RESPECT THE ENVIRONMENT
In a word, our relationship with our environment is about respect.
- We live on a planet soaring through space.
- We call this spacecraft Earth.
It is a spacecraft (Earth) within a spacecraft (solar system) within a spacecraft (Milky Way galaxy) within a spacecraft (universe).
And, our universe may be another spacecraft within a multiverse.
As the late esteemed professor Edward O. Wilson wrote, “Humanity did not descend as angelic beings into this world.
- “Nor are we aliens who colonized Earth.
- “We evolved here, one among many species, across millions of years, and exist as an organic miracle linked to others.
- “The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness was our cradle and nursery, our school, and remains our one and only home.
- “To its special conditions, we are intimately adapted in every one of the bodily fibers and bio-chemical transactions that gives us life.”
We are a product of this tiny orb that is our world.
Over billions of years, we have evolved and emerged in concert with other species of plants and animals.
As a part of this whole, we are subject to the natural laws that enable everything to exist.
Every physical thing we require and enjoy is derived from our world. Everything.
Every breath we breathe, every drop we drink, and every bite of food is derived from our environment.
Every bit of clothing, medicine, building material, and everything else is drawn from this source.
This world gave birth to us and countless other species of plants and animals.
Now, much of life, including our own, is threatened.
- We are polluting and decimating life-support systems, plundering resources, and driving species to extinction.
- The rate and range of global environmental deterioration is unprecedented.
- It is driven by the relentless needs of a global population that has grown out of control.
Author John Gray pointed out in Straw Dogs, “The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, ‘Western civilization’ or any flaw in human institutions.
- “It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate.
- “Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.”
Parasite-like and swarming, we are destroying our environment.
With astonishing speed, we are attacking our ecosystems like businesses in liquidation.
We have upset an extraordinary array of life that took billions of years and endless experiments to produce.
- Environmental problems cross the boundaries of nation states, academic disciplines, political and cultural ideologies, and religious theologies.
- They affect the affluent and the impoverished, developed and developing nations, individuals and whole societies.
These problems are far more than just another on a list of major concerns.
Our relationship with our environment is at the core of our existence.
Our relationship with our ecosystems is sacred and inviolable.
At our peril, we cannot violate, damage, or destroy them.
Nowhere do we find clearer and unmistakable evidence that what we do to others, we do to ourselves than in our relationship with our biosphere — Earth and its atmosphere where life and we exist (the sum of all ecosystems).
Respect the environment.
It’s the only one we have.