WHO SPEAKS FOR EARTH?

We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew, we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries … It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening … Out of our … lineage, minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
-H.G.Wells, “The Discovery of the Future,”


It’s good to see you again, my dear perceptive reader. I hope you’ve been well, as have been I. For my humanities elective, I chose a course called ‘Literature and the Environment’. Great course, excellent teacher. But even though I really enjoy the classes, somehow I feel uncomfortable with the philosophy of the course.

Say, for instance, an extraterrestrial intelligence comes to earth and asks for one sentient life being to represent the planet. Surely you can imagine the strife among the factions of our society as to who represents us. But ponder this; do we ever consider that the planets representative be any other life form other than humans? What leads to this specio-centrism? Are we the dominant life-form on this planet? Surely not. We are nowhere close to, say, bacteria. It has always been the Age of Bacteria. There has never been a time in life’s history when they have not been the most abundant life form. What is it then? Yes, it is the fact that we are the most intelligent species on the planet.

Well then, who does the planet belong to? Most would give me one of two answers: either no one at all or all the beings that inhabit the planet. I, on the other hand, beg to differ. I believe the planet belongs to us, humans. By what virtue, by what right, ask you? Do we have a ‘divine’ birthright which gives us control? Certainly not. We have the right because we TAKE the right. I ask people, what is the reason people pursue environment conservation and all that? Again, two answers. One, because plants and animals, (I use the phrase generically, science students please don’t contradict me about the bacteria and the like.) are useful to us. I have no problems thus far. I more than agree, in fact. Later, people tend to get into the divine right of all life to live. This is where I must jump in. We are the most intelligent species on the planet. We are the ones who will eventually colonize the galaxy. I do not believe in the sacrament of life, but in that of intelligence.

We are the local embodiment of a cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of molecules raised to consciousness. Our loyalties lie towards our species, towards intelligence itself. We have an obligation to survive. WE speak for earth.