Murdering Mother Nature or "Oedipus. You can't handle the truth!"

If you want to know how poorly we are taking care of our planet, you should check out CNN's Planet in Peril. I didn't see it all, (frankly some of it is quite painful to watch!), but it is impressive in it's scope and there is a ton of new information to process. To sum up, our wealth and affluence and prosperity are killing the planet (all of us are culpable - every last one of us!). Seems that our great technological/industrial paradise is squeezing out the planet-wide ecosystem that spawned us. We truly are murdering Mother Nature and at an alarming and accelerating rate. Did you know that our world-wide population has grown by 400% since 1900? Unchecked growth (don't the economists tell us this is a desirable state?) in nature is what we call CANCER! Human Beings are now a Cancer on the Planet! Yikes! Not so good for one's self-esteem.

Reminds me of one of my heroes, the famous beat poet Gary Snyder.

Back in the 70's he wrote a truly great book called "Turtle Island." That's what the Indians called the territory we now call the U.S. Anyway, Gary was kind of like the canary in the coal mine. The lone poet/prophet whistling past the graveyard. And well, now that we know we are turning this blue planet into a grave, can we somehow stop it?

It's kind of funny in a sort of sick way, we are the uppity monkeys that just don't know our place. Everything in an ecosystem has a job. At some point, we got it in our heads that our job was to destroy the ecosystem and replace it with Orlando, Florida, a faux paradise of glitz, a desolate, god-for-saken amusement park of cheap thrills. Not so amusing after all. And is it our fear of Mother Nature, our fear of death, that drives us to killing everything that is not us and in that way, we actually assure our own destruction? Maybe there's a play in there?!