Earth's apoptosis

Isn’t it wild to think

How we’re just water and carbon and some other little pieces

But how all those little pieces came from

A living rock

Hurtling through space?

Just look at the surface,

Our surface,

Earth's surface,

Teeming with trillions of creatures--

Like cells

Some of those living things are small, and squiggly. Some of them swim and some of them buzz

And some of them are us

You and I

Cling to life on this space rock,

We cluster like lichen and moss

But this stone doesn't roll

It fucking orbits

When parts of the stone— atoms and molecules— coalesce to form algae or bugs, or humankind,

Or any

Of the trillions

of Earth's creatures

Aren’t these still

Part

Of

The Earth?

Aren’t we all

—lichens and humans alike—

Just pieces of the planet?

We are not simply ON the earth

We ARE the Earth.

Some Little Portion of it anyway.

This piece of earth feels fear and and this piece of earth feels greed.

And over there, another piece of earth feels altruism, or love or whatever you want to call it:

This piece feels peace

***

Isn’t it sad how the earth— now imbued with hundreds of billions of individual instances of life— can know itself...

But

The “smartest” species among these pieces cannot stop harming the whole?

We are of the earth, we are the earth, but we are not for the earth

Some see humanity as a parasite, taking too much too fast and throwing ourselves-- the earth— out of balance.

But if we’re to think again

Of the earth as an organism, and all its creatures as cells, then we aren’t parasites at all

Because we didn't come from outside

So

Perhaps

We

Are

A diseased part of the whole

A break down, within the system

Because we cannot cooperate with our own

Planetary

Ecological

Body

Does that make us

A

Cluster of cells,

Growing out of control?

Are we to the planet what cancer is to us?

We crowd the system

We disrupt the system

We impair the system

And we trigger the immune response

Climate change is our countdown

Our final admonishment

And we'd better listen

For Mother has no concept of mercy

We, diseased pieces, we are more fragile than the whole—

We pollute the body

We disrupt homeostasis

We bring on the purging fever

Warming our globe--

Our only home

Until

One day

This planetary body will become

Inhospitable

To us

Our planetary body imposes its own limits

On the pieces that grow too fast and take too much

If we are earth’s cancer, we are also the cure— self-limiting by our own laughable attempt at limitless growth

We metastasize

And

We trigger Earth's apoptosis

Capitalism is not noble, but it is Icarian

And the fall will not be majestic

But it will be spectacular

The Garbage Island will not float forever

Eventually, we shall sink