I don;t quite buy into the whole Gaia concept but I have spent my life working in the buisness of extracting a finite resource from the ground.
I can see the end as distant blip, the old timers say dig deaper and you find more and they are right but the ground pushes back.
Holes the miners drill turn egg shaped from the presure and stick the rods, and back likes to crack and spit and drop shards of stone on my head.
This tells me this earth ( ground ) in particular is not happy with me......
Its changed the way I look at the world, I accept the concept of limited resources and deminishing return on investment to extract them.
I have come to look at the world around me in the same way and some things are very clear and obvious.
In my grandfather's day there was an underground spring inthe mine where he worked, he used to drink from it and even bring it home to drink because it was very fine cold fresh water.
In my mine the water dripps on the back of my neck from cracks, it runs from blood red to electric green and form stalagtites that range from white to red and blue green funk.
It burns my skin both as a chemical reaction from what evil has been desolved and it just plane hot.
If I drank it I would probably die lol.
This difference in only 2 generations is not lost on me....
In the old mans day there was nowhere to go but forward and there were no limits and few repercussions.
Now I see the limits on the horizon and the day my job becomes non ecconomicaly viable.
And in the here and now I see push back from unconsious non living forces of the earth itself and and am reminded of a lick Pink Floyed song about how " she will take it back some day " with every bump, snap drop of burning water from cursed earth the miners dig around me stinging my eyes and desolving my mine buggy before my eye ( 3728 RTV retired at 1400 hours 1 1/2 years use due to heavy frame corrosion, the unit it replaced lasted 12 years in a drier, friendlier upper section of mine ).
And the rocks on the hill in my bak yard are burned black from acid rain ( but you can see the white and balck speckle granit still there if you opn a fresh fracture ).
And the creek down the road runs red with rust leached from the ground.
And the water in my sump in the basement leaves a red stain on the bricks as the iron leaches from the slag back fill under my driveway
And the stuff in garden dies from acidification of the soil when the droughts come on in the summer here so I don't bother growing stuff anymore.
And the metal that leach in that water are in me and if you reach into your pocket right now and pull out a shiny coin its the nickel in that coin that came from here that was the cause of all this. The need for resource drives the demand that pays the bill that buy s the home that sits on cursed earth.
And I have no idea what to do about it.
If I do nothing it will play itself out and someday all the black stuff will erode form the rocks and the acid will wash away with the rain and trees will be back and all that great stuff but the question is not can the earth recover from us the question is do we have the right to bread like rabbits and strip the world of resources that took billions of years to develop for the sake of some easy living that might last 100 to 400 years of so?
Maybe more maybe less?
??
I have no idea anymore of global warming is caused by farting termites of SUV's but the termite was here first and come on slow the SUV just arrived on the scene and in whats only the blink of an eye compared to other life forms we are new on the scene too and you can't say we are bengnin as the termites...
Poll