The Earth, or rather life on Earth, has survived many cataclysmic events and each time (so far) has clawed its way back. The peaks of evolutionary complexity were crushed and over time new forms evolved to take their place – not better but different. We are the present calamity as we destroy the life around us and bring in the biggest wave of extinctions since the last asteroid hit. Already in my lifetime the changes have been dramatic. In my own backyard hedgehogs are a rarity, honey bees absent, few butterflies frolic on the flowers, slowworms, lizards and grass snakes are almost never seen and the streams are devoid of darting sticklebacks. The joys of my youth have vanished.
It saddens me. But I know things will recover.
When we are gone life will return, though it will, I fear, be far too late for so many. Many of our most extraordinary will be gone forever.
Over long periods of time, millennia, new forms of complex life will evolve. Maybe we will even see intelligence evolve again? Maybe not? Whatever evolves will not be predictable and neither will it inevitably be an improvement on what we have now. But the planet will recover. I do not think we are yet capable of destroying all life – just the more complex forms.
I look ahead to those distant times with a modicum of hope. Perhaps in a few million years time the planet will have recovered from our outrages and be vibrant with complex life again? I hope so. And I hope those new forms will prove as wonderful as the variety we now have all around us. But there are no guarantees when dealing with the chance and luck of evolution.
That hope for the future does not prevent me from mourning the demise of the creatures that once teemed over our green jewel of a planet. I mourn for the tiger, elephant, rhino and gorilla, the frog, newt and bee, the butterfly, stickleback and chimpanzee and the hundreds of thousands of other species that we are presently mindlessly destroying.
I mourn. Even my hope for the future fails to raise my spirits. We had so much and we are carelessly throwing it away, discarding living creatures like trash.
