Toe in the Water

Enough, Already

Enough, Already

I confess to becoming tired at times of our constant whining about the terrible things we’ve done to the earth. Yes, we’ve paved Paradise and put up a parking lot, shifted mountains in our hunt for necessary minerals, erected monstrous conglomerations of little-box living quarters for our millions to live in. And we’re not the first to notice and wish that things could remain as they never were - an Eden where the lion lies down with the lamb in meadows of eternal green. There is no particular virtue in joining our moans to all the others that have gone before; there is no dramatic new insight in complaining without an eye to the good things we’ve done as well.

The plain fact is that all the evidence points to the fact that every cataclysmic and apocalyptic world-ending drama that is dreamed up by each generation in its turn is defeated by our own equally stunning inventiveness and ingenuity. Where now is the overpopulation predicted in the sixties? Replaced by a world where everyone is better off and has more to eat than ever before. Where is the new ice age that the seventies so loudly proclaimed to be upon us at any moment? Oh, terribly sorry - we seem to have lost that one in all the fuss about global warming. Never mind, I’m sure we can persuade some errant passing meteor to change course and collide with the earth sometime soon. By all predictions, we should have run out of oil years ago. Silver too (bet you don’t remember that one).

All overcome and sent packing, every one of them. And, as long as we don’t panic, retain a sense of perspective, and are reasonably careful about how we proceed, there is absolutely no reason why this earth shouldn’t last until, well, the end of the world. Whining doesn’t help a bit.


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