Mother is Pissed

The Planet Strikes Back

In his 2010 book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, environmental scholar and activist Bill McKibben writes of a planet so devastated by global warming that it's no longer recognizable as the Earth we once inhabited. This is a planet, he predicts, of "melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat." Altered as it is from the world in which human civilization was born and thrived, it needs a new name—so he gave it that extra "a" in "Eaarth."


The Eaarth that McKibben describes is a victim, a casualty of humankind's unrestrained consumption of resources and its heedless emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases. True, this Eaarth will cause pain and suffering to humans as sea levels rise and croplands wither, but as he portrays it, it is essentially a victim of human rapaciousness.


With all due respect to McKibben's vision, let me offer another perspective on his (and our) Eaarth: as a powerful actor in its own right and as an avenger, rather than simply victim.


Eaarth is now responding to humanity's depredations in a similar way: by warming the atmosphere, taking carbon from the air and depositing it in the ocean, increasing rainfall in some areas and decreasing it elsewhere, and in other ways compensating for the massive atmospheric infusion of harmful human emissions.


But what Eaarth does to protect itself from human intervention is unlikely to prove beneficial for human societies. As the planet warms and glaciers melt, sea levels will rise, inundating coastal areas, destroying cities, and flooding low-lying croplands. Drought will become endemic in many once-productive farming areas, reducing food supplies for hundreds of millions of people. Many plant and animal species that are key to human livelihoods, including various species of trees, food crops, and fish, will prove incapable of adjusting to these climate changes and so cease to exist. Humans may—and again I emphasize that may—prove more successful at adapting to the crisis of global warming than such species, but in the process, multitudes are likely to die of starvation, disease, and attendant warfare.


Bill McKibben is right: we no longer live on the "cozy, taken-for-granted" planet formerly known as Earth. We inhabit a new place, already changed dramatically by the intervention of humankind. But we are not acting upon a passive, impotent entity unable to defend itself against human transgression. Sad to say, we will learn to our dismay of the immense powers available to Eaarth, the Avenger.

Mother Earth/Gaia is truly not a passive victim. Reminds me of...

I would be pissed at what we do to the planet. I would also be pissed if someone served me Chiffon margarine (it was a staple in mt parent's fridge - sorry to say).