My work week spilled into the weekend and yesterday I found myself doing some work on a property in Miami. It was the last place I would have expected something natural that would be worth taking a picture of. But the parking island had the stump of what used to be a palm tree and the two attached images are what I got.
“Life finds a way†is what Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park when trying to explain how Mother Nature evolves over everything to continue with the living and breathing of this wonderful planet we are on. And indeed she does. I know these aren’t the most exciting or thrilling pics you have ever seen, but they capture a little microcosm of life. Within the rotting base of the tree sprung a collection of new life, reminiscent perhaps of Fern Gulley (another early nineties movie) and I found myself staring into it.
I read recent reports that talked about how scientists believe it will take the earth about ten million years to recover from the human species once we are extinct. And they wrote that report to make us feel that ten million years is a lot of time … but this planet has been around for 4.3 billion years. So we are just a tiny blemish in the timeline to Mother Nature. Apparently the ten million years is how long it would take to restore evolution to where it was before us, even if we caused mass extinction of most species.
Prior mass extinctions have occurred, most notably the ice-age which wiped out the dinosaurs. So, humanity isn’t the first disaster to befall the earth and probably won’t be the last.
Regeneration is a wondrous thing … just look at the little world that is coming alive in the base of that one tree trunk. One tree trunk on a shopping center. On a shopping center in the middle of a huge urban development. One of many thousands of such developments across what we know as America.
Makes me pause and think about what this land mass looked like before humans descended from the trees.
As much as we see ourselves as masters of our domain, isn’t it sad to think that, looking back from the distant future, Mother Nature will view us only as one of several extinction events from which she had to recover?
It’s a sobering thought …
Have a thoughtful week!
