Earth Day and Easter seem to have a lot in common. 1) they both happen in April, 2) they both were forgotten by me, 3) they are also both largely ignored or unknown to the 1.3-1.5 billion people residing in the rooster-shaped beauty of the PRoC.
My friend Eric posted this in its entirety at his blog (click the name – turn on Tor if you’re in China), but I think this paragraph sums up my feelings about the planet and how much it needs to be “saved”.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic…asshole. – George Carlin.
I read, what in my opinion is, a really great book once called “Straw Dogs”. It maintains the opinion of George in that environmentalists are a bunch of human-centric worriers that believe we have harmed or could some how harm this massive ball we call home. Keep in mind I’m a) human and b) a semi-practicing environmentalist. The book led me to my current belief that if I really want what’s best for the “planet” then I should help pollute it anyway I can. The quicker we kill ourselves off, the better off the planet will be – until insects with opposable thumbs comes along.
The thing about “-ists” and “-isms”, beliefs and ideologies are that they’re just concepts, ideas that we’ve made up… and when you start incorporating them into your life as dogma, it’s bound to mess things around a bit. So I don’t. I accept that I should do my part to live a clean, eco-conscious life, but I also accept the more nihilistic view that we really have no idea, and we might just be genetically programmed to kill ourselves off. Add these to a thousand other conflicting “beliefs” I hold at any given time and you start to get a picture that the world often operates on principles of black and white – but those aren’t our rules, we’re just tenants, we live in the grey.
Oh… went to a wedding today. My second Chinese wedding. It was pretty amazing. Expect photos and a new vblog soon.
