What We See Teaches Something About our Planet…
and Ourselves
Earth is one of NASA’s prime areas of study. The same goes for the European Space Agency and its satellites. Other countries also study Earth from space. What does this tell us? That our home planet is something we are seeking to understand from afar. It makes sense. There are certain ways to study Earth that can’t be done from the surface. It helps to study the atmosphere from space, to see it as a “whole” instead of a “column” of air that we look at from the ground up. The same goes for studies of the ocean and large-scale land features. It’s a systems approach that gives us the “Big Picture” of our home planet.
The picture below is from the International Space Station. It shows the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the catastrophic failure of a deep-sea oil well. It took millions of years of geologic action to form (an oil reserve) beneath the ocean. Humans want that oil, but in the process, are now destroying ecosystems and coastal areas that also took millions and billions of years to form. Think about that.
It’s at times like this you realise just how vulnerable our planet, and our own existence is.
Until we devise and enact upon a more enlightened and less primitive economic system, tragedies such as this will continue to happen, they’ve been doing so since the Torrey Canyon was wrecked off the southern shores of the UK in 1967.
The problem is that with economic institutions and models relying on constant growth to supply an ever growing population, our sheer numbers are starting to mean we are posing a danger to ourselves. It’s a bit like yeast in fermenting beer or bacteria in a petri dish. In an isolated system such as the Earth, we’re in danger of poisoning ourselves with our own waste products.
Unfortunately no viable economic models seem to address the situation. There are only two: socialism, which has demonstrably failed wherever it has been instigated and forced upon a population, or capitalism that works in terms of generating wealth, but whose tenets of exploitation and profit at all costs, are diametrically opposed to our fragile finite environment.
Any ideas as to how we can solve th impasse, because to me it’s a problem of gargantuan proportions that is going to need more than green energy, nuclear power and wishful thinking?