This was my first thought this morning.
Facing the possibility of the planet reclaiming the earth back from the people sounds like a fine plan to me. Almost comforting.
Not a popular thought obviously!
But would it be such a dreadful thing if the people on the planet went extinct too?
Left to himself I am fairly sure Jude and Free Bee will lean on the fences till they fall down then the hogs will wander off, and as long as there are no men with guns, Jude will be just fine. Out here anyway.
The cows will be fine. The electricity will have gone off so all the electric fences will be down and they can roam and graze and find water in the creeks. The water will slowly clear up. The fields will grow long.
The chickens will even do ok as long as the wheat is left in the fields to go wild and they are able to find shelter. We know they are fertile!
Mr Flowers will be more than fine.
Even the cats will do ok. Though I hope they don’t because they kill so many birds.
The coyotes will keep the deer on the move.
The beavers will take over the waterways. The trees will grow wild.
The sea will do what the sea does when people are not using it as a garbage dump.
I actually quite like the idea of the planet rumbling along without us.
It will be better off. Different from what we expect I am sure. But reclamation would commence immediately.
So is it just me, BooBoo and Nelson who will not be able to sustain ourselves? (Well, I won’t be here – no people remember). And Boo is pretty good hunter. I have a feeling the planet will just do the renovations and after a couple of thousand years all our ugly buildings and horrible mass produced weapons and misery and ambition and buzzwords and emojis and wars and bikinis and computers and bitching about the internet will be gone.
And not in a dark armageddon + machines taking over the planet kind of way. The moment the batteries need maintenance they will stop in their tracks. I think the earths recovery would be in a green over-grown, natural, weedy, algae, insecty, stinky composty survival of the fittest kind of way.
Time would erase us.
That’s what I was thinking about when I woke up this morning – preparing to do battle with the world again.
Just do it right, today.
No more saying – just this once. Or just one more.
Do the best you can.
Forgive your-self for the stuff you just can’t get right (like milk containers and plastic wrapping around cheese) and get on with the clean up.
So, when the earth finally does begin to take its power back there is less trash for it to absorb.
That sounds fair. Right?
Is that too heavy for a Monday?
Celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
48 responses to “Saving the Planet – or – saving the People on the Planet.”
I do like this thought you wrote Celi, “Do the best you can.’ If each and every one of us does just that we should be able to move in the right direction toward sustainability.
Yes! I think so. It feels huge but only when we look at it as one single person. Once we realize that if many people can do as much as they are able there will be a huge change – then it feels more positive.
In fact that is the thrust of The Sustainable Home workshops. I can’t wait to get that landing page live and linked to thekitchensgarden- then it will be official!
Look at all those lovely eggs! I would sell my grandmother for some – your grandmother anyway
I have often wondered and asked other people of what use are we to the planet – could it get along fine without us – are we part of the balance or not. No one told me of a necessity for us being here.
Not dark… I would actually like to have all trace of my presence on this planet erased by green. I’d like to become food, and soil, and water. I’d like to drift off the surface and become oxygen, or space dust. I would like to become something Other, as part of the planet’s evolution, not being too greatly attached to my own humanity. Perhaps I could learn to Tree, or maybe Stream, or Bee…
A growing number of people share your thoughts. Not too dark for a Monday. It will happen sooner or later.
Hi Michael- I hear people all the time (me included) banging on about saving the planet when what we really worry about is saving the people and the animals on the planet. It is an interesting flip of the narrative, don’t you think?
Oddly, ultimately I suspect they are the same thing. Or rather, if we speak about saving future generations we must think about dramatically reducing consumption and most likely population.
Which was a discussion I remember having back in the 70’s.
It is ongoing, sadly……
Yes. We just keep doing as much as we can.
That is all we can do.