Where do we fit in?
15 July 2009
[This is carried over from my Facebook (www.facebook.com/eoneill). Originally posted on 30 March 2009.]
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Yesterday a man in Massachusetts stabbed his 17 year old sister to death, and then decapitated his 5 year old sister. He then stabbed his 9 year old sister until two officers who had arrived on the scene after she called 911 shot him to death. She’s now in the hospital.
Humanity is full of the cruelest, sickest beings on the planet. Only in humanity do we see such waste of life, such sadism, such sickness.
Why? What’s the difference between us and the other creatures on the planet?
Sentience seems to be the only factor. We’ve been given the capabilities to reason, and it seems that comes with a cost. We have the ability to reason ourselves into terrible things. We don’t see animals go on murderous rampages, save perhaps cases of genetic defects or sickness. We don’t see insects rape.
There’s a pair of giant landfills in the Pacific Ocean, collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Together, their size is estimated as twice that of Texas. Texas. The second largest state in the US. Perhaps those of you who’ve taken long road trips can imagine sitting in a car on a highway for two thousand miles and driving through a landfill. That’s how big it is.
On top of this, most of the trash there is plastic. Not only does plastic take millenia to degrade, it soaks up any and all toxins it happens to be submerged in. Small bits of toxin-filled plastic are eaten by small animals, who then become ill and either die or are eaten by larger animals, who then become ill and may die.
Why do we, the smartest beings on the planet, do these heinous things?
More importantly, why are we allowed to do them?
It’s been said many times that Earth would get along fairly well on its own, without a thinking brain on it. Food chains and ecologies would function as nature guided them, animals would become extinct naturally rather than by being over hunted or by having their habitats razed for whatever reasons.
But would it? Would things be greener, cooler, or more orderly without humanity?
What I’m really asking is, “Where do we fit in?”
We exist, unlike any other creature on Earth, at the top of every food chain. Literally. We have no predators to fear. You can start at bacteria and work your way up every conceivable path of consumption, and we will never be below an animal the way they’re below us.
We have the ability to tailor our environments to suit us. Take the desert I live in, for example. By all natural rights, this place should be nothing more than a dust bowl in most areas. However, through engineering and an IMMENSE amount of water, we’ve turned some of it into farmland. We have green grass wherever we choose and tend it. We have lakes and we stock them with fish.
We are apparently the stewards of the planet. We subdue and master it. We progress by making the world fit us. We evolve the nature, the nature does not evolve us.
It seems, though, that it comes at a cost. Humanity’s foresight has not kept up with its innovation. We’ve made countless species extinct for a plethora of reasons. The odd thing, though, is that it’s never been, “That species needs to die because they’re harmful.” It’s usually more along the lines of, “That species is in my way, but they can’t stop me, so I’m going to do what I want anyway, and whatever happens happens.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fatalist. I don’t believe mankind has the capability to wreck our planet thoroughly right now, save for our retarded amount of nuclear weapons.
However, think about this: in a thousand years, the United States will not exist. Your bloodline will have either died out or merged with families not even started yet. For all we know some malignant genius could create an airborne HIV variant and spread it to every human on the planet, making us extinct.
And all that plastic trash in the Pacific will still be there, floating in circles, kept aloft by the currents that dragged all of that waste from our coasts out to the middle of the ocean. It will still be there for eons after.
That will be our mark on the world.
Slowly, over geological and evolutionary time, the plastics will break down to whatever compounds they break down to. Some creature’s fifteen thousandth descendant will have evolved to consume and break down those products, and excrete them as urea and gases and perhaps degradable solid wastes.
The planet will recover. Much like that little girl may, after her brother killed two of her siblings, one right in front of her, and then stabbed her. The problem is that she shouldn’t have to. You ask anyone why she should have seen those terrible things, why she should have been stabbed, why she should have been scarred physically and emotionally, and you will be met with silence.
Animals, plants, insects, bacteria… none of them can scar the planet or one another the way we do. We are unique in that we have the ability to do so. We are unique even moreso because we know better.
However, what makes humanity TRULY unlike any other life form is that we do it anyway.
So where do we fit in?
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