I don’t disconnect from my technology, stop to smell the roses, as often as I’d like; but I did just that today, a beautiful, sunny crisp autumn Michigan day. I drove to a park, coffee and cigar (as yet unlit) on board, admiring the leaves, at peak color. Beautiful.
I strolled down to water’s edge and immediately saw someone had discarded a half-empty plastic bottle, capped, of cola, a few feet away someone else had dropped an empty beer bottle. Nearby I spotted a plastic candy wrapper. A few yards from shore, at the bottom of the lake, lay another empty bottle. Man leaves his ugly footprint wherever he goes.
I deposited two of the three bottles and the wrapper into a receptacle that was maybe fifty yards too far away for the owners of the trash to notice. Then I sat down on a rock to finish my coffee and fired up my cigar.
Watching two swans fishing for their morning repast, I was struck by the balance of Nature. Day follows night follows day; the four seasons rotate and repeat. All for a purpose.
How truly fragile is the ecosystem. It’s been said that Mother Nature is a harsh mistress—only the strong survive—but man is infinitely more cruel in his treatment of this opal of a planet. We’ve placed ourselves apart from Nature, sitting comfortably in our homes, global warming but a myth. The weather may be cyclical, but only to an extent. Is anyone foolish enough to believe that we don’t contribute to the changing weather, or that the planet, a living organism itself, won’t fight back, with droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes? But our economy and our way of life are more important than the ecosystem, without which we cannot survive.
Perhaps it was destined, after the invention of the wheel, that man would seek for ways to make easier the brief moment we spend on this gem. Always at the expense of the planet. And so God’s crowning creation has become a blight on the gift God entrusted to him.
Today nearly nineteen thousand species of lower life forms are in danger of becoming extinct. Thousands of tons of waste and trash are dumped daily into the oceans, killing nearly a million seabirds annually, not to mention the harm it does to sea life.
We dump our refuse into scented reinforced plastic bags which in turn are dumped into landfills, where those bags will take, depending on which source one believes because no one really knows, between five hundred and a thousand years to decompose. While we sit comfortably in our homes, apart from Nature, uncaring, accumulating wealth and things that make our lives easier but not necessarily better.
Bertram Russell wrote that one must care about a world one will not see.
Does anyone?
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