It's been...interesting. Actually, it's been nice knowing you, old Planet Earth, place I called home.
I've lived a half-century now -- I know that's a blink of an eye in geological terms, and even much less significant in comparison to cosmic chunks of time....but it's been an eventful period for me. When I started out here, there was all sorts of dread and fear, and mostly, we were scared that we'd kill off this planet in a fiery exchange of nuclear weapons.
We -- by "we," I mean humans -- we didn't understand back then, the myriad other ways we were slowly choking the planet to death. Now, even only 50 years later, we know what we're doing to you-- we can't really pretend that we don't -- but there's a cult of sociopaths that is really only concerned with their comfort and is hell-bent against doing anything to stop this planetary death spiral. I'm sorry about that. I probably didn't do nearly as much as I could have, but then I'm just one man.
It's kinda funny, Earth. When I was a kid, there was all this science fiction that I practically devoured -- all about humans getting off this planet and exploring the cosmos. There was always this subtext though -- about civilizations destroying themselves. The question was always whether we'd survive our nuclear adolescence. There's no way some of the younger folks could fully understand the uncertainty of the times, but we were pretty sure the odds were about 50/50 for planetary annihilation. Perhaps we hadn't encountered more intelligent, more advanced life in the universe because it was just too hard for a species to master technology like the atom without using it in suicidal wars.
The good news story for much of my life, though, was all this progress we were making on the environmental front. Thanks to people like Rachel Carson, we had stopped using CERTAIN pesticides, and the government in my corner of the world enacted legislation to cut back on the pollution of the air and water. They even created a whole agency whose job would be to enforce these laws and develop regulations to make ever more improvements. We kept all sorts of measurements. Despite numerous calamities, we really thought we were making fantastic progress. The air became much cleaner, blue skies were seen again where they hadn't been seen for years. The water quality improved, too -- at least for a time.
There were a few voices in the wilderness as it were, warning about colossal environmental train wreck ahead. There were simply too many of us, and a lot of us were consuming far too many resources. This wasn't sustainable, they argued. The years that followed -- and the famines that we witnessed were pretty compelling evidence that they were right, but we just kept on trying to suck the marrow out of life -- all life.
Speaking of bones -- some really smart, real-life scientists (not the science-fiction writers) seven warned about all that carbon dioxide we were generating with our fuels, which we developed from mining in the depths of the planet for the remains of other species long ago extinct. That was going to change the climate of the whole planet, melting glacial ice, flooding coastlines, causing more powerful storms, and long droughts. Some argued that we were also losing the best means to control all that CO2, with the massive clear-cutting of aboriginal forests, just to find more land to for cattle to graze and to grow all sorts of non-native crops that were sucking out all the nutrients from the land. This was creating a cycle with ever more demand for new swaths of land to lay bare and cultivate. Our appetites for food and fuel only grew. Along with that, we employed ever more pesticides to grow a lot of this food, even though many scientists pointed out this was counter-productive -- that it was destroying the soils, poisoning many people, and driving the needed pollinators towards extinction.
Some people who studied the seas also warned we were consuming too much fish -- that we were driving a number of species to extinction. So, we put in some controls when enough people could agree and moved on to over-fish other species. Also, we were creating all kinds of pollution that seemed to killing off large areas of the oceans. Sometimes, even our unending search for fuels created incredible amounts of damage to the underwater eco-system. Then, these people who studied the ocean figured out that the climate change was probably affecting the oceans even more than the land -- that the warming waters were trapping too much CO2 and becoming acidic and that this was killing off lots of animal life and corral. Even the noblest of species -- the great whales -- were fished to near extinction, even after rules were put in place against harvesting them for human consumption.
Did we change our behavior? Not so much...and not nearly fast enough. There were lots of 'reasons,' and, frankly, almost everyone shared in the blame, in one way or another. Of course, it became harder and harder -- really, it became almost impossible to deny the scope of the problem and our role as the main driver of what was starting to look like the beginnings of a planetary death spiral that would consume many, if not most of the Earth's species.
In the face of that reality, there was still a cadre of really influential people who were determined to deny all these realities. Some of them personally profited from this "denialism," gaining great riches and/or political power from extractive industries and chemical industries and the factory farming that dominated food production on land and in the water. Others were simply too willing to believe these denialists because they didn't want to receive the bad news. They knew that accepting these truths would remove any moral pretense that there was a benefit to society in maintaining our rampant consumerism and dependence on fossil fuels. They didn't want to change their comfortable lifestyles. To be honest, no one really did want to make the changes. Even those who recognized the threat kept hoping that either scientists or the ir leaders would somehow create some technological or political change that allow us to just shift to other power sources without making real changes in the way we live.
It all came to a head, when hardly anyone was paying attention, and the denialists took control of all the important levers political power. Then, there's was no realistic way left to dislodge them from their positions of power and they were able to block all the efforts to make the changes that might have saved human civilization.
Anyway -- I'm writing to apologize to you Earth. It certainly wasn't your fault. We did really well by you for many thousands of years before it all came apart over a couple of centuries of rampant industrialism. At first, we were simply ignorant of the damage we were doing. At the end, though, when we knew how bad it was, there weren't enough people willing to do make the sacrifices and willing to make the effort to choose leaders who would help chart a different path. It was really ironic, after all, We were afraid for so many years that our leaders would push a button and start a nuclear war that would kill us all. In the end, we sealed our fate with the buttons we pushed in the voting booth.
So, thanks for all you did for us. Don't blame yourself. Better luck next time.