Choose Life
"The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth." Apollo 8 Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, Dec 24, 1968. Image: NASA
The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Life started about 3.8 billion years ago. Imagine that: from inert matter, some chemical molecules started to replicate themselves and life began. God knows how, (literally or figuratively, depending on your point of view).
From there, life took off, branching and changing and dying and expanding until today, when we have millions of life forms. There are slow-growing giants that live for thousands of years and make themselves from the air. There are fungi that help nourish these giants and help them communicate with each other. There are tiny bugs that keep soil healthy, and bigger ones that pollinate our crops. There are inquisitive, eight-legged, boneless, shapeshifting problem-solvers, and iridescent songsters that take to the air. Each of these millions of lifeforms—and some inanimate matter, as well—is interconnected, part of a planetary system of innumerable connections which we are only now starting to understand. Every organism supports another, either in growth or decay. Each of them is doing its part to maintain a system of life. Scratch that: the system of life.
As far as we know, Earth is the only place in the vast emptiness of space that has life. Think about how awesome that is.¹ But what do we humans do? We reduce everything to a dollar-value in a search for greater ‘utility’ and ‘efficiency’ and we destroy life. In the one place it exists! And not in a kill-it-to-eat-it-and-survive way; we commit mass murder of entire species, lopping whole limbs from the evolutionary tree of life, undermining the resilience of the very systems on which we depend! By trying to enrich ourselves, we imperil our own future. And we do it consciously!
Incredible.
This is not a call to de-civilise or to halt development, but to recognise the beauty and importance of life. All life. Any decision that does not prioritise the vitality of Earth’s system of life is a bad decision. Any business whose success is predicated on the destruction of life is a bad business. Any leader who promotes polices that undermine the beauty, the miracle, the safety of this, our home, is no leader at all.
This is, instead, a request to take this thinking into all that you do, whatever it is. There are alternatives, and mitigations and rectifications aplenty. If you’re not sure what they are, ask. If you see the wrong thing being done, demand that it cease. And remember this simple fact from the Earth Charter: human development is not about having more, it’s about being more. Each of us can be more, be better, and continue to live on a healthy planet. We just need to choose.
To choose life.
