I found myself revisiting a thought from yesterday when I was in conversation with someone who was challenging me on my lack of belief. I had pointed at a flower that happened to be nearby and said, “Most people would just say, ‘Oh, that’s a pretty flower'”, but when I look at it, I know I’m staring at thousands of years of evolution of that flower that it didn’t pick, but the pollinators chose. That there were plants didn’t make it because they were off a shade of color or shape from what we see now.
The conversation moved on and I didn’t get to finish the thought. I finished it earlier.
Flowers are pretty because pollinators made them so and because we said, “oh, these are pretty” and cultivated them further. So when I’m looking at a flower, I’m looking at seemingly infinite amount of chances to be something else. But these changes to make the flower what it is now came from choices made by more than one species.
Each of those species are affected by seemingly countless factors. Seasons, temperatures, food sources, oxygen levels, rainfall, and species evolution for all of those.
It’s amazing. It’s beautiful to consider, all those little things that made that flower a flower that is appealing to us, and why would it be appealing to us? There’s an interesting question too, maybe that’s how we found the bees to get at their honey. I don’t know.
Yes, that is a beautiful flower, and now maybe you’ll see how beautiful they are. They are the survivors our world picked.
This planet sucks. It’s full of people, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing but we seem to like it that way.
The people do silly things, play with anything with a flat screen that has some sort of light coming out of it, chasing red dots while sticking food in their mouths.
They drive around either in gasoline or diesel powered vehicles and pollute or buy electric cars that someone else already polluted to create. The drive past each other, looking smug at each other about how they’re ‘saving a planet’. Carlin was right. The planet doesn’t need saving, we do.
We have billionaires who say really weird things and do weirder things, but that’s ok because they’re rich and eccentric. If they were poor they’d be locked away in an asylum somewhere. Billionaires just live in bigger asylums and nobody knows whether the inside or the outside is the actual asylum.
We have politicians that are dishonest who get elected to office on promises. People do it every election cycle and are surprised things don’t change. There has got to be a party somewhere where the other mammals get together and just laugh at us. I would. I’d go, but they’d probably want me to wear a hat and ride a tricycle.
There’s some discussion here and there as to whether we’re still in the Holocene epoch – a time where everything is supposed to be in the right balance to sustain the world we know.
There are some that suggest we’re no longer in the Holocene epoch, and that we’re in the Anthropocene epoch, a period where we humans have affected the world on many levels.
This is all about ‘climate change’. The main argument about climate change seems to revolve around whether we humans have been naughty or not during our stay on the planet.
The planet we call Earth is fine, barring a supernova of our sun or something we can’t predict. The Earth doesn’t really care too much whether we’re here or not. It’s happily spinning around the Sun, which in turn spins around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which in turn doesn’t seem to orbit anything we have found… yet.
That’s the point, really. We’re pretty good at knowing what we do know, but as a society we’re awful at knowing what we don’t know. We’re so bad at this that we have specialized groups of people that try to figure out what questions to ask so that we can know more. We call them scientists, and we trot them out when their opinions and our opinions agree.
We accept Einstein’s Theory of Relativity on faith now, largely, but when it fell out of his head it was questioned. Of course, it didn’t affect the planet as much as the things surrounding the present discussions. To do that would require people to learn a new name.
A rendition of Dr. Clair Cameron Patterson from the television series Cosmos. Originally aired on April 20th, 2014
Dr. Clair Cameron Patterson. This geochemist did something that most people don’t even think about. We used to have leaded gas, done to keep internal combustion engines from ‘knocking’.
In other words, by measuring one thing he found other things – he found the questions to ask and answer that ultimately affected the entire world and how livable it is.
That’s really the core of the climate change ‘debate’. About how livable the Earth is. And since the Holocene, our metaphorical puddle, is at least being discussed as ‘over’, we don’t need to think so much about the intentionality of things. We don’t need to debate how fast we can positively impact the environment. That’s too long and detailed for most people, and the choices for people are between convenience or not instead of whether we’re assuring that generations to come will have a livable planet.
We all know that the climate is changing simply by going outside. We can’t comprehend ‘global warming’ when our personal experience is that it’s colder outside, or ‘global cooling’ when it’s warming outside.
We can comprehend that our environment is becoming less livable.
Like it or not, the planet we call home is changing – maybe some of it is natural, maybe not, but that’s immaterial. If we want our species – we are a single species – to have a future on this planet, we need to accept that how we have existed during the Holocene Epoch prior to us finding questions and answering them… we need to accept that how we have lived is not the way we should live, and that we need to pay more attention.
All the rest is politics, and by definition, there is no agreement in politics. Self-interest for ourselves lasts only as long as we do, perhaps further in some cases.
Being interested in our species, on the other hand, is where we should start.
