A modern fable (some thoughts following Earth Day)
fellow humans, surely they must lament the lack of clean air, the loss of wildlife, and the millions of acres of scorched earth.
As for her beautiful shining seas, increasingly clogged up with this dead substance, plastic. She mourned as they became polluted with every kind of vile foulness emanating from mankind, resulting in the elimination of ocean species that had flourished there since Eden. Well, it was enough to make any mother weep.
“Really”, she fumed to a passing planet, “This time these humans have gone too far. I fear that even their over-confident reliance on the age of technology cannot save them.” She decided there and then that the human race would have to prove itself worthy of being bailed out once more. This time they would be required to earn back their paradise.
She would reduce the Earth, her Earth, to a few basis elements so as to facilitate man’s recollection of the privilege of having once inherited Eden. This time, however, there would be no repetition of the verdant garden with its convenient apple trees, no wily snake to blame, no awaiting bonus of fertile lands and abounding seas.
A MODERN FABLE 2
“Just look at the result of all that beneficence,” she fumed. “Sibling rivalry with one brother killing another - a precourser to family feuds and inter-national hostilities to the detriment of the health of my earth and its resources. For these creatures to win back the right to continuing existence on their treasured planet, new thinking is required.
This is clean-up time!”
“By all the powers vested in me,” she intoned, “I will reduce this planet, my planet, to providing access to only the basic necessities for human existence. This arrogant species must now prove to me that it respects the earth on which it depends, and thus persuade me that humanity is indeed worthy of being rescued from their latest misadventure.”
The existing lands groaned in agony, the seas broiled and heaved, and those of the human race still surviving were left writhing in their collective anguish.
As the new panidemic continued to infect the gasping multitudes, Mother Earth watched and worried. Could she risk hoping that sufficient goodness still existed in these 21st. century humans to enable them to reverse the damage that their selfishness had inflicted on one another?
Was it possible that a combination of humility and technical ingenuity might lead mankind to reverse the causes of global pollution? That reviving lungs and a collective generosity of spirit might help regenerate her vast land masses, its huge forests and wildlife population? She mused on the possibility of her great rivers and oceans, waters both deep and shallow, and her irreplaceable coral reefs belatedly receiving the renewed respect expected of old and trusted friends.
There is no moral value in drawing out the details of the fearsome struggles endured by those human survivors of this latest pandemic.
Mankind was being tested as never before.
But slowly, painfully, hope struggled to overcome despair. Practices were universally re-instated confirming that humans were indeed capable of being each other’s keepers. By reviving a universal respect for each other, the earth and the seas, survivors of the epidemic would eventually succeed in establishing systems of global good health, thus celebrating their own and the Earth’s continuing existence.
“Interesting,” observed Mother Earth as she surveyed all this progress through a freshly-clearing biosphere, “What was that I have been saying about the earth getting back to basics?”