CONSERVING OUR NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Beyond civilization we will conserve, share, beautify and, if possible, improve the earth, which is our physical base of operations.

The earth is an irregular sphere, one of a number of planets circling the sun, from which we get light, heat and radiation.  The earth has a shell or crust made of various minerals.  Two-thirds of its surface is water of various depths up to six miles.  Above the surface is an atmosphere, some twenty miles thick, composed of various gases, dust particles and water vapor.  Operating throughout the earth there are vibrations of different wave lengths.

As a whole the earth is a going concern that carries out its daily, seasonal, yearly business of providing a home for an immense variety of forces; for living forms, in the earth, on the earth, in the water and in the air.  The earth and its attributes are the common host or mother of us all.

Some of earth’s inhabitants are “alive”.  Many of the living forms move about—­and reproduce themselves, passing through a life cycle from birth to death.

Some among the living forms cluster together into more or less permanent groups which develop social relationships including communities in which individuals are born, live and die.

Speaking in metaphors, the sun is the common father of us all, providing us with light and heat, the earth is the common mother of us all, providing us with sustenance.  We living beings, progeny of sun and earth, pass through a span or cycle of earthly existence—­helping one another, ignoring one another, jostling one another, annoying and even killing and devouring one another.

This is a roundabout way of saying that nature, human beings and human society are part and parcel of a total relationship which includes the planet earth, the solar system and an immense range of celestia which includes minute particles of celestial dust, like our earth, and majestic assemblies of celestial notables like the Island Universe of which we are unnumbered and barely noticed particles.

At some point in this vast assemblage, actually before the assemblage came into existence, there were responsible, animating forces in play.  There was also the responsibility for the use or exercise of the operating forces.  We humans are a product of those forces.  We also share in their functioning.  Consequently we share in the responsibility which is associated with their exercise.

It is the task of philosophy to designate the responsibility; to describe it, measure it and perhaps to assign it.  At any rate, we find ourselves in a position where certain things are expected of us, perhaps even required of us as members of the human family and/or of the human family as a functioning whole.

It is entirely possible that, instead of overlooking, ignoring, bickering, quarreling and periodically maiming and killing each other wholesale, we humans should be devoting our energies, emotions, thoughts and plans to furthering the larger purpose of which the earth and its inhabitants are small segments.  In a word, that we humans should be acting as a responsible part of a functioning whole engaged in the vast enterprise of being and becoming.