There are billions upon billions of stars, each more spectacular than the last. There are rules to the universe, a predictable and mathematically comprehensible order. As far as we know, we are the only form of life. Human intelligence is the only mechanism we know for observing this universe, witnessing these stars, figuring out the math. Without humans, there would be no poetry here. When I think of all these spectacular stars and galaxies, billions of years of glory with no one to observe them, it makes me so sad. When I realize that we are here, that we can comprehend and marvel at the power of the universe’s stars and planets, it makes me realize what a special role we have.
As the only known outpost of life, Earth occupies a unique position – its sentient beings are the only creatures to stretch in a sunbeam, smell flowers in bloom, feel love. When you add human intelligence to sentience, the ability to understand the underlying plan in the chaos, it’s clear we have a very special privilege.
But we take life for granted. We don’t see that it’s an awe-inspiring privilege to witness the stars, to comprehend the grammar of the universe, to crack the mystery of how life came into being. Life was always here, for us – life was here before us, it’s all around us, it will be here after we’re gone. We lose sight of what a unique feature it is to have cells that replicate and turn air and sun into life. We don’t see life. We don’t see how nothing else is alive except what we know to be alive.
Most of the time, all we see is our individual human problems. How to explain the quarterly results in the next board meeting. How to get our kid the Frozen Dream Kitchen for Christmas. Why the a$$hole in the Camry is only going 25 in a 40 zone. We were raised surrounded by life; it’s all we’ve ever known. So we don’t see that it’s an insane gift. That we can walk in the forest, and look at pictures of supernovae, and love our animal friends. When we could look at a blade of grass and see 4 billion years of evolution. When we could look at the sun and see a thermonuclear reaction 150 million miles away that feeds our planet with just-right energy.
We are the sole witnesses to the miracle of our own intelligence, to life on our planet, to the glories of the universe. When we get bogged down in our little human lives, we lose sight of what is our unique gift, the ability to see things around us, understand how they work. Without us, as far as we know, there is no one to look at the stars, and contribute to understanding how the universe works. There is no one to trace 4 billion years of evolution to crack the secret of how on Earth life came to be – and maybe give insight into whether there’s life elsewhere, and how to find it. We are it. We have a front-row seat to the spectacle that is the expanding universe and its tiny outpost of life. It’s a gift beyond measure.
To say nothing about how we disregard life that isn’t human life. How we tear down forests millions of years old for grazing land to feed us Big Macs. How we dump chemicals into the air that destroy marine life.
If anything, this myopia seems to be getting worse. The self-absorbed navel gazing and total inattention to preserving the life of this planet has outrageous momentum. When I think about the potential we could realize for taking on the role of stewards for our planet, what could be is so much better than what is. If we protected what life there is left. If we explored the stars instead of exploring Twitter. If we turned our wildly powerful capacity for solving problems to solving the climate crisis instead of solving the problem of how to eliminate a post from our open-concept kitchens.
And we’re hooked on perpetual growth. Again, it’s all we’ve ever known. We’re terrified to find out what life would be like if we ever stopped mainlining ever-increasing stockholder returns. What if we reached a point where we said, “What we have is enough.” What if we reached a point where we were out of things to destroy to make money on? Then what would we do with ourselves? We might have to start looking at who we’ve become, versus who we could be. We might have to ask ourselves if we’ve done the right thing laying waste to anything that’s profitable to lay waste to.
But we haven’t hit bottom yet. There are still forests to destroy, and mountains to explode for coal, and oil to pull from the ground into the air. There will come a day where we’ve made our planetary body so sick that it will be obvious that the way we’ve lived our lives has made us sick and nearly killed us. It might kill us still. We will not be high-bottom addicts. We will be at death’s door.
Perhaps with that will come some wisdom. Maybe we’ll see that the living things we share our planet with have always had as much right to live here as we do. Maybe we’ll see that there is enough for all of us if I don’t have to take from you to show how much I have of something. Maybe we’ll have actual recovery, the kind of recovery that makes us wiser and kinder and helps us discover an appreciation for life – for a beautiful individual human life and the marvelous experience of consciousness, for the infinite variety of bugs and trees and plants and birds and animals, for our clever little monkey brains that take pictures of the surface of Mars. We can be witnesses to miracles of the universe we haven’t conceived of at all – or will we burn ourselves back to the Stone Age before we have a chance to find out?