Does the earth need human beings?
It is fashionable now to hold high-level junkets called regional and international conferences, protocols and establish innumerable committees to study practically every aspect of the Earth from the melting polar ice to the ozone layer, from earthquakes, cyclones, global warming and climate change, to rain forest preservation, food production, population control etc etc. The ultimate theme is always “How can human beings save the Earth”. This is just another manifestation of our inherent arrogance and our blind confidence in our own stupidity. We are delegating to ourselves a task which evokes no confidence in our proven abilities. We have only to look back at our own track record which covers just a mini-second when measured in the time scale of the Earth's existence.
The Earth has been around for about 4 billion years. It took more than a billion years for the first primitive life forms to appear. Slowly, higher forms came into existence, till about a billion years ago, the first diminutive mammals appeared. Millions of these evolved, adjusted, improved and grew in size and intellect, but each had to co-exist with the conditions prevailing on the Earth. Those that could not, quickly became extinct because Mother Earth is a hard taskmaster. Take the dinosaurs, whom we deride as slow-moving and stupid. They flourished for over 500 million years and only an extra-terrestrial collision of cataclysmic proportions about 66 millions years ago snuffed them out forever. But even they left us their descendents and a record for longevity, which we, the Ashraf-ul-Makhluqat, the so-called highest form of life, will find impossible to equal.
Homo Sapiens, in Latin, 'human with wisdom' is no longer appropriate for our species. We evolved during the last 500,000 years or so, but recorded history is hardly 10,000 years old. Never during its innumerable journeys around the sun, has a species so despoiled the Earth, on so colossal a scale, in so short a while. The human race has oppressed, maimed, and killed each other and other co-inhabitants who share the Earth with it, in billions, we have exploited in a few centuries, the riches that took the Earth millions of years to accumulate; we have poisoned its waters, its land and its air. The great endless forests that once enveloped the tropics and temperate regions and the teeming wildlife in it and in the great oceans have been brought to the verge of extinction. Most count their further existence in decades only.
The apathy, avarice, cruelty, corruption, envy, greed, ignorance and waste of Man know no bounds and narrow-minded nationalism and regionalism and unrestrained ambitions are hammering the last nails in our coffins. Soon and this may be within the next century, we are going to breed, bury or blow ourselves into extinction. Just retribution, I say. for crassly abusing Mother Earth's hospitality and the Almighty's Commandments!!!
The Earth will nevertheless survive, wish us a sad good-bye, and slowly but surely Nature will put its timeless balm on itself, to heal the wounds we have inflicted on it. In due course, the Earth will rejuvenate and eventually support life once again, with the hope, that the species to come will learn from our senselessness and co-exist with themselves and with other living things, in peace and harmony. We are, after all, different links in the One Great Chain.
Thus, the issue “CAN WE SAVE THE EARTH?” is a moot point. Except for going around and around the sun for a few more billion years, the Earth is NOT going anywhere WE ARE! The Earth does NOT require to be saved WE DO, especially from ourselves!!
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