“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
Scholars tell us that humans have triggered the end of this world. Often they wring their hands, concerned over our excess. Politicians ring the bell of alarm, or in skepticism, over what we've been told, will kill us all. It plays into our fears, our conscience's perceptions that we do not deserve such a beautiful planet. And we've been told that nature's creatures know when an event is happening, even before it happens. They are sensitive to the rhythms of the earth, and all of its sounds. We have been told that we are dulled to the rhythms and sounds, because we are modern, we are deaf to empathy, perhaps we are even simply made of meat. We have become, or always have been immodest and empty.
The same nature that made us human, made us from nature's own designs, and we are from the same world, the same laws of nature, the same physics, world of sound, and the power of fire. We have come this far as nature, we will die as dust as nature. Many of our kind arrived at this very point in our history, from a place thinking themselves of higher and evolved minds. But we are not. We are different yes, we are able to destroy and reproduce in numbers that give pause to idea of ever worrying that there could be such a thing as isolation. Should extinction beckon we could scarcely last any longer by fighting it. Should destruction and devastation wipe us from the earth, there'd be no one to mourn our passing. For all of our great developments and minds, we will have left precious little of note behind to know we'd been here.
At this place and time, if we have a notion that the world is hanging in the balance, it is, to some great degree false. No, humans have changed the surface, we delved to the depths and stirred a change there as well. But this world will go on. Many species will go extinct, and those who lived beside us, as friend and food, will die as well. But others, despite our best efforts to change them to bend to our whims, will survive us. The world and many species will go on whereas we were called to a full halt. Despite the forsaken lands left from our existence and passage through, despite tell tale signs approaching, the fears forboding we do not have a way to leave. As of yet we do not know how to abandon our biome.
We cannot flee.
As much as scholars call unto humanity to soar into space, we've yet begun to fully, and actually roam. For all of our great intellect we cannot escape the natural world that we were born unto. We cannot flee our home. Some see this as a destiny setting standard. We were born of earth, we shall die upon earth. That may be so, but we cannot beg upon ourselves death for the wrongs done by us, we have children, they will have children, our future is not to stay and die.
Yes we must flee.
But no, not in retreat. Flee yes we will, but not to abandon and care never to return, earth remains and will always be our home. Flee, to save the germ of our species, and to begin again, this time with knowledge and forewarning of what we must do better. Humans have gone to the moon. With imagination and renewed desire to find the rest of the universe, we can reach out and find exactly that. Whatever that holds.
"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million, our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space." Stephen Hawking
“Regardless of how you believe the universe was created, it is there waiting for humans to explore.”
