Happy Earth Day -- The Earth is for All People

All people in all places deserve clean water, clean air, and un-contaminated soil, in order to live a healthy existence -- just as much as the animals with whom we share this planet deserve such necessities.  If trees and animals are people too, then every member of the human species should also be treated as a real person. Otherwise the structure of the argument fails.  If we treat our fellow humans foully, how can anyone expect us to respect and heal other living things on this planet?  But our minds are what make us human, and not merely like all other living things.  The human intellect is the inevitable result of natural, ecological development.  It is a part of the natural order.  More importantly, it has successfully lived in harmony with nature for 99% of the time it has been cranially present in the hominid family, fully emerging into wakefulness anywhere from 70,000 to 50,000 years ago, depending on what evidence you examine and which anthropologist you talk to.  Our present disharmony with Nature should not be blamed on the cerebral potential of the human species, but on society's political misguidance, on its dry-rot of despiritualization.

There are libertarians who would say we should blame environmental degradation on the ignorance and carelessness of the poor, while liberal progressives would blame it on the insouciant economic methodologies of the rich.  Rational minds will recognize that overpopulation is of vital concern, but birth control education, supplies and clinics are being stymied by right-wing religious lobbies and traditional male chauvinist tribal societies -- and within the United States, by legislators, judges and even pharmacists!  Here is the usual prescription for the Earth Crisis: recycle, reuse, eat no or less red meat, buy local produce, use less electricity, reproduce fewer children, walk or ride a bike instead of a car if you can, don't buy that malfunction-prone cheap garbage from slave-factories in Asia, press your political leaders and candidates to restrain extractive industries that produce greenhouse gases, demand that corporations actually develop systemic forms of green energy.  These are all helpful and constructive, but the rich and powerful hold the true keys, and they are stubborn.

Not only that, they purposely mislead the less informed to believe that environmental concerns are a hoax and that defenders of our biosphere are anti-business, anti-capitalist, even eco-terrorists.  All of this anti-green skullduggery is so frustrating that sometimes the imagination could lead one to wonder sometimes if there are not pod-people inhabiting the bodies of humans to efficiently orchestrate the disintegration of our world from within.  If it were a matter of mere ignorance, that would be one thing.  But when it is so willful and cannily informed in its destructive nature, its reflexive shirking of all positive alternatives, it seems diabolical.  Earth is all we have, and if there is a Congress of Intelligent Life in the Universe (which I think not unlikely), they are probably now awarding us a resounding "D-" in ecological stewardship.  And what are the powerful going to do with their piles of wealth and booty when the Earth has become a desert? Take a silver spaceship to a secret resort on Planet X and clink bubbling champaign glasses?

I apologize for being so negative, but I know there are probably plenty of more hopeful sites out there in there on the internet to celebrate this day.  I just want us to squarely face certain aspects of the problem of potential environmental collapse that I have grown sick of the mainstream media dancing around.  Did not Nero play his lyre while Rome burned at the hands of his paid arsonists?  And then he blamed a scape-goat.  The planet burns now -- have we learned nothing?