Gaia the New Playa?

There has been more than one reference to the green theme in previous posts. Given the current 'climate' of environmental literacy, and a perceptible ripple within within the family itself, I feel compelled to at least comment on it: the 'green' ( I cringed to type that) cause, as many opportunistic semantisists love to call it. While have no thoughtful insights on power saving, planet saving, and such, I do have some flogged-to-death questions for which I am providing a public funeral service.

Now, I get all terribly muddled with this business of natural selection on one hand, and environmental activists baying, on the other, for the reinstatement of all things 'green'( believe it or not, even the Monarch butterflies and the Birds of Paradise fall under this colourblind category). It seems 'Natural selection itself has arrived at some sort of stalemate' where we have become both the selected and the selective forces.( Now folks, stay with me here; I promise it'll get easier.)It seems, we are the fittest but since we're the ones to have come up with the theory, we can decide if we continue to stay fit or let the dogs rule. It's anyone's guess what we want, right?

Here's my interpretation
In the interest of the continuance human race, the human race had found ways to master it's environment and ensure its survival on the planet. But somewhere along the road, it took a huge diversion to Vegas and got hypnotized by Materia muchamoolah and spent much time in it's darkened chambers spinning luxuries and creature comforts. Suddenly,the shades are lifted and we are blinded by a world we had paid little attention to.

So being the pinnacle of evolution, we thought we could surmount these problems. We thought " we've adapted to nature, we've manipulated it so we don't have to adapt anymore, we don't have to get cowed down by anything because we are the fittest and who's to select anymore?" What we didn't reckon with was that all that was beyond the grasp of science, or was conveniently ignored by it, was conducting an experiment that,unfortunately, was making guinnea pigs out of us. If I'm not mistaken, the experiment was to test our fitness again- selection was it work.

Right now, under the intense gaze of nature and the increasingly adverse test conditions in the petridish that our world has turned out to be, I believe, I'm perhaps not the only possessor of this realization. In fact, I'm sure I cottoned on rather late myself. This realization, fortunately, has given us the luxury of choice but a choice that is very, very hard to make. It is not the choice between letting wilderness overrun us and dying martyrs or a choice between harmonizing with nature and fighting a technological battle till the end. It a choice between dying with the knowledge that we could have done something, at least tried and orsubmitting to natural selection in a most hypocritical, defeatist manner that is not entirely unbecoming of mankind.

The choice is easy to acquiesce to but hard to make, simply because once you do you commit yourself to anything that follows.

With the strokes so tentative in a picture so definitive, it is hard to comprehend anything. My perspective is microscopic under lens that become clouded by neglect. It is so tempting to submit myself to forces we have all along denied. But as a member of the human race, I feel compelled somehow to react otherwise.

Can individual pursuit, vested interests, and survival of the race be reconciled somehow?

Rest in Peace.

Amen
(Swathi)