From the blog The Dendroica Project, some excerpts from "A Letter from Earth". For the whole thing, see link below! Note the similarity to the essays by John Michael Greer I posted links to recently...
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Dear humans,
You have been behaving rather oddly of late. I have been following the evolution of your species with great interest, as you are in many ways unique among the forms that have lived upon me over my long life. I am wondering if it might be helpful to see how you appear from the perspective of a planet. Your planet. Earth, as you call me in one of your languages.
My “heartbeat” – the living rhythm of my life – is my orbit around the star you call the Sun. For you, this “year” is a long time. For me, it is but a second. Imagine then that each year is condensed into a single beat of your heart – that time appears to pass 42 million times faster. Then perhaps you can begin to understand my experience, and the way that you appear to me.
By this reckoning I am one hundred and eight years old, and I expect to live for another hundred years before the dying, expanding Sun dissolves my substance. You live, on average, for one minute. Perhaps that is longer than you expected; you imagine that you are only an eyeblink in deep time. The one you call Jesus lived 25 minutes ago. The last ice age ended two hours ago. Your species has existed in its present form for seven days, and earlier species of humans first appeared three weeks ago.
You have mined most of the accessible iron laid down when those cyanobacteria first oxygenated the atmosphere. You have discovered the traces of decayed life buried in my skin – you call them fossil fuels. It is not so much energy really – equivalent to the solar energy that reaches my surface over a month or two of your time and less than a heartbeat of mine – but it has been enough to power your factories and energize your fantasies of a techno-industrial space-traveling future. Those fuels were laid down in my skin gradually over nine years of my time – 360 million years of yours – and you have mostly burned through them in the past three minutes. Whether or not you burn the rest in another minute or two is of little consequence to me.
You have discovered the fuel that warms the core of my body – the unstable element you call uranium – and realized that if you concentrate and compress it you can release all of its energy at once. You call these Armageddon weapons, and they terrify you. To me, they are like those little fireworks you toss on the sidewalk and they make a little flash and pop. Even if you were to set off all fifteen thousand of them – in a war that you believe would surely destroy your species and your planet – the energy released would still be one hundred thousand times less than the asteroid impact that is still in my recent memory – and that your burrowing ancestors and millions of other species survived.
I am saddened that your species has declared war on the rest of Nature, but I am not afraid, because I know that it cannot last much longer. Everything that you build decays from the moment it is made. My systems rebuild and renew themselves continuously. Your systems move resources from mines to factories to landfills, from wells to fires to the atmosphere. My systems recycle resources indefinitely. This is a war that you cannot win, because you are not actually separate from Nature. The power of your industries pales in comparison to the great thermal engine that converts sunlight into wind and weather, into rainstorms and rivers, into forests and grasslands – all of which nourish you – and the fuel for your industries is rapidly running out.
Many of you who have turned aside from Progress and who would call yourselves environmentalists still believe the story. You believe that you are separate from Nature and that Man has the power to conquer Nature. But rather than seeing this as your destiny, you see it as an evil that must be stopped. You see yourselves as destroyers, as sinners who must repent. So it is that you insist that your fellow humans must be controlled in the name of stopping climate change. So it is that you mourn endlessly those species whose extinction you have caused, or you attempt to resurrect them. So it is that you seek to “restore” nature to a state from before you “degraded” it – a state that can only be maintained by relentlessly poisoning “invasive” plants into submission.
Allow me to reassure you that you cannot destroy this planet, any more than you can transcend it and blast off into space. Your planet-destroying Death Stars are just a fantasy. You see yourselves as a cancer upon my body, but to me it feels more like a skin rash and a mild fever. You see the change you cause as bad and control as good. From my perspective there is no such morality. Change is inevitable and control is temporary. Whatever harm you have done will heal, in just a few minutes or hours of my time. Carbon dioxide will be absorbed by the oceans and precipitate into limestone, and the climate will cool again, resuming cycles of ice ages and interglacial periods. Those species that you have moved and that have thrived – that you call “invasive” – will become native to their new homes, just as you will become native to the land you inhabit.
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