What’s All This Nonsense About Saving the Planet? Part One of Three; a Little Background Music

George Carlin muses that the planet is in no trouble at all and will shake off the human experiment like water off a wet dog. Stay with me a bit for my thoughts. After all, the Earth is thought to have been around for four and a half billion years and we’ve been here for a mere 0.13 percent of that total. We are not capable of ‘saving’ anything, although we’re primarily responsible for the climate disaster.

I’m up at what my wife and I lovingly call our ‘summer house,’ just 40 miles north of Prague, although the picture that may come to your mind is far greater than the reality. 400 sq ft, divided into three floors does not a mansion make. But it’s ours, inherited from her father, who single-handedly created this small paradise from a wild and impenetrable hillside.

I, who am entrusted with beating that paradise into agreeable condition throughout the summer, marvel at his persistence, all of it accomplished under the communist regime that ruled this area of the Iron Curtain. I beg you to have patience with me on this, it’s important to my opinion on humanity’s ignorant and egoistic ‘saving’ of our unique home planet.’

I am a Darwinist, and hold no grudge against those who credit their God with ‘intelligent design’

Yet, we are newcomers to this earth, and I reckon our existence here to be somewhere this side of six million years ago, although we didn’t develop our wicked concrete-pouring ways until quite recently.

Compare that, if you dare, to the modest hedgehog. That cute little curled-up ball of a mammal has existed, virtually unchanged, for over fifteen million years. Or, consider the elegant flamingo, gracing what ultimately became Florida for fifty million years, so I’m told. Crows, 24 million. But here’s one for you: Dinosaurs actually roamed around this planet for 245 million years and, one presumes, might still be here today if a rogue meteor hadn’t happened by.

What separates us from these still-living ancient species is intellectual development

The apes came close, flamingoes and hedgehogs don’t count, but we are unique, and that’s our badge of honor and fatal weakness. Or, so it seems to me, as I gaze out across the verdant farmland below our summer house and contemplate the volcanically created mountains behind us.

Author Kurt Vonnegut held the opinion that ‘our big brain is killing us,’ and he makes a pretty good case. Wars abound in our husbandry of the planet, from little spear-chucking disagreements, to bows and arrows, muzzle loaders, bolt-action rifles, machine guns and flame-throwers. Kurt had a point. He was a prisoner-of-war, held underground in wartime Dresden when the city was firebombed by U.S. and British air forces. The city had no strategic value, it was simply that era’s war crime against civilians, presumably to frighten them into surrender. It frightened the hell out of its few survivors, killed 25,000, and when Kurt emerged all he saw was a beautiful city flattened. Slaughterhouse Five is his novel based on that experience.

No other species does that to its kind

So, these are the things that occur to me as I read my share of newspapers and write some of my thoughts, gazing out across the countryside delivered to my wife and I, courtesy of Sir Charles Darwin. I am now dipping my toe into a life that spans all (or part) of ten decades, and it hasn’t made me wise, or even more observant than my fellow occupants. But age brings a perspective that youth can’t match. Who remembers the Marshall Plan or Dresden bombing?

Counting my years by the wars we fought, I was five when Pearl Harbor was attacked, ten when WWII was over, and Auschwitz liberated. Fifteen when the Korean War began. Twenty when Vietnam occurred. Drafted into the Army at age 22, I was not called for Vietnam. Sixty-four when NATO troops led by the United States blatantly set the United Nations Security Council aside and carried out a 78-day continuous bombing of Yugoslavia under the guise of "preventing humanitarian disasters."

Good luck with that. Age sixty-six when the United States and NATO invaded Afghanistan, a twenty-year stalemate that turned out to be the longest war America ever fought. Sixty-eight in Iraq, seventy-six in Syria.

Seven wars in my lifetime and, if the Pentagon and Lockheed-Martin have anything to say about it, it ain’t over yet. Interestingly, the military takes 42% of our national budget to support the largest fighting power the world has ever known, and we haven’t won a conflict since WWII. Yet we (and the 900 generals/admirals on active duty) keep our hopes high. Somehow, we got along with 34 in WWII. Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, MacArthur, Clark and George Marshall seemed enough, and more than up to the task.

It’s getting close to dinnertime and our Labrador needs a walk

The Elbe is beautiful this time of evening and Tenny had a couple of good swims.

So, these are the influences that shape my worldview, along with Tom Lehrer, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon. They may not be yours, but I have room for you in this conversation. Love Big Oil and Donald Trump, c’mon in. An Evangelist Christian, we can discuss points of view that coincide.

Part Two, as soon as I mow the lawn…