An alternative hypothesis
Ξ October 6th, 2006 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Law, Environment, Books, People |
One reason for saving the wilderness is very simple even if its philosophically impossible to substantiate, I suppose, and that is that wilderness is worth saving for its own sake. Not for human benefit or pleasure, but simply for its own existence. In other words, I’m saying that wild things and wild places have a right to exist and continue existing with no relation to human wishes. I say that bees, birds, animals, snakes, buzzerds, bugs, whatever, have a legal and moral right to continue. Even rocks have the moral right to continue being rocks. The Book of Genesis was wrong. Man was not put here to have dominion over all things. That’s Woman’s function. The Earth was here first, and all these living things before us. We are the newcomers, the late arrivals in the evolutionary pageant. Ofcourse, we, too, are products of the process. We also belong on this planet no matter how alien we may sometimes feel or often behave. We too have a right to exist here. But there’s not enough evidence to support the common and prevailing human belief that we have a right to expand our numbers indefinitely and to exploit the Earth indefinitely for our own purpose alone, at the expense of other living things and non-living things. How about this?
Rocks have rights, I’ve said. Is it not possible that rocks, hills and mountains, and the great physical body of the Earth itself may enjoy a sentience, a form of consciousness which we human cannot perceive only because of the vastly different time scales involved? For example, the mind of a mountain may be as powerful and profound as that of Buddha, Plato, Spinoza, Whitehead and Einstein. Say that a mountain takes 5,000,000 of our human or solar years to produce a single thought. But what a grand thought that single thought must be. If only we could tune in on it.
The classic philosophers of both east and west have tried for 5,000 years more or less to convince us that Mind is the basic reality, maybe the only reality and that our bodies, the Earth and the entire universe is no more than a though in the mind of God. But consider an alternative hypothesis.
That Buddha, Plato, Einstein and we are thoughts in the minds of mountains, or that all of humanity is a long, long thought in the mind of the Earth. That we are the means by which the Earth, and perhaps the universe becomes conscious of itself.
I tell you that God, if there is a god, may be the end, not the origin of this process. if so, then our relationship to the Earth is something like that of our minds to our bodies. They are interdependent. We cannot exploit or abuse our bodies without peril to our mental health and our survival.
We have definitely seen some mindless bodies dancing around us, but we have yet to observe a disembodied mind. At least I haven’t seen any. And as mind is to body, so is humanity to Earth. We cannot dishonor one without dishonoring and destroying ourselves.
Ed Abbey speach at St. John’s College, Santa Fe 1975
From adventures with ED by Jack Loeffler
