The week before last, walking through my Alma Mater in Dublin, I came across a sculpture that was at once stunning but woefully out of place.
It was a gorgeous golden sphere by an Italian Sculpture that reeked of modern symbolism but clearly didn’t belong in a university whose roots (and buildings) extended back to the late 1500’s.
There is only one picture in this blog and here it is:
According to the artist, the symbolism is a reflection of how this planet is both beautiful and complex, yet is alarmingly fragile.
I was happy with the shot as it showed the reflections of the skies and of the nearby building, yet neither took from the artwork itself but rather enhanced it.
It was really only this morning that I was looking back through images from my trip and I came across it and thought on how the wonderful message from the artist is lost because the piece itself is so beautiful.
I have written many times about how fragile our environment is and how we humans have chosen to destroy it for profit. I have spoken about how the greed and selfishness of the few is aided by the apathy of the many and how the world we all live upon suffers as a result.
So, I won’t go into all that again.
But what I will say is that when we soften messages of destruction and doom, we enable the nay-sayers and their masters, who profit to our detriment.
These profiteers view only the short term impacts of what they do (enriching themselves) and ignore the long term impacts. But parasites rarely think of their host when they suck the life out of it.
They don’t understand that when the host dies, they die too.
Some parasites have adapted to try to move from one host to another and prolong their miserable existence. And the ideas that many of these most powerful leaders have, to set up off-earth colonies in space stations or other planets, bear a startling resemblance to these advanced parasites.
The complexities of setting up a new host in space are incredibly more difficult than the alternative, which would be to save the planet we are living on and respect that we are only inhabitants, not owners.
But saving the planet would requires the greedy ones to be less so and the apathetic hordes to care more.
In all truth, neither is likely to happen. And one day this beautiful planet will give up the ghost on us.
As parasites, we are already at almost twice the number than this host can sustain. Estimates are that the natural resources of this planet, if managed properly could sustain life for about 4 billion humans but we now number almost 8 Billion.
An intelligent parasite would start to prune back the numbers to try to get our numbers down to a sustainable level but we race to have more babies and even legislate against those that might want to not have one.
And yet we happily believe that humans are the planet most intelligent life form.
Paraphrasing the Dunning-Kruger effect states it simply: Stupid people don’t understand how stupid they actually are.
… just a thought.