Urban Wildlife Abecedarium: E Earth
E: Earth, The Planet
(I'm writing short pieces for my zine "The Urban Pantheist: Loving Nature While Living in the City," using the alphabet, and the suggestions I get from my LJ friends and posters. I didn't get assigned anything I felt I could use for "E" so I wrote the following:)
The Earth is the only object in the Universe known to create and sustain life. Our point of view is biased: the Earth is our home and mother. The size of the Universe gives us hope that there are other, similar places, that life can occur again and again. Our limitations prevent us from proving this, however. We can stand on her surface and point telescopes into the void, and we can even send small craft away from her body to transmit information back to us. Distances in space prevent us from ever visiting a planet outside of our Solar System. Technological limitations prevent us from even detecting planets in other solar systems, except for a few dozen gas giants--more like small suns than enormous Earths.
How the Earth created life is not understood. How she sustains life is the more important mystery. We don't really know to what degree human activity is disrupting the Earth's ability to sustain us. My belief is that we may destroy the Earth's ability to sustain our species (and the species that have come to depend on us) but we will never destroy her ability to sustain life itself. The important thing to know, is that if we can not live on Earth we have no where else to go.
Cross posted to The Urban Pantheist (urbpan), adult_pagans, armchairscience, ecologists, pantheists, zine_scene.
(I'm writing short pieces for my zine "The Urban Pantheist: Loving Nature While Living in the City," using the alphabet, and the suggestions I get from my LJ friends and posters. I didn't get assigned anything I felt I could use for "E" so I wrote the following:)
The Earth is the only object in the Universe known to create and sustain life. Our point of view is biased: the Earth is our home and mother. The size of the Universe gives us hope that there are other, similar places, that life can occur again and again. Our limitations prevent us from proving this, however. We can stand on her surface and point telescopes into the void, and we can even send small craft away from her body to transmit information back to us. Distances in space prevent us from ever visiting a planet outside of our Solar System. Technological limitations prevent us from even detecting planets in other solar systems, except for a few dozen gas giants--more like small suns than enormous Earths.
How the Earth created life is not understood. How she sustains life is the more important mystery. We don't really know to what degree human activity is disrupting the Earth's ability to sustain us. My belief is that we may destroy the Earth's ability to sustain our species (and the species that have come to depend on us) but we will never destroy her ability to sustain life itself. The important thing to know, is that if we can not live on Earth we have no where else to go.
Cross posted to The Urban Pantheist (urbpan), adult_pagans, armchairscience, ecologists, pantheists, zine_scene.