The Community of Life

With all the fearful and sad perspectives in the news, I'm learning to write only about the positive ways of looking at things. There is always a better way to interpret something than to just say it's bad. Here's an example:

There are reports that Earth's average global temperature increase is causing mushrooming quantities of the greenhouse gas methane (natural gas) to be released into the atmosphere. Some scientists (wanting to believe the best, naturally) are minimizing the importance of the data coming from the Arctic, which indicates that exponentially increasing amounts of methane (previously encased in ice) is being released from ocean areas .

Now, I'm not one of those people who think of a new source of natural gas as a good thing; we need to get off of fossil fuels. Those who are excited by warming-caused opening of formerly seasonally frozen shipping lanes are thinking with only one part of their brains; they're not thinking through the causes and effects of what's melting the ice. It's part of the vicious spiral of burning - causing melting - causing increasingly warming oceans due to less ice reflecting the sun - causing more melting. But I am more and more convinced that we humans are - by being increasingly able to access an infinite universal database of knowledge - able if we work together to deal with our mushrooming environmental problems.

Throughout history - and especially in modern times - breathtaking scientific advances have allowed problem after problem to be solved. Now that it's becoming common knowledge that the planet is in an extinction event, we can - by surrendering our habitual ways of thinking - look at the naked facts more clearly. But solving the problems will take changing ourselves, drastically.

Not only we humans, but all life is one community. Each life form, whether you're talking about plants or animals or microbes, works together in the web of life. We have to respect all living things and celebrate diversity. The way to help ourselves is to stop hurting Nature. The way to suppress disease, for example, is not to fight specific diseases (with, for instance, anti-biotics) - but rather to encourage a diversity of microbes via pro-biotics.

Here's a fact we don't often think about: We're arguing about whether humans can change the weather when in fact even microbes can and do affect it. Varieties of life such as bacteria and mold take gases from the air and turn them into other things. And microbes give off gases to the air. The seven plus billion of us humans who use oxygen and give off carbon dioxide when we breathe are doing the same - changing the atmosphere. And, on top of that, we burn stuff, which uses more oxygen and gives off more carbon dioxide.

Being the most powerful species on the planet (at the moment), we have the capacity to do the most harm and the most good; it's our job to do the best we can.

Grow as many and as varied plants as you can. Stop cutting down plants as much as you can. Pull yourself (as much as you can at any one moment) out of the parts of the industrial system that are destroying the ecosystem. Vote for an end to planned obsolescence. Don't participate in financial or military competition for fossil fuels. Open your heart to your human and other neighbors. We're all one family. We're not by any stretch of the imagination the only intelligent or loving species on or off the planet.

Jim McCue
(412) 421-6496
appropriatebiotech@yahoo.com