“Ravings” are a series of essays written by my sister Linda J. Clarke. It was her hope that people who read them would gain a “tenderness and appreciation for the animals and plants who share this world with us.” For more on Linda and her book, “On A Planet Sailing West”, click here … Linda Clarke.
I have learned through a secretly released report that a small vehicle from another galaxy recently floated through our solar system and briefly hovered over our planet. The ship’s computers confirmed that of the billions and billions of worlds populated with living organisms, ours is an average planet and our sun an average star.
Apparently, this unusual visit was prompted by a plaintive sub-space lament the ship’s computers picked up, from both our oceans and dry land masses, which seemed to be a collective expression of sorrow. These sophisticated instruments had detected such sounds before as their starship wandered from one sector to another in deep space. Mysterious whisperings, interpreted as haunting appeals or pleas, usually indicated a large-scale planet-wide extinction in process and were always investigated by the ship’s crew who were a deeply compassionate race and often acted upon an instinct to help an immature species in its natural progression for entry into the cosmic community.
A planet must have oceans, oxygen and billions of years of life in its geological and evolutionary history before sensor arrays detect the unmistakable grieving sound. Their data indicated that earth is a water world, the oceans covering over 71 percent of the planet’s surface, and that life here has flourished for several billion years, developing
intelligence and a technical civilization about midway during the approximate life span of the sun, a healthy yellow dwarf star. Currently, over ten million species live on earth, all direct descendants of organisms that lived 3.8 billion years ago. The crew also confirmed that in less than a hundred years, over half of these species will be extinct, particularly the largest, most intelligent, and most beautiful of the species.
Upon entering the earth’s atmosphere, they determined the cause of this worldwide anguish is the same as on other distressed planets: one dominant species in its headlong rush to build a scientific civilization, grows so aggressive and overpopulated and self-important that it takes over and occupies the habitat of the rest of the life forms who, finding themselves pushed aside and subdued, are unable to live as their nature intends them to live. Thus conquered, their movements restricted, these captive species unconsciously send out these sorrowful sounds on a psychic wave into the universe.
Very social family animals who travel in groups seem the most tragic, their lives the most interfered with. Wolves, for example, dolphins and whales, orangutans and gorillas, elephants are all tortured in one way or another. Some of these creatures, notably dolphins, whales and elephants have considerable intelligence and communicativeness but have not developed the capacity to create their own technology.
From the starship’s viewpoint, these creatures are worthy life forms who make our planet more valuable and interesting in the cosmic scheme as their characteristics and personalities have an intelligent integrity that has taken eons to evolve from mere instinct.
Humans, as the dominant species, possess a clever technological mind, an inventive, curious and ambitious brain that is social and literate, but our civilization is still in its infancy and our dependence on declining fossil fuels for energy still childlike. The certain disappearance within a century or less of oil, coal and gas, upon which our entire electrical grid depends, will be catastrophic. Without the sustaining help of electricity human progress as we’ve known it, is impossible. The computers noted that our recent attempt to create energy from nuclear fission has proved disastrous with hundreds of tons of radioactive dust blowing over the Pacific Ocean.
Most importantly, a spirit of responsible guardianship for the home planet is lacking in the majority of human beings. The computers recorded an extreme erosion of tropical rainforests, coral reefs, and temperate forests. A portion of the atmosphere is missing over one of the poles, and the oceans are badly damaged by overfishing, pollution and acid rain. Fish are the planet’s most valuable protein but few big ocean fish remain and smaller fish species are dying off in huge fish kills from lack of oxygenated water.
Even such a brief fly-by revealed we possess profound emotional deficiencies that make us indifferent and unresponsive to life here, even to the most charismatic life forms like tigers, panthers, blue fin tuna and whooping cranes. Some with great effort have transcended egocentric and human-centered limitations and become authentic cosmic citizens. However, they are generally helpless and unsupported. Our current post-capitalistic system, with its disinterest in anything but the well-being of multinational corporations, portends a violent end to intelligent life.
It was also noted that our species possesses a kind of reckless greed which could be the result of the short span of time intelligent life has been here, compared to astronomical and geological time. Fortunately, we are quite far away from the populated galactic centers so our limitations are not yet dangerous to other star systems. This kind of quarantine is providential. The algorithms of one computer onboard even concluded human beings and all remaining wildlife will be living on an unbearably hot, almost lifeless and radioactively damaged planet by the end of the century.
With their computers still whizzing and collecting infinite terabytes of information to be stored away, the small ship exited our solar system and moved on to another quadrant of the galaxy. The crew’s somber conclusion: we will not survive long enough to become a truly advanced civilization. Because our planet is supremely beautiful even in its present state of deterioration, in a few hundred years, another crew will fly by again to observe either our extinction or further evolution. Self-destruction is more than probable. A summary of this visit perfectly translated into English, Hindi, Mandarin, and Spanish was unobtrusively released by the spaceship’s computers to Wikileaks as a courtesy.
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Strangely, about the same time I read about this sensational visit, I dreamed that I was visiting a large male polar bear somewhere on an ice floe in the frozen Arctic Sea. In grumbles and hoarse murmurs, he communicated that seals are hard to find now that the ice floes are disappearing. Recently, he had met up with another much fatter male who has begun preying on females and their cubs, but he just does not have the heart to do such a thing.
His most expressive growls indicated to me that the Arctic, which so many have found so dismal, is to this elderly fellow an unforgettable paradise. He enjoys the howling arias of the wolf families at night and the thunderous drumming of caribou hoof beats shaking the ground as a herd flees into the darkness; and he loves the damp smell of the hairy musk oxen rising up from the hidden valleys and the daily contact with seabirds, seal and fish and the grinding and scraping and squeaking of the pack ice. He loves the tremendous din of huge walrus communities creating pandemonium near the coast. Three-foot tall Arctic hares hop away like small white kangaroos from his sudden stealthy shadow.
From what I can tell, in this exotic backdrop he has grown into an improbably serene and amiable creature, free to be himself, no longer guided solely by his appetite, though I suspect he doesn’t have the opportunity to agonize over good and bad too frequently. In the three months of constant daylight, when the sun moves in a small half circle around the horizon, his normal habit is to trudge solemnly mile after mile across the ice under a bright sunny sky, exploring his vast world with admiration. In the three months of constant darkness, he naps a good deal in his snow cave (polar bears are world-class sleepers) and contemplates shooting stars and the aurora borealis and other indefinable joys and pleasures of solitude.
Despite being a venerable twenty-three years old, he can still hike mile after mile on the remaining ice and swim in frigid water between ice floes and haul up seals from their breathing holes whenever he finds one. Ambling confidently on his own in the cold up and down the ice ridges toward a molten gold and emerald sunset, he has always been filled with joy and gratitude for the stark beauty around him.
But lately, he has been troubled. The top layer of ice on the Arctic sea where he managed his lengthy hikes was now always a mixture of water and slush and his feet were suffering from this new wet world and strange blisters were appearing on the tough soles of his paws. Then he discovered his mate of many years and their latest two cubs washed up on the shore of Davis Strait separating the Greenland ice cap from Baffin Island, apparently drowned, as there was not a mark on any of their sodden bodies. He experienced a strange discontent when he turned over their stiff furry bodies to look them curiously in the face. Something about the cubs’ small frozen black noses. They should not be dead.
During the season of long black nights and wintry cold, exhilarated by the intensely bright fresh air, he had watched the stars tirelessly. His mate must have been drowsing on an ice floe with the two cubs when a fast current began dispersing the ice. A storm must have come in, slapping the seas against their small island and breaking it into pieces. The mother must have slid into the water and started swimming toward a shore she could not see, followed by the heroically striving cubs who would have followed their mother into hell and back. They all swam diligently through the four-foot swells, through driving sleet and spray, but for some unknown reason found no other ice floes. Padded with less fat than their mother, the cubs were soon cold.
His mate would have turned to try and save the cubs. For heartbreaking minutes, they would have all clung together in the rough water. The cubs probably tried to clamber on their mother’s wide back. Exhausted, they couldn’t hold on and finally, panting and choking and sneezing in the relentless waves, she could not bear their weight.
Of all the creatures on this planet, the female polar bear has always been the fiercest personification of protective motherhood. She had provided these cubs with food for two years; she had driven off strange males who would do them harm; she had curled up around them in blizzards; she had called them back if they recklessly wandered off. She had anticipated every danger except that her fluffy white darlings, so promising and well-behaved, would drown, that the vast ice sheet at the center of their home, normally so substantial and thick, would melt and break up and change faster than anywhere else on the planet.
I woke up suddenly in my lounge chair in the back yard, a wasp in my face. The last image I had in my mind was of the disconsolate polar bear’s massive head with its Roman nose, bent over, almost touching his blistered paws, asleep. I sat there in my chair in the sun for a long time staring at a perfect red hibiscus flower still clinging to its bush. I was warm and disoriented. The yellow pollen and wavering stamen seemed to shout: that polar bear’s life is worthy! And then it shriveled up. Later, I noticed the plainspoken hibiscus had dropped to the ground, its ferocious red petals limp and defeated after their outburst. Everything had changed. My favorite cheery mockingbird had become unaccountably grumpy and glared at me with skepticism as if I was not to be trusted and could poison the birdbath. Even the orange butterflies seemed to float away from me with contempt, no doubt still upset I had killed so many of their caterpillars last year while they were eating the leaves off the passionflowers. The ambrosial jasmine vine pulled and tangled in my hair with a certain irritability and distaste. For some reason, I was resented and unwelcome in my own back yard.
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