We are greedy little bastards. We want all we can get and then some and our collective appetite is insatiable. We horde things and we commit larcenies. We use this awful stuff we’ve created and now worship called money. For money, greedy men at greedy companies will intentionally put pollutants and allergens into our atmosphere, to sell more remedy. We actually will create a problem if the product we sell will fix it. We refer to other organisms as lower life forms, except these lower life forms do not mistreat their own nature as we do.
I fear that this problem we’ve created for ourselves is one we cannot solve in the long run, not for any amount of money, not for any form of technology we’ve developed, not really for anything. It took four generations to realize how badly we were destroying ourselves and even when we clued into that, we continued to get worse instead of better. Maybe we deserve our own destruction at the hands of a few so called heroes who are merely wealthy men who are even more greedy than the rest of us. We slave away at making things which destroy our environment in the pursuit of money. It seems in this world, money is God.
