extinctions

I just noticed something on the local TV (9am show, Ten Network) that disturbed me for two completely different reasons.

They interviewed film maker and Orangutan activist, Stephen Van Mil, who discussed "the devastating effects of Indonesian deforestation to plant palm oil plantations, a commonly found substance in our grocery items." I have seen these plantations, and it is the typical 'monoculture' so loved by big business, keeping everything nice and simple and sterile. Nice for business, deadly for native animals. Disturbance number one.

I'll probably be posting quite a bit about global warming, and you might wonder why I think it's a big issue for a site devoted to peace. Well, peace is easier if we aren't all scrapping with each other to eke out an existence in a starving world. True peace (which includes peace with all our nonhuman friends) requires we don't do things that will harm wildlife or damage Earth's capacity to feed us all. True peace should make everyone happy; and if you've seen Gitie's and my wild bird website (wingedhearts.org, you'll know I don't reserve "everyone" just for people.

Four and a half billion years... half way through the lifetime of a planet... for some of that time molten and dead from bombardment in the early formation of the solar system... for most of the remainder inhabited only by single-celled life forms. And for a 'mere' half billion years, a flourishing of plants and animals. Then at last, for the merest flicker of geological time, there are human beings. How very long it took until a tool-making, syntactic language-using, self-reflecting species arose—for the first time and (for all we know) the only time in the entire galaxy.

But life on Earth is dangerous. Mass extinctions can happen slowly through geological changes that cause vulcanism and planetary cooling, or quickly through a collision with a meteorite. A nearby star could become a supernova. At least twice in its long lifetime, Earth has been frozen solid or nearly solid all the way to the equator—the sort of ice age which, if it happened now, would exterminate all multicellular life. Bacteria would once again be the only life forms. By the greatest of good fortune, our planet has survived until it is within reach of safety from cosmic disasters: its latest creation, ourselves, is slowly maturing in its capacity to develop the means to safeguard the planet for all life.