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I should be over at the Earth Summit, listening to all the talk about sustainable development. Serious talk by serious people, who've come here from the world over to see if we humans can treat the earth as if we intended to stay. But, I'm not there this morning. I'm sitting instead on some gnarled old trees in the middle of the Cradle of Humankind. |
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Bill Moyers
From Johannesberg on the Future of the Planet
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The Cradle of Humankind is an hour from Johannesburg, out in the vastness of South Africa, where the remains of some of our earliest ancestors have been found. No one is talking here. Only the wind breaks my reverie. The tree I'm sitting under is a mere 800 years old, quite young for these parts. People have been sitting under this tree long before Christopher Columbus sailed for east India. Right over there, surrounded by tall brown grass, and dotted with the spore of hyena and jackal and the speckled feathers of wild guinea hens, are acre after acre of rocks that go back one or two billion years, more or less, and the fossils of flora and fauna said to be a million years old. And the remains of human beings, the locals tell us have been here at least 100 thousand years.
In a cave down the road, they've identified parts of 600 different individuals. No one knows how they all got here. I imagine them attending the very first earth summit and the roof caving in. Mother Nature always has the last word in these things. I'm sitting here, pondering my earliest kinfolk and wondering if it isn't all futile, this talk of saving the human race. What if we humans are not the crown of creation? What if it's affection for the snail darter that causes the cosmic heart to beat a little faster? Or those low brown hills over there, smooth and round like a woman's breast? What if the peace of mind, they inspire matters more to the maker than, say, those monstrous starter castles popping up all over New Jersey, where I live?
The angels summoned to earth by the playwright Tony Kushner said humans are a cancer on the planet. Maybe so, there will soon be 9 billion of us, and we're eating the earth up, fighting over it's shrinking water supply, cutting down the forest, pouring so much stuff into the atmosphere that it keeps falling back on us, like dandruff. Who says we humans are the be-all and end-all?
Verdune in the psalm, the missing Armenians, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the little girl aflame with made-in-America napalm, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, Srebrenica, the 11th of September … I wonder what those ancestors, whose ghosts surround me right now, would say about our ascent, if that's the word, from the Cradle of Humankind. We've gone from dodging the hyena and jackal to dodging bullets and hijacked aircraft, and the truth about what we're doing to our life support system. Sitting here, I can't help wondering if the Earth won't return one day to the silence of the cradle where it all began. I don't fancy that. I have four grandchildren who deserve a future, but it could happen, to all 9 billion of us, if the talk is just talk.
Tell us what you think.
State of the Earth Report
Summit Transcript
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