Newcomers

Herbie  Gomez

THE Washington DC-based Conservation International has produced a series of powerful short films for natureisspeaking.org. These films are meant to be shared on social media. The one- to two-minute films are aimed at pointing out how we pay so little attention to the things we have been doing to the environment. Hollywood stars lent their voices to deliver powerful messages as viewers are shown dramatic scenes in the short films. The list includes Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey, Edward Norton, Penelope Cruz, Robert Redford,  Reese Withersoon, Joan Chen, etc..

I saw one shown on ANC News Channel two weeks ago. In the short film, Roberts is heard providing a voice for the environment. Her monologue: “Some call me Nature, others call me Mother Nature. I’ve been here for over four and a half billion years–22,500 times longer than you.

“I don’t really need people but people need me.

“Yes, your future depends on me. When I thrive, you thrive. When I falter, you falter–or worse…

“But I’ve been here for eons.

“I have fed species greater than you, and I have starved species greater than you.

“My oceans, my soil, my flowing streams, my forests–they all can take you or leave you.

“How you choose to live each day whether you regard or disregard me doesn’t really matter to me.

“One way or the other, your actions will determine your fate, not mine.

“I am nature.

“I will go on.

“I am prepared to evolve.

“Are you?”

Some powerful and thought-provoking stuff there. Not only that, it is scientifically sound and debunks the medieval thought that the planet we live in has been around for just a few thousand years. Fact is, the world scientific community holds that the universe is over 13 billion years old, and earth has been around for some 4.5 billion years.

Indeed, the environment doesn’t really “care” what we do to it. It cannot care. It’s been through worse, much worse, in fact. It’s been smacked by a planet-sized body over a billion years before molecules could even start replicating, and some two billion years before oxygen-producing cyanobacteria could emerge and start to build up. It was only some 465 million years ago when plants started to colonize land, 95 million years ahead of the first amphibians that crawled from water to land. And then for some reason, 99 percent of all living things perished some 250 million years ago, paving the way to the Age of Dinosaurs 10 million years after that mass extinction. Plate tectonics played a role–landmass broke apart and formed continents some 200 million years ago. There was another mass extinction 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs, including the famous T-Rex, and two-thirds of all species at that time, making it possible for mammals to flourish. And modern man? Well, the earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans are from the Middle Paleolithic or about 200 thousand years ago.

Earth could collide with one of the millions of stars in the galaxy and cause fireworks in the night sky or the sun could just die now. Our planet could simply stop spinning and it wouldn’t really be worried if it becomes a cold and barren world like Mars that once upon a time, astrophysicists are convinced, was habitable (again, as if earth cares or can care).

Man, in his arrogance, thinks he can save earth. Do you actually believe you can save the planet? You can log and you can mine for all your heart’s content. And you can turn all bodies of water into septic tanks, and cover the sky with black smoke and it won’t really matter to Mother Nature. Nature will adapt. It will always find a way. Rather, the species that live on earth are the ones that should be worried given that most of the living things before them and that ever lived on it are now extinct. It happened before and it can happen again.

Don’t worry for earth, it can take care of itself. Instead, worry for us, the newcomers. We simply cannot handle it. Pastilan.