Be careful. Be very careful.

Here are a couple of quotes from a book by James Lovelock “Homage to Gaia” (Gaia, for those unfamiliar with the term, in this instance, is not the Greek goddess of the Earth, but refers to the now accepted concept that life on Earth is a self regulating community of organisms interacting with each other and their surroundings. By doing so the Earth controls its surface and atmosphere to keep the environment always benign for life). 

 

However, I thought these quotes quite interesting:-

 

Ø  “If, in caring for people, we fail to care for other forms of life on Earth then our civilization and we will suffer. I wonder if in the 21^St Century, when the grim effects of global warming become apparent, we will regret the humanist bias that led us to continue to burn fossil fuel and plunder the natural world for food.

Ø  I soon found out that salinity greater than five percent damaged almost all cells, whether from animals or plants…… This knowledge stayed with me and when later the idea of Gaia, a self regulating Earth, first came to my mind I began to wonder how the salinity of the sea had always kept below five percent. It has done so for over 3 billion years, otherwise marine life would not have survived. We still do not know what regulates salinity……I still do not know how ocean salinity stays below five percent; it is one of the puzzles posed by the notion of Gaia.”

 

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We dig up huge quantities of minerals leaving massive holes in the earth; we rip up millions of hectares of trees, cleared to plant crops; we use millions of tonnes of chemical fertilizers to try and replenish the soils degraded by over cultivation; we diminish the natural flows of rivers with unfettered irrigation; we poison the rivers and the oceans with chemicals which are the runoff from the degraded soils; we discard millions of tonnes of plastic, which end up in the sea; we overfish certain species of fish causing havoc with the food chain. 

 

We must all recognise that what we do individually or collectively, has consequences. And these are totally out of our control - we might not like them when we see what eventuates.  

 

But that is ok. There is money to be made, you see. And money is paramount. Cash is king.

 

Remember that we humans, all 7.4 billion of us, are like a thin layer of dust on the surface of the Earth. If every human being suddenly disappeared the Earth would quickly recover from our depredations and return to it beneficent state and a natural peace would be restored to that beautiful “blue” planet so evocatively seen from the surface of the moon.