Patrick didn’t wake much in the night that I remember but he woke this morning before 5:30 and wouldn’t go back to sleep and didn’t want us to sleep either, but we tired to. He crawled around and finally at 5:30 I got up and took him into the living room. We played and read some books for a while and then I got his breakfast ready. At 6:15 Harumi was still asleep so I gave her a call and she got up and took over breakfast so I could get mine and then get ready for work.
Left at 7:00 and got to Carrefour at 8:00. Sakurada came in and announced that today he was the only student. I groaned inside but smiled outside. Sakurada, I now realize because if the 2 hour we spent only talking to each other, has fucking awful listening and grammar. His listening skills were making me lose my patience with him; he sometimes couldn’t understand a simple, straightforward question or word!
Left just before 10:00 and was home just before 11:00. On the train I finished the Bill Bryson book (A Short History of Nearly Everything) , and what an excellent book it was, I can see a re-read of it a year from now, if not before. The final chapter was about the rise of humans and the destruction and increasing number of extinctions we have caused. It was a depressing thought to finish on.
I am becoming increasingly interested in ecology and life on the planet, diversity and the threats to it. I wonder where I should go with it? I’d like to do something to try and stop the destruction of parts of the planet’s eco-systems, but what can I do? I think if more ordinary people knew of the wonders of this planet, knew the miracle that is life and our own existence, the oneness of all life on this planet and knew what we were doing to the planet, then things would happen.
Knowledge is power.
The 19th and early 20th centuries (and before) were times of amazing ignorance and bizarre attitudes to the planet and the other living things we share it with. It’s only in the last 50 years or less that people have begun to understand about life on Earth, a lot of that due to TV and people like David Attenborough and the great nature documentaries that have been made. In fact he has probably done more in the cause of changing attitudes towards the environment than anyone else, at least in the UK. But the same has been happening in the USA.
I wasn’t quite sure what to write when I used the word "environment", because sometimes we make it sound like there are two parts of the planet: our part and the part where everything else lives. We treat it as our planet (obviously) and often refuse to share it with the creatures and the plants that where here millions of years before we were even down from the trees, or even before we decided to go up the trees in the first place. Because we can’t think in terms of the vast stretches of time the Earth works to, we tend to regard things in terms of human time, and so 3,000 years is seen as a very long time, when in reality it’s not. We kind of think we have been here for a long time, but we haven’t. Also we think that all the history and the Earth and evolution was building up to us and we are the pinnacle of the process and the end. Another big mistake that create the dangerous attitude that we own the place and everything on it.
I wonder if nature has something in store for us? A little balancing things out. We are just the fleas on the Earth’s back and one day the earth will scratch or jump into a river and we will be gone. All species eventually become extinct – the average length is about 4 millions I think. Something like a pandemic, a climate breakdown, a nonotech grey goo, something...
What’s annoying though is our fucking ignorance and arrogance, a terrible combination. I think in a way we are undermining our very existence by the things we do. We perhaps shouldn’t worry about the impending extinction of other species rather we should look to our own extinction, caused by our own stupidity, greed and lack of perception.
Anyway, good book and I want to continue learning more about the things he wrote about; about how the Earth works and how life works.