|
The Plague Upon Eden
Eden Defined
By
Manuel
Valenzuela
12/13/05 -- Such a spectacular and magnificent entity is the
planet we call Earth, a wonderment of natural beauty and symbiotic
balance yet to be surpassed by the creative genius of humankind. It
is a planet teeming with the colors of life, its oceans and
continents gems of existence, an overabundance of beating hearts and
flowing energy. The planet we call our only home is a living,
breathing, dynamic cocktail of universal energy, for billions of
years spinning and molding itself according to the laws and
realities of science, adapting, shifting and shaping itself through
the long days of darkened chaos and the unmistakable genesis of
light, becoming, through the slow processes of evolution, the
eventual home to millions of life forms, encompassing a wide range
of periods, extinctions and eras of flourishing order.
Welcome to the Eden of tangible reality, a
terrestrial paradise not of myth or fable but of evolution, physical
change and awe-inspiring natural splendor, created by the sands of
time long and lonesome, not in days but in eons, molded by cycles of
energy, not the hands of supernatural prehistory.
Traversing epochs of time unfathomable to the human
mind, Earth has been witness to wave after wave of natural calamity,
constant shifts in tectonic plates, weather alterations and even
mass extinctions from asteroid impacts. It has hosted many dominant
species of life forms, most of them living long before the arrival
of man, offering sustenance and prosperity, becoming a breadbasket
of survival and of death, enabling creatures of all shapes and sizes
to thrive or die off for millions upon millions of years in a circle
of life from which all living things arise. She is an old, wise
planet, bearing witness to billions of years of change, herself
evolving and constantly alive, from the nadir of the oceans to the
zenith of the highest mountain, her surface becoming the cradle of
life where even death helps spring forth new energy.
She has seen life grow from the earliest, smallest
single cell organism to the mammalian world of today, her soils and
waters granting the sustenance enabling our species to thrive. Her
balance of life and energy has allowed us to evolve from rat-like
mammals to ape-like entities to our present adaptation, in the
process transforming primitive primates into overlords of the
planet, slowly but surely extending our reach to all corners of the
globe.
Our planet has always thrived with a balance of all
things living as well as that of all the energies it possesses, for
on Earth all vibrant mechanisms are interconnected, each dependent
on all others, from flora to fauna to insects to ecosystems to
weather to oceans to winds to currents to tectonic plates to
magnetic fields to the moon to the air we breathe and the food we
eat, much the same way that wings of a butterfly can cause the
formation of a hurricane clear across the world. The
interconnectedness of all the Earth’s energies has allowed the
planet to thrive in its natural splendor for millennia, always
keeping its surface in perfect balance, maintaining its fragility
protected and becoming an Eden for the eyes of the universe to gaze
down on. Its delicate balance was sustained in eternal synergy,
allowing the planet to function in perfect harmony, upset only by
cataclysmic events or by the plague called man.
What a site to behold to have seen Earth in its
virgin state of nature, well before the arrival of humans, its
surface an oasis of life, its atmosphere a radiant splendor upon the
eyes, its forests and jungles unending and lush, its plains and
savannas saturated and teeming with a cornucopia of creatures. The
Eden of days long gone must have been the peak of the planet’s long
history. Unscarred, untouched, unmarked, unpolluted and undamaged,
the planet existed without borders, fences, dams and boundaries,
free of the human ego, free of the flag and the cross, its lands,
air and waterways uncompromised by the toxins spewed by man, its
creatures free to roam and live, fighting for survival in the harsh
existence that is the circle of life, free to evolve according to
natural selection, not human intervention.
Earth before modern man was a reality just over
100,000 years ago, when most of the planet had yet to experience the
arrival of human beings, before it had yet to bear witness to what
would soon become a plague springing from east Africa that, in each
new land it set foot in, rapidly unleashed destruction upon land and
extermination upon life. For the primate with the large brain
possessed greater intelligence than all mammals, yet still retained
its animal urges, needs, wants, behaviors, emotions and passions,
thus making it that much more dangerous to the environment it walked
on and the planet that birthed it.
In short time it made extinct the once bountiful
herds and numerous species native to the area, altering ecosystems,
damaging environments and wreaking havoc on once pristine lands, for
it can be said that wherever man walks destruction soon follows.
Wherever Homo sapiens journeyed on Earth, from Africa to Europe to
the Middle East to Asia and the Americas, mass extinctions soon
ensued, for within its unquenchable hunger for meat, sustenance and
salvation existed its inability to envision the consequences of its
actions. As is still prevalent among our species, forethought was
but an afterthought and our longing for conquering the present
invariably exceeded our inability to comprehend the future.
The Evisceration of Eden
For billions of years the planet had existed without
man, allowing the invisible hands of time to dictate change, for
hundreds of millions of years allowing natural selection determine
the fate of life. With the arrival of man onto virgin lands,
however, what had taken eons to create began to be eviscerated in a
matter of years. In the blink of a historical eye, humankind became
the dominant species on the planet, introducing to the world a
primate capable of manipulating the complex mechanisms of nature, a
mammal using brain intelligence along with social skills to thrive
at the expense of the environment it now controlled, yet failing to
understand, even with its propensity for higher intelligence, its
effects for the tomorrow, blinded instead by the glare of the
today. For Homo sapiens remained but an animal in behavior and
emotion, its psychology dictated by tens of millions of years of
evolution, from our reptilian origins to our mammalian needs.
Incapable of understanding the long term, only
managing to comprehend the present, short term, preferring to try
and manage problems only when they arose, thereby failing to preempt
them before materializing, human beings spread to all corners of the
planet, growing exponentially in numbers, in short time beginning to
place tremendous stress on nature and the environment. For
millennia humanity subsisted exclusively on hunting and gathering
but with growing numbers of family and tribe members, with
increasing numbers of rivals, with less territory and an
ever-dwindling supply of game surviving became a growing problem.
These stresses thus gave birth to agriculture about 10,000 years
ago. With agriculture civilization rose from the crumbs of tribes
and clans, giving rise to the city-state, birthing the human
ecosystem that has been our home for millennia.
Growing villages and cities meant a need for wood
for fuel, heating and cooking. Timber was needed for shelter and
fortifications; land was needed to expand the crop yields necessary
to feed an ever-growing population. Thus began the clear-cutting of
most of the world’s massive forests and untold numbers of trees in
other parts of the globe. This phenomenon, which has devastated
forests and ecosystems alike, leading to the extermination of an
untold number of animal and plant species, has yet to stop; indeed,
it has only accelerated with the rise of machines and the enormous
demand for wood products by billions of humans, without even so much
as a concern for the damage we are inflicting or the understanding
of the long term – and permanent – destruction upon ecosystems whose
balance and harmony will never again regain their synergy.
Today, the forests and jungles of Africa, North
America, Europe, Russia, China, Indonesia, Asia and South America
have been or are in the process of being utterly destroyed,
centuries-old trees chopped down in a matter of seconds. Entire
forests, acting as the lungs of the planet and the clusters of
diversity, home to millions of living organisms, have disappeared to
the degenerative needs and wants of man, our gluttonous appetite for
lumber as ceaseless as it is destructive. For millennia dependent
on wood resources, it seems our modern civilization and
sophisticated cultures have yet to escape the primitive need for
timber.
Not satisfied with the extinction of northern
hemisphere forests, our addiction to all things wood being so
all-encompassing, we have for decades now turned our attention to
the jungles of the southern hemisphere, particularly those of Latin
America and tropical Africa and Asia, in the process eviscerating
plant and animal life on a massive scale. Our inability to
comprehend the consequences to our actions is so great, and the
damage done is so pervasive, that in less than a few decades we will
succeed in mass exterminating most if not all of the flora and fauna
we have come to know and love, including our closest mammal
relatives, the gorilla and chimpanzee, the latter of which we happen
to share 98.5 percent of our genetic sequence with.
Today, humanity’s greed and quest for natural
resources continues to devastate the world’s forests and jungles,
now comprising a semblance of their original appearance, some being
logged under enormous stress to their continued viability. In a few
years time the beauty and wonderment of these canopy cathedrals will
cease to exist, becoming a historical relic seen only in the
receding minds of elders and the recorded images of video. What
will happen to a world devoid of armies of trees, their rich
diversity exterminated? In a few decades, the complete mass
extinction of the animal world in the wild will arrive into our
reality, robbing the planet and future generations of the Garden of
Eden that has existed for hundreds of millions of years. Our
collective complicity is today relegating the great mammals of the
planet to small patches of protected land, their ecosystems coming
under immense human pressure more and more each day.
The time will soon arrive, much to the sadness and
humiliation of those whose grey hair and wrinkled faces mark the
accumulation of age, wisdom and experience, when the only way to see
and observe animals, birds and plants will be through the looking
glass of city zoos, with moats, fences and glass imprisoning once
wild and free creatures. Our future progeny’s only experience with
the planet’s animals will be in the circus-like environment of zoos,
with artificial environments, settings and altered behaviors,
observing not mammals in their splendor but only as a small
microcosm of their former selves, seen not in their natural habitat
but rather through their confined, man-made fish bowls.
Soon those that will have allowed extermination to
occur through their complicity, passivity and silent apathy will
look at the faces of their children in shame, cognizant that it was
our generation that failed to act, as most human generations
inevitably do, helping transform Earth into a planet devoid of life
except that for that plague called humanity. As usual, one more
generation will have failed to act in the interests of those yet to
come, always mesmerized by the present, never learning from the
past, invariably condemning the next generation of human beings to a
world less balanced, less beautiful and ever-closer to the
inevitable self annihilation of the human race.
Global Warning
Our civilization has, in the last three hundred
years, set free terror upon the lands and waterways of Earth, her
balance and harmony in serious peril. Human beings have scorched
the planet’s fragile energies and mechanisms, unleashing
consequences upon the globe we are only now beginning to
understand. Through our mass introduction of carbon dioxide
emissions we have opened up a hornet’s nest of natural calamities
that we are, and will be, impotent to try and alleviate. Global
warming is causing the planet to change rapidly in ways our
mammalian minds cannot fully fathom; its intricate and delicate
mechanisms are slowly but surely being manipulated by our primitive
activities, its cycles are being altered contrary to the normal
manifestations of time. Our dependence on natural resources
threatens to spawn transformations to Earth’s energy and natural
cycles that will give rise to the eventual downfall of man.
The signs of transforming energies are
all-encompassing, clear warnings that what we are doing to the
planet is altering mechanisms that have been in place for millions
of years. Research and readings have found that carbon dioxide
levels on Earth are the highest they have been in over 650,000
years. The poles are losing record amounts of ice every year that
passes, their temperatures rising exponentially, their ice sheets
melting and ice shelves cracking due to warmer climate, threatening
to flood the world’s coastal cities. Today, for example, some
islands in the South Pacific have begun to experience flooding of
their coasts, forcing entire towns to relocate to higher ground.
Greenland’s enormous glaciers have been receding, as have those
around the world, from Alaska to the Alps, from the Himalayas to
Patagonia. Once frozen tundra and permafrost in Siberia and Alaska
have begun to thaw, releasing records amount of atmosphere heating
gases. As a result of this thawing, tens of thousands of Inuit are
under threat, their villages and towns sinking, their infrastructure
collapsing. Snow levels are decreasing more every passing winter,
meaning less fresh water in spring and summers.
The world is experiencing warmer winters and
summers; migratory birds are becoming confused about the times of
migration; spring seems to arrive earlier every year. Throughout
the planet plants and animals are shifting their ranges and
ecosystems to higher elevations and colder environs in response to
the warmer temperatures being felt worldwide. Gulf of Mexico waters
are experiencing an increase in temperatures, thereby spawning much
more powerful and destructive hurricanes, in greater number, their
season lasting longer than ever before. Tornadoes seem to be
increasing in the Midwest of America; flooding is more severe
worldwide. Ocean currents are being altered due to shifts in
temperatures; proto-plankton, that most vital component of the
oceans’ food chain, is disappearing; corral reefs are dying at
alarming rates; the Gulf Stream is slowing down, threatening to make
uninhabitable parts of the northern hemisphere, including Britain.
Drought is increasing worldwide, rainwater is becoming more scarce,
crops and farming are being damaged; billions of poverty stricken
human will soon be forced to emigrate from their homes, eventually
heading northward to escape disease, in search of water and food.
Earth is approaching a vortex of fluctuation whose
point of no return fast approaches. However, instead of decreasing
carbon dioxide emissions human
interference in the climate system continues to escalate, seemingly
with reckless abandon. In fact, energy conglomerates have invested
millions of dollars to fight the few mechanisms implemented to fight
global warming. They have bought off prostitute politicians in
America, and are attempting to do the same throughout the world,
lobbying governments to trash protocols and timetables. They
continue to deny the reality of global warming, seeing it not as a
threat to humanity but as a threat to their bottom line.
The time scales on which
humans have changed the composition of the atmosphere are extremely
short compared to the natural time cycles of the climate system. We
are accelerating natural cycles that are being manipulated and
compromised by our activities. Our
concern for tomorrow seems non-existent; our only concern is for the
present. Our inability to plan ahead, to foresee the ramifications
to our actions or to possess the vision of a dreadful future is
condemning our species, and planet, to forces that will tear our
civilization apart in the coming decades. Global warming is, in no
uncertain terms, the greatest threat facing the human race, quite
possibly the most colossal menace we have ever encountered.
Our primitive brains have
yet to fully conceptualize the fact that we are meddling with
phenomenon whose fragile balance, synergy and interconnectedness is
of utmost importance for the health of the planet. Combined, all of
Earth’s mechanisms create a planet in harmony; all energies acting
in unison with each other enable the planet to function as it has
for untold epochs, its parts acting as one, like a single engine
dependent on the proper working order of the many parts that
comprise it. Yet instead of controlling our emissions, instead of
slowing them down, instead of learning how our activities affect
each part of the whole engine, we are paradoxically increasing them,
warming the planet ever more and slowly pulling the guillotine’s
lever, releasing its razor blade upon our collective jugular.
Not satisfied with the
level of pollution and carbon dioxide emissions spewed by the world
today, blinded by the quest to further our comfortable, gluttonous
ways, we continue pushing the increase of carbon, oil and gas
consumption ever more, with the worst culprit of them all, the
United States – which has five percent of the world’s population yet
produces twenty-five percent of all worldwide carbon dioxide
emissions – seeking to control all remaining gas and oil fields, all
the while fighting the international community over the principles
of alleviating global warming, its purpose the continued expansion
of its voracious economy and by implication, its greenhouse gas
emissions. Captured by greed, industrialized nations of the north
seek to maintain comfort and privilege; meanwhile, developing
nations seek the treasures and lifestyles of the north. Combined,
both north and south will achieve only misery, meager subsistence
and a future of dastardly consequences.
Today we are becoming
aware what our manipulation of climate and atmosphere is
accomplishing, yet the biggest beasts on the planet, China and
India, have yet to fully enter the carbon dioxide delivery
business. Slowly they are integrating their economies, and rapidly
they are consuming vast sums of carbon, oil and gas, growing at
tremendous speed, every day releasing greater amounts of gasses.
When the day arrives, when both nations are at emission levels
comparable with or greater than present day America, the planet will
invariably be set on course to a future untenable and devastating,
the future of humanity compromised and threatened. For fossil fuels
are the devil’s excrement and slowly, yet surely, China and India’s
addictions to these sources of energy grow, creating, though not yet
visible, Hell on Earth, a place entirely of our own making, birthed
through our ignorance and voracious plague-like appetite, rising
from the only home we have to unleash devastation upon the human
race.
Rat Race
The internal combustion
engine has succeeded in evolving society, pushing our civilization
into the realm of technology and modernity, yet the accomplishments
it has yielded in the short term have likely condemned humankind’s
long-term vitality. Always thinking solely about the short term
rewards of present accomplishment, humanity fails, again and again,
to visualize the long-term price of our euphoria, progressively
condemning the future through the accumulated lack of enlightenment
of past and present generations. We have evolved civilization, yet
civilization has yet to evolve us.
The rise of machines has allowed humanity to control
– and devastate – nature on a massive and unparalleled scale,
usurping the natural balance of change away from the normal
processes of Earth and monopolizing them in a way at complete odds
with what has always been. We have manipulated nature in ways never
before seen by nature herself, compromising her natural processes
and altering the natural progression of her cycles. When we act in
such a way, when we clear cut the Amazon, for example, we are
meddling in consequences, to ecosystems, the forest itself, living
creatures and the health of the planet, in ways that we are just
recently beginning to understand.
It seems we fail to judge the overall picture of any
action we take, and how even the smallest alteration or manipulation
in one corner of the globe can have the greatest consequence
throughout Earth. The larger picture is rarely, if ever
contemplated, and its repercussions are made to become mere
inconveniences in the further exploitation of nature. For we are
creatures myopic and short-sighted, lacking the vision or the
“outside the box” mentality to overcome our various short-comings.
According to man, Earth is ours, endowed to us by
the Almighty itself, to use, abuse, exploit and to do with her as we
please. Nature, therefore, has been placed in this world for our
exclusive use and manipulation, a luxury given us by the gods
birthed inside the minds of our most creative priests and shamans.
In our dementia, we are the greatest species to ever arise, dominant
and created to rule over all Earth, its living beings conveniently
placed at our beckon call, to enslave, exploit, ruin and make
extinct. Delusional and egotistical, we are made to believe, from
cradle to grave, that we are omnipotent, a species chosen in the
image of our man-made god, placed at the throne of Earth, able to
leap giant mountains and the deepest valleys, a higher form of life
needed to engineer the destiny of both Earth and all its living
beings.
In truth, we are a rat race, living an ego trip,
sailing on a rocket ship, miles from reality, selfish and voracious,
a species without clothes, remaining primitive and mammalian,
possessing the same behaviors, instincts, passions and emotions as
our animal brethren. We are a plague upon the Earth, like locusts
ravenously gorging on the spoils of Eden, becoming over millennia
gluttonous despoilers of life, exploiting a planet endowed to all
creatures, not just ourselves. We have spread like a cancer to all
corners of the globe, as always to be followed by the destruction we
unleash, the mass extinctions we commit and the insatiable appetite
we possess.
Our thirst for blood, violence and death has
resulted in our own miserable, good for nothing wars, the
evisceration of entire environments and the death of hundreds of
billions of our fellow living beings. Wherever our feet touch
devastation soon seems to follow, transforming fertile and lush land
into concrete, asphalt, glass and steel, giving rise to the human
ecosystem, the city, with its concrete jungles, brick canopies and
steel-enforced canyons. We are a rat race, living amongst streets
of trash, making toxic our air and environment, polluting our bodies
with the poisons of humanity, assisting in the premature death of
hundreds of thousands each year, gutting our immune systems through
the housing we build and the furnishings we purchase, subsisting by
eating the refuse the corporate world decides to feed us with. Our
vehicles saturate the streets, emitting the carbon dioxide that
hovers like a dome over our cities, its brownish hue festering over
our daily lives, slowly poisoning the unlucky many socially
engineered to inhabit the inner city. The stress of dwelling in the
human ecosystem is slowly degenerating us all. A plethora of noise
emanates from all corners of our habitat, as do putrid odors and the
unattractive spectacle of modern American architecture, with its
overabundant mini-malls, cookie-cutter housing and franchise
business.
Our ecosystems continue to grow, swallowing the
natural world, erasing from the surface entire forests and savannas
and deserts and swamps and marshes and fragile habitats. Our cities
are now mega-cities, millions of humans living in closed quarters,
our increasing numbers exerting tremendous pressure on the planet.
We are now 6.3 billion human beings, 10 billion by 2050, a species
bred to consume the bounty of the planet, forced to survive at the
expense of Eden. Six point three billion primates, remaining
primitive and animalistic, refusing to halt the plague-like
destruction of the planet we have systematically been performing
since we left the jungles of Africa. With so many people the human
race is forced to destroy the planet to survive, replacing forests
with concrete jungles, tearing down ecosystems, building human
habitats, the globe’s fertile lands burned and used to feed the mass
of humanity, its animals sacrificed to the dictates of modern man.
The human plague is its own worst enemy, and that of
Earth, inevitably condemning itself to a planet on the verge of
collapse, its living organisms becoming extinct due to human
interference. The self-proclaimed, ego-deluded ruler of the planet
is clandestinely killing itself, slowly exploiting the planet beyond
repair and rapidly helping to spread its self-extinction through the
manipulation of Earth’s energies and cycles. Homo sapiens, thinking
itself highly intelligent and modern, truly beyond primitive, has
instead shown its true colors, now facing an enemy of its own
making, a threat it cannot defeat, a challenge seemingly already
lost.
If history proves anything, it is that humankind
always follows a certain path, never deviating, always leading to
death, destruction and the lack of vision. It shows that
forethought is but an afterthought, that today is much more
important than tomorrow and that securing the next two, three or
five generations is not as important as realizing the immediate,
short-term wants and needs of present-day humans. An alteration of
cataclysmic proportions of both human psychology and enlightenment
would be needed to reverse the seemingly inevitably drive toward
self-destruction we are headed towards. Global warming must somehow
be halted and contained, yet its momentum is only growing,
resembling that of a runaway freight train. The destruction of the
last vestiges of forest and jungle, including the last patches of
animal habitat, must be stopped.
Humanity must learn to live in harmony with Earth
and its living organisms, understanding the balance and synergy
inherent in all of the planet’s mechanisms. Our actions must be
understood for what they are doing, and a vision of the future must
be implemented, choosing to save our children rather than condemning
them to a life harsh, dangerous and full of misery. A new human
enlightenment must rise from our collective conscious, transforming
the way we live and behave, giving birth to an awareness of the
interconnectedness of all living energies, whether organic or those
mechanisms of the planet. Whether we heed the warnings or alter our
destructive path in time to reverse the seemingly irreversible is
entirely up to us, of course, yet, given our easily decipherable
history and predictable psychology, the odds are not in humanity’s
favor. History is the greatest witness to our inabilities, errors,
demons and weaknesses.
If world history were a 24-hour clock, human
existence would only comprise the last couple of minutes, yet in
that minimal amount of time we have unleashed devastation upon the
lands and creatures of the planet. In those few minutes we have
gutted the lands of a once pristine terrain, claiming for ourselves
everything and anything, whether living or not, that lies on or
below the surface. Eden was given to us, she was our
responsibility, as caretakers and guardians, yet we have somehow
managed to place her in her last throes. She birthed, nourished and
allowed us to thrive, yet our corrosive actions on her surface for
millennia is how we have repaid her.
It has only been in the last 300 years, with the
arrival of the Industrial Revolution, that humanity’s acceleration
towards complete destruction of both the planet and itself has
become easily visible. What man could not accomplish by hand or by
beast of burden could be easily performed by machine. The rise of
machines greatly increased our devastation of the planet’s
environment. More damage has been unleashed upon the lands,
waterways and atmosphere of Earth in the last 300 years than has
been done since our most primitive rat-like ancestors escaped the
mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
We have become a plague upon Earth, a virus that is
sickening the planet. She is now hemorrhaging from years of
devastation and utter contempt by humanity to her plight.
Unfortunately for us, she has decided to purge the cancerous plague
from her surface, cleansing Eden of the species causing her
sickness. Yet primitive and unwise we remain, reliant on primitive
forms of energy and resources, refusing to use our immense talents
for the betterment of all. We now find ourselves impotent to the
forces, unleashed by us, which in the coming decades will rid Earth
of the malignancy afflicting her natural beauty, thereby returning
balance and interconnectedness and normalcy back to a most beautiful
Garden of Eden.
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
