The Human Experience
Since junior high school, I’ve looked at humanity with scorn, for their sins against Gaia, Mother Earth. Some do it intentionally, like killing fellow Earthlings for sport, some do it ignorantly, just people trying to get by in life, and some do it knowingly in worship of another deity: money.
All the same, the result is a world that is hurting, one that objectively would be better off without us. Ever since the rise of humans, animal species have been going extinct due to overhunting. Entire populations of megafauna were wiped out because they haven’t developed the trait to fear hunter-gatherers. Man migrated from Asia to the New World 12,000 years ago, to an ecosystem where they were not present before. The animals that went extinct were the size of modern day elephants. How could they ever know that these tiny, seemingly harmless Homo sapiens were a threat? They were easy pickings. During that time, North America lost many megafauna species you’ve probably seen in the movie Ice Age, like giant ground sloths, mammoths and giant armadillos.
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Plastic, greenhouse gasses, agriculture, overfishing, mining, all kinds of pollution…the list goes on. We are to blame. Since we live in this material world, we are susceptible to its influence. The culprit is a short-sighted mindset that yearns for instant gratification. The ones that worship money. We can’t really give back to nature. We haven’t even begun to rectify our mistakes and some of us don’t believe there are any. Watching An Inconvenient Truth heavily influenced my misanthropic views. Whenever I would hear news about lives lost in a disaster or accident, I thought “that would ease the burden on the planet’. That’s pretty dark, I know. I would root for the villain in Dan Brown’s Inferno and Thanos in Marvel’s Avengers, who were plotting to reduce the human population for environmental reasons. I would relish post-apocalyptic stories where nature thrived in absence of mankind. But that is just a fantasy.
Sure, the Earth doesn’t need humans. We are a cancer on the planet. However I believe that God put us here for a reason. Of course, in the time of Noah, He brought the flood because man caused corruption and violence on Earth. A reckoning will come, whether it be divine or natural, if in our time the corruption reaches a critical point. But I don’t think God put us here just so he could destroy us and start over. The Creator loves His creation. He sent us down to Earth, providing everything we need to live our lives to the fullest the correct way, if we obey His commands. All the beauty of the Universe, from ecosystems, to quantum physics, the intricacies of minute things that make life possible, this grand architecture He created would be meaningless if there is no one present to appreciate it and create even more wonderful things from it. When we truly see the perfection of God’s design, we can’t help but praise and worship Him even more. Thus, the world cannot have value without a valuer. The human experience is just as important. I realized this after reading Peter Brannen’s book ‘The Ends of the World’. In it, he quotes a conversation with a Swedish researcher, Anders Sandberg, ‘But the most chilling thing might be that if there is nobody around, there is no value at all. There is suddenly no point to the universe’.
Therefore, for the sake of value, the presence of a sentient being that is aware of itself is needed in this world and for the time being, the only ones we know of are humans. And they don’t necessarily have to believe in God to want to protect it. I believe that we have the capacity to the make use of the resources in this world, without compromising the needs of future generations and other formd of life that inhabit Earth. God will show us how, if we just allow that inner voice in ourselves to be heard.
