Earth Day Thoughts

The Rarest View

On Earth Day, we are often exhorted to think globally and act locally. But sometimes, one must act globally in order to think globally.

The modern environmental movement was catalyzed, to a large degree, by the riveting view of Earth from afar. That precious, tiny blue sphere, suspended in the blackness. I suspect that it was this image, more than anything else, which allowed the common person to truly grasp the fact that our planet is not merely the abstract, infinite stage upon which all the things of life unfold, but a discrete thing in its own right, which can be loved, or broken, just like anything else.

Metaphorically speaking, it's a question of the forests and the trees. Humans have an innate talent for comprehending trees -- we can hold them in our minds, estimate their age, height, diameter, value of lumber at current market rates, and so forth. But we are innately lousy at comprehending forests, other than as "a whole lot of trees" (which is hardly better than describing a person as "a whole lot of cells") . Our poor hominid brains seem to be intrinsically "thing"-oriented. Until we take a step back and look at the forest from afar, as a singular entity in its own right, with qualities that are vastly more relevant than its part-count,
we have little hope of understanding it.

Anthropologists have observed that non-nomadic indigenous cultures, living on the bank of a river, often have names for every bend in their section of the river -- but no name for the river itself. It is simply "the river". One can take it for granted: after all, what other river is there?

These same indigenous cultures are often revered for their harmonious integration with the environment, but I suspect that this is, in large part, due to their relative inability to cause it harm. If they were armed with all the contemporary agents of chemical death and destruction that us moderns possess, I wouldn't want to live downstream. Until one has seen the river from afar -- traced its path from the snowy highlands to the ocean deltas -- one cannot truly understand the river. Or the forest. Or the Earth itself.