I hear on the grapevine that yesterday, that being April 22, was the officially declared "Earth Day" by man. Having been apprised of this, I can't decide if I should burst out laughing out loud and very sarcastically... or throw up. Perhaps both would be a suitable response to such unmitigated hypocrisy and self-blinding.
I cannot imagine, and I possess a pretty inventive imagination machinery, what "Earth Day" can possibly mean to the average Earthian, apart from the hope that it can become another "statutory holiday" so he can get a day's pay without working, take out his off-road horror machines and get out to the river bars, or the marshes or the hills and destroy as much habitat as one day can allow. Or he may decide to go shopping, an enterprise he's quite adept at. Or go out in an over-sized boat and kill fish for fun. Unfortunately he can't go hunting here, it's off season. Of course if you're in one of those countries perpetually at war, you can go shoot somebody, lob grenades or drive your torn up child to the nearest medical unit. Are there any other ways to properly celebrate "Earth Day" if you're an average Earthian? Can't think of one.
Earth day. Should one write an elegy, a eulogy, or both? How does instituting an "Earth Day" possibly mean anything, or change anything? The destruction man has so enthusiastically entered into must now go its course: it simply can not be stopped, nor reversed, not without such serious blow-back that million, perhaps billions, would simply die as a result of any meaningful alteration of course. Officially declaring an "Earth Day" may well be the most ludicrous "special day" ever invented. But that it not what it is: it is sophistry; deliberate deception; another public attempt to hide the facts of the case: that man has run out of time as far as this world is concerned.
Consider this: why do you need to celebrate, one "Earth Day" a year? Isn't every day an earth day? Does this official declaration mean that on one day of the year Earthians should (not must, there's no mandate) take care of their world, the conclusion being that it's OK to desecrate it 364 days out of the year?
At the entrance to Dachau - one of the most infamous Nazi extermination camps, for those who have no awareness of history - they had put up this slogan: "Arbeit Macht Frei" which means, translated, "Work Makes (you) Free." It was a slogan with a deadly double meaning: work hard and when you die, you will be free. "Earth Day" is just such a slogan brandished in the face of a dying world, the ultimate insult, since quite obviously no one, or no one of any consequence, is going to do anything to change the way things are going for the planet and its non-man life. Everything is a resource; everything that is exploitable must be; everything that can be translated into monetary gain, into some sort of power or pleasure is fair game.
There will be those who will respond with the standard line that scientific discoveries and technological innovations are changing the way of things. More development of wind, solar, tidal and nuclear power means less dependency upon "fossil" fuels. That may be true, but opinions on how much these developments will positively affect the environment vary immensely. One thing is certain: it will be many decades before an appreciable difference is made. What these opinion do not talk about is man's exponentially increasing population. No matter how much "technological enhancements" are made, the spectre of man overcrowding and exceeding any ability for the planet to supply his needs will only continue to exacerbate. Simply put, the creature is insatiable and stupid. Give it more artificially produced means to survive and it will respond by procreating at a faster rate.
Man has already lost the human race. He'll need a whole lot more than one official "Earth Day" a year to survive even in much reduced numbers, and I, for one, don't want to be there to experience the horrors attendant to such survival.
‘As far as we know, all changes are in the direction of increasing entropy, of increasing disorder, of increasing randomness, of running down.’ (Isaac Asimov)
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