On Earth Day 2019

Every Earth Day I think to myself, why isn't every day Earth Day? Just as I can't live outside my body, we humans and other terrestrial life cannot live without our earthly habitat. A few weeks ago I read an article in the New York Times about the Biosphere 2 experiment, and I was struck with how difficult, if not actually impossible, it is to reproduce any sort of self-sustaining ecosystem. Actually, this makes sense when we recognize the complexity of the ecosystem we take so much for granted. It took literally millions of years for this habitat we are enjoying to evolve. It is unlikely that any amount of human planning will be able to reproduce a self-sustaining ecosystem in space or on another planet. Just imagine all that would entail, just growing plants requires so many other organisms to sustain them, fertilize them, etc.

Meanwhile, we are destroying our planet, the only place we can live, at an alarming pace. I used to be confident that I would never survive to experience the coming eco catastrophe, but apparently I have not been giving my fellow human beings enough credit for their ability to destroy things, even if sometimes inadvertently. Each year hundreds of species disappear. Those my age and older can recall many varieties of seafood that are no longer available in restaurants and supermarkets. When I moved back to Texas I wondered if there would be any horned frogs left that aren't imaginary mascots for a football team in Fort Worth. And how long before Monarch butterflies are just a memory some of us have?

There are many other examples that come flooding to mind, but what is the point? So much damage has been done by now that if miraculously we stopped destroying our planet in honor of this Earth Day, the momentum of global warming would likely continue for decades and bring our inevitable end anyway. So perhaps all we can do today is pause and remember what a beautiful planet this once was and wonder what it will be like in some distant future. Will humans evolve and learn to live in a much diminished and harsher world? I suspect they will, but thankfully, I probably won't live to see it. Probably.