I’ve had this feeling for several years that the Earth, or Nature or however you want to characterize it, is trying to kill us.
Stay with me here. I’m beginning to see the world as another living thing. And it does what it feels it needs to, to survive. We all motored along for generations, gradually making “progress” in various areas of making it happen. Transportation got faster and easier. Leisure time became more of A Thing. We all kept having babies not out of necessity—maybe only half would survive to adulthood—but more out of habit or duty… or by accident.
And things started to get out of whack. And whack was good for generations. We conquered this and that disease, and people started living longer. We came up with incredible drugs and wiped out several scourges that held us back for years. We learned to eat more lettuce and fewer potatoes and meats. So while we are the fattest nation that’s ever been, Life Expectancy has continued to go up. We’re making more and more garbage and doing it over extended lifespans.
In the 1980s, I saw a graphic showing the resources Americans used in a year. It was about twenty percent more than was being produced, or was thought available or something like that—the moral of the story was that we were using up about 1⅓ planets worth of stuff, and that this was unsustainable. This was about the time I started noticing that Mother Nature or the globe or whatever you want to call it, seemed to be devising ways to correct for all of this. We’re pumping tons and tons of CO2 into the air and warming the place up… which causes more of the polar ice caps to melt which raises the ocean depth and those waters encroach upon the land we’ve come to know and love.
And what do you know, something like 80% of people live near the ocean. And for those that don’t, the climate change intensifies both the number and severity of storms. That’s going to displace people and wreck a lot of plans, for sure. And it’s also going to scrap a lot of cars, energy-inefficient houses built a generation or two ago are going to be replaced with modern, better-constructed and more energy-efficient homes, and most of the will be smaller than the ones we’re replacing.
Cars are getting better. Household energy is getting better. Medicine is getting better. So it’s a big fight to get rid of the thing—people—that’s messing it all up and the rise of technologies and behaviors like the increase in composting, recycling and more conscious buying decisions, and the people once again gaining the upper hand.
Meanwhile we continue to have earthquakes, predominately on or near the coasts. And we continue to create new diseases that wipe out entire populations. We didn’t have AIDS and COVID in the 1500s. We didn’t need them. The pox would get or the flu or some kind of an infection would do you in. But it seems to me the Earth is trying hard to make things a little more inhospitable for people, in the hope that we’ll quit monkeying with the natural planet.
