Earth's impermanent reality
April 21, 2012
IMAGE SOURCE
Earth Day 2012
by John Guerrerio
One of the principle tenets of Buddhism is that the present by its very nature is impermanent; therefore, everything that exists within that present is also in constant flux, a perpetual state of change.
It was only just over one hundred years ago that only 2 billion people lived on Earth. It is ironic that the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago resulted in humans moving from a migratory species to a sedentary one, and then that the invention of fertilizer pushed the number of people past the number of people the Planet could sustainably support. The irony lies somewhere in the evolution of agriculture from a life sustaining force to a destructive power capable of reducing the overall biodiversity on the planet and putting the human species back on its heels in terms of its long-term survival.
The Earth's climate can only be described as impermanent. Temperatures fluctuate from day to night and region to region, with altitude and with latitude. Air masses only take shape once they are measured, otherwise they are in constant motion.
The Earth's carbon cycle filters carbon from atmosphere into the oceans where it is processed over millions of years and stored as fossil fuels in the sediment. The cycle is a sensitive one, meaning that the balance is constantly shifting from earth to sky over the course of epochs. We have been tapping into the carbon battery of the Earth now for over 150 years releasing stored carbon at rates that are starting to upset the natural rhythms of atmosphere-ocean carbon balancing.
The Earth's nitrogen cycle, before the invention of human industrial fertilizers was based primarily upon the principles so scarcity. Most all of the nitrogen was in the atmosphere, relying on timescales dictated by lightning strikes rather than corporate quarterly profit reports, resulting in a short supply of nitrogen in most ecosystems. Today, however, the tables have shifted. Industrial nitrogen fertilizers poison very river delta in the world creating dead zone at the mouths of all major rivers on Earth. The process of taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and converting into fertilizers and spreading it over the Earth on scales that have upset the natural rhythms of the nitrogen cycle.
While the Earth is covered mostly by water, only 1% is considered freshwater. The demands on freshwater resources vary from region to region, but the pattern of consumption is similar everywhere. Water demand is usually split between three man demands: people's personal use needs, energy needs, and agricultural needs. As the population of the Earth skyrocketed over the course of the 20th Century, so did the amount of land being irrigated for agriculture. During the same period, electricity generated from fossil fuel power plants required higher and higher amounts of freshwater to be converted to steam to drive the industrial turbine that pumped out current to wires that conducted the energy around the country as inefficiently as possible. People moving to suburbs and their desire for greenery in regions of the country more suited for desert shrubbery increased people's personal use demands. Add in the the fact that some agricultural regions, planned one hundred years ago, are no longer suited for growing due to shifting climates and rising seas.
The polar regions of Earth are currently thawing due to an intensifying of the greenhouse effect, which traps heat at the planet's surface. How the introduction of large amounts of freshwater into the ocean circulation system is yet to be determined. The most recent research observes large pools of freshwater gathering in regions of the Arctic Ocean waiting to be drained; what is unknown is how this water will interact with the warmer, saltier mixture currently being circulated.
All of the cycles of Earth are kept in balance by the creatures large and small that inhabit the planet. Human beings are but one species, albeit one with a grandiose impression of their importance.
The Sixth Extinction is currently underway on Earth. In the planet's history, the Earth has gone through five major extinction events since major life forms began evolving on the planet some 500 million years ago. There is a natural extinction rate that goes on in the background of evolution that is steady throughout time. Occasionally, some cycle or combination of cycles will get out of balance and drive a higher percentage of species to extinction, producing Extinction Events. Some scientists make the case that the current Sixth Extinction began 10,000 years ago as humans began spreading across the globe and becoming sedentary. Others make the case that the current extinction really didn't ramp up to full-swing until the 20th Century. Regardless of when it began, prediction of biodiversity loss in the 21st Century hover in the 70% of all species range; that is, 75% of all species will be gone by the end of the 21st century.
The oceans of the Earth along the continental coasts are currently sick as a result of overfishing and pollution. The toxicity of human 'progress', however, is spreading ever farther out into the vast waters that regulate the overall health of the planet. Huge garbage patches of finely eroded plastic particles are now a permanent part of the ecosystem trapped in gyres thousands of miles out at sea. Birds and fish eat these particles and cycle the new compounds through the food chain.
Industrial chemicals have made their way so far into the human food chain that they show up in newborn babies, the toxins being transferred from mother to baby inside the uterus via the umbilical cord. Powerful pharmaceutical drugs have also permeated the human food chain via industrial livestock farming and have saturated the water in some rivers to levels that are mutating some species of fish to have both sexual organs. The amount of mercury resulting from burning coal for electricity in power plants has shown up in every river across the United States.
It was only 40 years ago in the 1970s that humanity recognized their actions were having a detrimental effect on the other species on the planet, the air, and water. Since then, the battle between human beings' needs and corporate quarterly profit reports' needs has only intensified resulting in a lockdown of the status quo until a longer term pattern of calamity develops. Most probably, by then, the problem will have reached a tipping point and will be beyond remediation.
Still, the Earth continues its journey of growth waiting to be recognized one day for all of its achievements over it's 4.5 billion year history. Maybe it won't be us that recognize theEarth's greatness. Maybe our generation is supposed to be the generation that lost it's way and collapses society so that those that come after us will have a reminder of where human arrogance leads, but it feels as if that story has been told before.
Living on the sixth floor of an apartment building in New York City for the past year has made me realize just how much energy is transferred between Earth and Humanity through the simple act of standing barefoot on the soil.
We here at EarthPulseDaily believe that Earth Day is a perfect opportunity to take a snapshot of humanity's interaction with and dependence upon the Earth for survival. We also, however, believe that the rest of the year should be spent taking action on the various issues affecting the health of the planet and the subsequent dependent species like ourselves.
The future is impermanent by its very nature. Therefore, all of our actions can change in an instant or they can change slowly over time. We can ignore all of warning sign and proceed full-steam ahead. We can let the dawdlers in politics fumble about and stall the process so as to keep the business-as-usual model in place for as long as possible. We can respect the life force that sustains us today if we want to. We can design an economic system that simply makes people rich for protecting the Earth rather than for destroying it. Now that our species has evolved substantially in its mental capacities with the advent of modern technology, we ought to apply some of that higher order reasoning to our archaic societal designs. Humanity needs to embrace the impermanence of the future and work toward redesigning our present so that our daily action realign our species with the natural cycles of the planet. Economics is a subset of Earth; without balancing the cycles responsible for the unlimited resources necessary for the American Capitalism model to function effectively, economic markets collapse because resources become too limited to meet demand. Therefore, environmentalists are the defenders of capitalism. They are working to preserve the supply side of Economics.
While impermanence can have some chaotic qualities associated with it, natural evolution, without human desires transposed over it, usually produces a result which if a human being we're to create would be considered an example of higher order intelligence. For example, nature figured out how to tap into abundant free energy in its evolution. I was under the impression that it was the human species that was intelligently designed; why can't we even figure out how to replicate what nature already does? It would appear in the case of generating energy, balancing various natural processes, and sustaining life that the Earth has us beat in the intelligence department.
We should honor that achievement and pay homage to the Earth this day and every day into the future.
Posted by EarthPulseDaily. Posted In : humanity
