Tonight I was collecting Devonian fossils on a bank near my house and thought about how when I cracked open a rock, I was exposing a brachiopod that had been encased in mud and then stone for hundreds of million years. For every specimen I found and saved, thousands will be crushed and hauled away for a road project.
I thought about oil, the result of organic deposits millions of years ago, pumped out and processed so somebody with a weed whacker could cut down wild flowers. I thought about coal, millions of years in the making, burned in a power plant so somebody could run his air conditioner to keep his bedroom cool while the planet heats up. I thought about starlight, arriving on earth after traveling millions of light years, only to be snuffed out by lights from street lamps in our cities.
We are fouling our nest. We are supposed to be the intelligent species, able to reason and plan for the future. I don't think so.
You are so right, Roy...I have similar thoughts when I go fossil hunting... or I'm on a hike and find plastic garbage...Tonight the National Geographic Channel had a piece on about garbage...How 10% of the world's plastic ended up dumped into our oceans last year...There's a whorl-pool out in the Pacific that is larger than the state of Connecticut! And even if it bio-degrades, it's getting into our food by microscopically contaminating the fish we eat...Such short-sightedness...And the Republican-controlled legislatures all over are cutting funding to agencies put in place to protect our environment and us....
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