Dear Earth—
Writing as a member of the mammal species we call homo sapiens (Latin for “wise person”) I want to apologize for our
behavior towards you: it has not been very wise. However, we are the hand you
were dealt regarding a human species—wish you had a better luck on the draw.
We were okay to you until the middle of the 1700s when we
commenced what we call the Industrial Revolution in Europe. (You may very well
want to call it The Start of a Really Bad Date.) Our large-scale manufacturing
set in motion the mining and drilling of fossil fuels, which has led to the
melting of your beautiful Arctic ice cap; sea level rise that is just starting
and is headed for 15+ feet, destroying coastal cities where most of us live;
ocean acidification that is already having a fatal impact on myriad marine
species; accumulation of plastic that is literally choking life everywhere; and
an explosion of the human population which is leading to what is called the sixth extinction of animal life on
Earth—by 2050 half of the creatures who call you home will have gone the way of
the extinct DoDo bird. It has already begun. Actually, in a recent report published by Living Planet 2016, two-thirds of
wildlife that was on Earth in the 1970s will be gone by
2020—two-fucking-thirds!
I could go on and on. But you know this better than we do,
better than most of us anyway, the ones who are walking around glued to their
smart phones, posting pictures of their cheeseburgers on Instagram, taking
selfies with grizzly bears and getting mauled when the bears don’t get the
selfie thing so good and do what bears do, faced with close-up idiots.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of us humans. Currently, almost 8 billion. Twenty-five years ago, Dave Foreman,
radical environmentalist and co-founder of Earth First! called us “the human
pox” in his biography, Confessions of an
Eco-Warrior. He was right and
not the first to point to human over-population as causing an imbalance and strain
on the Earth’s eco-system, your eco-system.
Henry David Thoreau lamented egregious human population
growth in Walden, recognizing in it
the rampaging destruction of wilderness.
“In wilderness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau observed that a
squirrel could hop on a tree in Maine and not have to touch the ground again
until he hit the Mississippi River (1,500 miles away). That pristine wilderness is now paved
by endless highways, passing to-the-horizon monoculture fields of genetically
modified corn, used for ethanol to power our cars and trucks, which pump filth
into your atmosphere, filth that started to accumulate in the 1750s and filth
accumulation that has accelerated exponentially due to our enormous human population
explosion.
And Edward Abbey (Earth First!’s patron saint), in one of
his dozens of books about nature and humankind’s relationship to it,
proclaimed, “You can have wilderness without freedom; you cannot have freedom
without wilderness.”
Well, my friend, humans are well on their way to destroying
all of your wilderness, destroying you, Earth, as we have come to know you; and
although the ginormous number of us don’t realize it or don’t believe it, we
are also destroying our own freedom—a fact we will come to live every day as
our mega-corporations continue to seize control of our very minds. FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
are already doing it. Very few of us are aware. (God bless Edward Snowden!)
But back to you and the reason I am writing: I am so sorry
for what we’ve done. So sorry we
let ourselves get out of control.
Some of us, a minority I’m afraid to admit, follow Edward Abbey’s call
to arms, “Stand up for what you stand on!” We try to wake others up to support
ethical practices. We try. Maybe what keeps us going is the
knowledge that you, Earth, will continue without us, without most of the
species now living. But you will
generate more, new ones. You will
survive. We won’t.
With greatest respect and deepest regrets,
E. Grant
Earth Advocate
www.speakingforwolf.org
