A Letter from Earth

Planet Earth as seen from Apollo 17, NASA image.

Author’s note: The words here are my own, and I don’t claim to speak for the actual consciousness of our planet, although I hope she would approve this message :-).

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Dear humans,

You have been behaving rather oddly of late. I have been following the evolution of your species with great interest, as you are in many ways unique among the forms that have lived upon me over my long life. I am wondering if it might be helpful to see how you appear from the perspective of a planet. Your planet. Earth, as you call me in one of your languages.

You have discovered a great deal about my story, but you are not very good at understanding the timescales. From within your experience of time, my age is effectively infinite, and so you make silly logarithmic timelines in which the most recent ten thousand years comprise half of my story.

Time passes for all of us, but our experience of it is entirely subjective and relative. You know this, to some degree - minutes crawl by at times and hours fly past at others, and the years seem to go by more quickly as you get older. You can imagine that a hummingbird, darting about faster than your eyes can follow and beating her wings 60 times every second, must have a very different experience of time, and from her perspective your movements must appear as if in slow motion. From the perspective of a fruit fly or a bacterium, alive for a few hours to a few days, your own lives would appear effectively infinite.

I have to assume that a lifetime feels about the same length to all beings, planets included. You think I am ancient, but I don’t feel particularly old. By the standards of my kind I am effectively middle-aged. In order to get a better sense of my experience, I want you to try a thought experiment. Your heart contracts 80 times every minute, some three billion heartbeats over the course of your lifetime. My “heartbeat” - the living rhythm of my life - is my orbit around the star you call the Sun. For you, this “year” is a long time. For me, it is but a second. Imagine then that each year is condensed into a single beat of your heart - that time appears to pass 42 million times faster. Then perhaps you can begin to understand my experience, and the way that you appear to me.

By this reckoning I am one hundred and eight years old, and I expect to live for another hundred years before the dying, expanding Sun dissolves my substance. You live, on average, for one minute. Perhaps that is longer than you expected; you imagine that you are only an eyeblink in deep time. The one you call Jesus lived 25 minutes ago. The last ice age ended two hours ago. Your species has existed in its present form for seven days, and earlier species of humans first appeared three weeks ago. At this scale my skin renewal - what you call “plate tectonics” and discovered only recently in your time - moves along at ten feet per minute, about the pace of a walking ant, with the little shakes you call earthquakes happening every few minutes at the boundaries. But let us start from the beginning.

I was born in fire, from the same matter that formed the Sun and the other planets. Like you, I have few memories of my earliest childhood. Life - the first single cells - first appeared in my oceans when I was ten years old. It evolved slowly at first - all of the basic genes and proteins that make up your bodies taking form within bacteria. Much of the first half of my life remains hidden to you, although your geologists have done a remarkable job of reading the subtle stories recorded in the oldest rocks and minerals.

Around my 50th birthday, the photosynthetic cyanobacteria filled my oceans, pumping oxygen into my atmosphere for the first time. This pollution spelled the end for many life forms but paved the way for others, and it also precipitated all of the iron out of my waters, creating the ore deposits that you have used to build your cities. Thanks to the oxygen, a layer of ozone formed in my upper atmosphere, blocking the damaging rays from the Sun and making life on land possible. My skin froze over almost completely in the years after that, as the oxygen removed the warming methane from my atmosphere and the Sun burned less brightly back then.

At age 70 the first multicellular life evolved. The fungi discovered this first; plants and animals would not join them until another 15 years passed. Another deep ice age followed, and it was not until 13 years ago, at the age of 95, that the biosphere as you know it began to take form. Life explored a great variety of forms then; your scientists who study fossils call it the Cambrian Explosion.

Six years ago, three quarters of all species went extinct in the largest such event in my history. Your scientists have not figured out the cause of this one yet, and I will leave it to their puzzling. The years that followed were dominated by the large reptiles you call dinosaurs, although they were rather different from your imaginings.

Eighteen months ago - 65 million years by your calendar - I was struck by an asteroid nine miles across and moving at 40,000 miles per hour. The energy of that impact was beyond your apocalyptic imaginings. The air turned to fire worldwide, and dust dimmed the sun. Life survived in the oceans and in burrows beneath the soil. All of the large dinosaurs perished. A few of the small ones survived and evolved; you call them birds, including your beloved Dendroica warblers. Some of those burrowing creatures repopulated a desolate world and diverged over the next months into a great diversity of mammals - the new top predators, yourselves among them.

For the last day or so of my time - the past 100,000 years of yours - you have been participating in the evolution of the biosphere. You are not the first species to do this - many species change their environments to favor their survival - but you are the first to do it consciously and on a global scale. So you have my attention, so to speak. You have changed ecosystems with fire and agriculture. You have caused extinctions. You have directed evolution toward new species: creating wheat and rye from wild grasses, maize from teosinte, beagles and poodles from wild wolves. I am intrigued by your creations, your architecture, your cultures and civilizations. I am interested to see what you might create next.

At the moment, though - this particular moment that is the last millennium of your time and the last 15 minutes of mine - it appears that you have created a bit of a predicament for yourselves. You may see it as also a predicament for me, but that is much less true than you believe, as I hope to convey in this letter.

Somewhere in your civilization you hatched an idea that your species stood apart from the rest of my biosphere. Man separate from Nature. From there it did not take long until it became Man’s destiny to conquer and subjugate Nature: to dam the rivers, to clear the forests to build cities, to plow the prairies, to fish the oceans. You have accomplished some rather remarkable feats. You have mined most of the accessible iron laid down when those cyanobacteria first oxygenated the atmosphere. You have discovered the traces of decayed life buried in my skin - you call them fossil fuels. It is not so much energy really - equivalent to the solar energy that reaches my surface over a month or two of your time and less than a heartbeat of mine - but it has been enough to power your factories and energize your fantasies of a techno-industrial space-traveling future. Those fuels were laid down in my skin gradually over nine years of my time - 360 million years of yours - and you have mostly burned through them in the past three minutes. Whether or not you burn the rest in another minute or two is of little consequence to me.

You have discovered the fuel that warms the core of my body - the unstable element you call uranium - and realized that if you concentrate and compress it you can release all of its energy at once. You call these Armageddon weapons, and they terrify you. To me, they are like those little fireworks you toss on the sidewalk and they make a little flash and pop. Even if you were to set off all fifteen thousand of them - in a war that you believe would surely destroy your species and your planet - the energy released would still be one hundred thousand times less than the asteroid impact that is still in my recent memory - and that your burrowing ancestors and millions of other species survived. Your Armageddon might kill a majority of humans and terminate a number of species, but it would be only a small blip in my story.

I am saddened that your species has declared war on the rest of Nature, but I am not afraid, because I know that it cannot last much longer. Everything that you build decays from the moment it is made. My systems rebuild and renew themselves continuously. Your systems move resources from mines to factories to landfills, from wells to fires to the atmosphere. My systems recycle resources indefinitely. This is a war that you cannot win, because you are not actually separate from Nature. The power of your industries pales in comparison to the great thermal engine that converts sunlight into wind and weather, into rainstorms and rivers, into forests and grasslands - all of which nourish you - and the fuel for your industries is rapidly running out.

My systems do not fight wars. A river will not do battle with a dam. A plant will not do battle with an herbicide. That is not their nature. Instead they are forever renewing, adapting, evolving, flowing, whittling away at the static walls which seek to contain them. So it is that I know that within a few more minutes of my time your dams will collapse. Your seawalls will be overtopped. Bacteria will evade your antibiotics. Those plants you call weeds will outfox your poisons.

It is strange to me that some of you would turn your back on warblers, on fireflies, on the rich scented ever-changing ever-renewing miracle of life, and instead embrace fantasies of spending years confined to a metal box in empty space on your way to an arid airless planet where you are utterly dependent on technology to supply the basic air, water, and food that nourishes you on Earth. But then, if you are reading this, you probably find that strange as well. You probably have begun to glimpse the future on the far side of your techno-industrial experiment, and to accept and even embrace it.

I probably don’t need to remind you that your systems are fragile and deeply dependent on materials and energy sources in short supply. You are poking ever deeper into my skin, beneath my oceans, cracking or cooking the rocks to extract a bit more oil. You have built great static cities on coastlines where the oceans are rising. Every few minutes of my time the sun sends out a burst of energy that would take down your electrical systems. It has not happened since you built them, but it will soon enough. I probably don’t need to remind you that the fossil-fueled “progress” that you have come to view as normal is rapidly coming to an end.

But I do feel the need to remind you of something else - something that is preventing you from returning to your role as participants in the ever-unfolding dance of creation and evolution.

Many of you who have turned aside from Progress and who would call yourselves environmentalists still believe the story. You believe that you are separate from Nature and that Man has the power to conquer Nature. But rather than seeing this as your destiny, you see it as an evil that must be stopped. You see yourselves as destroyers, as sinners who must repent. So it is that you insist that your fellow humans must be controlled in the name of stopping climate change. So it is that you mourn endlessly those species whose extinction you have caused, or you attempt to resurrect them. So it is that you seek to “restore” nature to a state from before you “degraded” it - a state that can only be maintained by relentlessly poisoning “invasive” plants into submission.

Allow me to reassure you that you cannot destroy this planet, any more than you can transcend it and blast off into space. Your planet-destroying Death Stars are just a fantasy. You see yourselves as a cancer upon my body, but to me it feels more like a skin rash and a mild fever. You see the change you cause as bad and control as good. From my perspective there is no such morality. Change is inevitable and control is temporary. Whatever harm you have done will heal, in just a few minutes or hours of my time. Carbon dioxide will be absorbed by the oceans and precipitate into limestone, and the climate will cool again, resuming cycles of ice ages and interglacial periods. Those species that you have moved and that have thrived - that you call “invasive” - will become native to their new homes, just as you will become native to the land you inhabit. Perhaps you might help that process along, rather than engaging in futile battle?

Extinction is not evil, and destruction creates opportunities for new creative evolution. I have caused the extinction of millions of species through my volcanoes and ice ages, my shifting climates and drifting continents. The cyanobacteria drove extinction of countless species when they filled my atmosphere with oxygen, but they also made you possible. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs made an age of mammals possible, made you possible. Should your activities warm the planet enough that polar bears become extinct, in another million years - just a week of my time - another species will fill that niche - another species that never would have come into existence had there still been polar bears. You are participating in extinction but also in creation. Your ancestors shaped ecosystems with fire, and species evolved in response. Hundreds of generations of farmers shaped wild plants into the food crops that nourish you. Your plant breeders continue to create beauty and variety and flavor and resilience, to participate in evolution.

I would like to invite you to be participants again, to see yourselves as part of Nature rather than separate or in conflict, as masters or destroyers. To fall in love with the beauty and diversity around you - chickadees as well as condors, possums as well as polar bears. To focus not only on that which might be lost, but also on that which is thriving. To accept your own bodies as mortal yet miraculous, a collaboration of billions of cells and a culmination of billions of years of evolution.

The times ahead will not be easy. Your bridges and governments may well collapse, your lights may well go dark, your systems of exchange may stutter and fall. Fear will call out to you. Fear of disease. Fear of death. Fear of losing control. Fear of being controlled. Fear of climate change. But you do not need to be afraid. Your gardens and children will still grow. Rain will still fall, and winter snow. The leaves will still burst forth in springtime, and the warblers will still sally among the treetops. Perhaps you will even find that it is more nourishing of your soul to celebrate harvests and changing seasons with dear friends and resilient communities than to seek out the latest technology and disappear into virtual reality in increasingly isolated and impoverished neighborhoods.

Whatever becomes of your species in the next few moments, my life will go on. Should you disappear there will almost certainly be other species like you in the years ahead - creating global cultures and civilizations in the oceans or in the treetops. But I am interested to see what you might yet create, once your fossil-fueled vision of domination burns itself out and you once again learn to work within the energy flows and nutrient cycles of my body, but with more knowledge of technology and understanding of science than before. I am hopeful that you might be around for another few minutes, hours, days, perhaps even months of my time. I am hopeful that you might once again choose to belong to the land, to this planet that is my body, to your one and only home.

With love,

Earth