Reflection

The death of Earth overrides everything else. I was just thinking about this reality today.

I am a person who like many people has enjoyed photography. I like aesthetically stimulating scenes of different kinds and photographing them.

Some of the things that are often appealing or stimulating are human made. For example today I saw what might otherwise be seen as just a nondescript bridge crossing over a roadway and there was something about it, and the plants and other things framing it, which I found very appealing.

But then I realized that humans are killing Earth. There might not be flowers within a few generations. The oceans may be dead. I’m sure there will still be trees and other plants, but basically the ecosystems will be wiped out and destroyed.

Ecosystems which took tens and hundreds of millions of years to evolve. They will be destroyed and will not be coming back. Vast amounts of species gone. And of course the atmosphere will also be having major problems. The ice caps will be gone. Glaciers will be gone. Its kind of sad to think that there will be no snow on Kilamanjaro – a mountain near the equator of Earth – anymore. And of course pretty much everywhere else as well including Antarctica and the Arctic.

So, given this backdrop, I just found it kind of hard to really get excited about looking at a bridge and feeling any kind of glee, happiness, or perhaps pride in human accomplishment when looking at it.

Instead I just felt a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The kind of feeling I’m having all the time now.

Every day I check in with myself along the lines of: So, this is what its like to exist on a dying world. This is what its like to incarnate into a species that is killing the planet it inhabits.

And I wonder. I wonder about possibly different lifetimes and about different planets, even different universes. I wonder about it all. What was the point of all of this? So this is what it all came to?

For better or worse, no matter how much I may regret it, I’m here now. Not sure what the point is: Wow. I get to watch a planet die. I get to watch an ignorant species, which I am a member of, kill its host ecosystem on a vast scale, as it population burgeons completely out of control and it seems like the most ignorant people are the ones reproducing at the highest rates.

And the point was?