from Scotland on Sunday, 31 May 1992
First of all, you have to understand her insignificance. Imagine a sandy beach, millions upon millions of tiny grains resting randomly each on the other. Remember that each grain is a collection of a billion patterned atoms, and try and focus on a single atom in relation to the whole beach.
To see the world in a grain of sand is to see her as she really is. Just one of countless millions of stars and planets hurtling through the infinite void of space, balls of fire and lumps of rock destined for no more than a few moments flickering existence in the unimaginable reaches of time.
Yet, in this solar system, at this time, she has acquired some significance. Because of an accident of birth, she has been playing host to a strange and wondrous creation known as life. This has distinguished her from many of her fellow planets. It could also herald her demise.
Let us call her Mother Earth. It is not her only name, but it is the one that best conveys her nature and presumes her sex. It suggests she is the source of life. It implies she is kindly, considerate and slow to wrath. It is a name that offers consolation.
She weighs about 6,000 million million million tonnes, is roughly spherical in shape, with a radius at the equator of 6,378 kilometres. She is apparently locked into unending motion. She spins about her axis once a day and orbits around a burning star called the sun once a year. The whole solar system of which she is part is also moving fast through space, although where it is heading is not entirely clear.
Like any respectable planet, she has her own moon which circles around her, and, along with the sun, tugs her oceans. On the half of the globe that at any one time is hidden from the sun, the moon can be seen in various shapes along with the far distant lights of millions of other galaxies. Viewed from space, Mother Earth looks beautiful and blue.
There is dispute about her age. Some put it at five and a half billion years, whilst others say that she is only 4.5 or 4.6 billion years old. Either way, it is a very short time in eternity, and a very long time if measured in earthly rotations.
There is similar uncertainty about the circumstances of her birth, though they are believed to have been violent. One theory is that a cataclysmic explosion of the universe created the sun, from which a vast disk of dust and gas spun off. Over millions of years, billions of collisions between sticky particles caused the formation of larger and larger lumps of molten rock, nine of which eventually became planets orbiting the sun.
The first few thousand millenia of Mother Earth’s existence were dominated by huge volcanoes, frequent earthquakes and heavy showers of meteorites. But the crust forming around her liquid core was gradually able to harden and stabilise, so that it is now 30 kilometres thick under land masses. The gases swirling around above the crust began to form an atmosphere, which eventually enabled water vapour to condense and fall as rain.
Between one and two billion years after she was first formed, recognisable oceans and mountains appeared. At some indefinable, miraculous, point tiny cells in the oceans evolved the ability to divide into two, thereby enabling the reproduction of life. The cells were probably a form of bacteria like algae and the first to practice the life-giving process of photosynthesis, which converts sunlight into energy for growth.
From this primordial slime, over the next few billion years, came all other forms of life: fishes, plants, trees, reptiles, birds and, eventually, mammals, each more complex, more diverse, more extraordinary than those that came before. One two-legged mammal in particular developed pretensions towards intelligence and glimmerings of self-consciousness.
It is important to get a grasp of the timescale here. One of humankind’s first attempts to understand its own genesis suggested that the creation of Mother Earth by a mythical super-being known as God took six days. Accepting the metaphor, it becomes possible to plot out the major events in Mother Earth’s life.
The turbulent formation of matter takes all day Monday. Sometime around noon on Tuesday emerge the first indications of simple cellular life. It takes the rest of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for life to develop the beginnings of its infinite variety. It is not until four o’clock on Saturday, the last day of creation, that dinosaurs start stomping about. By nine o’clock that evening, they have disappeared.
At three minutes to midnight, human beings make their first appearance. A quarter of a second before midnight, a long-haired man is crucified on a cross. One fortieth of a second before midnight, comes the industrial revolution. In the last hundredth of the last second the atom is split in the sky over Hiroshima.
In other words all the experiences, all the memories and all the dreams of any human being alive today can encompass no more than the tiniest split second of Mother Earth’s history. In geological terms, the human race amounts to no more than a thin sliver of strata at the top of a huge face of rock.
Despite this perspective - or perhaps because of it - human beings have evolved an almighty arrogance. They have formulated doctrines which presume dominion over Mother Earth. They have torn materials from her crust, laid waste her massive forests and poisoned her air and water. They have done all this for themselves, without much thought for the consequences, without much thought for the future. They have further complicated the situation by dividing their spoils in a hopelessly unequal way.
Not surprisingly, this all bothers Mother Earth. Toxic pollution from industry can be detected in almost every one of her hugely varied environments. Chlorine-based chemicals used by humankind have started to eat away the layer of ozone that blankets her upper atmosphere. The vast amounts of carbon dioxide released into the air by human fires are subtly and irrevocably altering her climate.
Up to a quarter of her ten million species are threatened with extinction over the next three decades. Many of her most weird and wonderful creatures have already disappeared. Yet her human population has leapt from 3.6 billion to 5.4 billion over the last 20 years, and is now growing by nearly a hundred million a year.
It is self-evident - or should be - that her natural flows and resources do not possess an infinite capacity for sustaining and absorbing life. It is conceivable that humankind’s overweening ambition and greed has already stretched her limits of tolerance beyond endurance. It is beyond dispute that - sooner or later - Mother Earth’s human life support system is going to break down.
There are those amongst humanity who worry about such things and try to prevent them. Most of the world’s leaders are getting together over the next two weeks in Rio to try and agree ways of protecting Mother Earth. It may do some good. But it is unlikely to lead to the kind of radical revolution in human thinking that is now required.
Mother Earth’s own reaction to Rio will be muted. None of the thousands of fine-sounding words to which ministers will attach their names will make much real difference to her problems. If solutions are to be found, she will have to find them herself.
There is a belief, inspired by the theory of Gaia put forward by the British scientist, James Lovelock, that whatever happens Mother Earth will always recover. Like a giant, resilient and hugely complex living organism, she is said to be equipped with an infinite variety of self-adjusting mechanisms which will enable her to adapt to ever-changing circumstances.
By this means, it is hoped, life on earth will be preserved. Unfortunately, it is by no means certain that the life form presumptuously labelled homo sapiens will be included. One of Mother Earth’s self-preservation techniques could involve the extinction of the human race. To protect herself from further harm, she could engineer a fatal combination of wars, famines and diseases.
Mother Earth’s closest human friends all admit privately to this fear. They tend to view humanity not as the most sophisticated result of millions of years of evolution, but as a pestilence, a cancer. The British writer, John Fowles, compares the human race to a “ravenous self-destroying horde of rats” that has been multiplying “like an uncontrolled virus”.
The virus is perhaps the best analogy. It helps us understand Mother Earth’s latest symptoms. The carbon dioxide that has been making her feel weary and causing her joints to ache. The chlorine that has started her head pounding. The depression that will inevitably ensue, making her sick at heart.
Then only one important question will remain. Will the virus kill her? Or will she rise up and kill the virus?
