Earth thought 243: Everything alive has its system. When the system's thrown out, there's death. So a report discussed days ago describes how lizards are going extinct at alarming rates, because the planet is heating up from greenhouse gas effect. They run for cover in the shade rather than overheat, but then they lose valuable feeding time. And many migrate to cooler climes -but then they compete with the lizard species already there until some go extinct. Climate change is happening too quickly for them to adapt by evolving. Their system's thrown out by a hotter planet, and their genetic lines die out after so many millions of years of evolution.
Earth thought 244 of 365 : From an abstract, visiting-the-world-from-outer-space height, much of contemporary human society within globalization seems so impractical. People run around pursuing private wealth or personal ambition while harboring vague fears that could better be faced in groups. It isn't uncommon to hear people worry about climate change or the off-gassing and abraiding of toxins or carcinogens in our environment. But on we go, in our own private worlds, instead of coming together in groups to examine our world, its limits, its points of potential responsibility.
Earth thought 245 of 365 : Environmentalism is a historically situated way of life. Ideally, attending wisely to our home on Earth would be a part of being wise. But (1) I exist in a culture that scarcely recognizes our home on Earth, ironic as that may be; (2) homo sapiens only now, for the first time, can be aware of its long range and widespread ecological effects -this due to natural science and objective history. The homo sapiens of 12,000 years ago was a long term ecological mess -consider the mass extinction of megafauna our ancestors initiated back then. But this mess paled next to the ecological blindness that is an assumption of the industrial world, which acts as if the Earth is not our home. And so environmentalism is historically situated in two embedded craters, so to speak -the crater of the industrial revolution, and the crater of homo sapiens's coming to technology. It is an anti-toxin for the industrial revolution, and an awakening for homo sapiens, a new way of life for this being that can be said to enter a little bit more into maturity and leave adolescence a little bit sooner with the advent of ecological consciousness and environmental wisdom.
