Sunday Scribblings - "The future of the planet"

Who can predict the future of the planet? Its end has been forecast for thousands of years now by doomsayers, but it’s still going pretty strong. Jet-setting eco-warriors like Al Gore pride themselves on pointing out exactly how badly we’re doing, and how much worse we are going to do unless we all stop travelling by air or anyhow else that requires fossil fuels, give up using disposable nappies, plastic bags, electricity, water, fertilisers (unless they’ve been personally passed by said eco-warriors, perhaps? to rephrase an old joke) and everything else that makes the modern world what it is. And before anybody starts throwing personally passed fertiliser on my house, let me hasten to add that I do my bit by recycling, using organically grown things, etc. It’s just that I don’t believe that what I do is going to have any effect overall on the future of the world.

My motto is que sera sera. What will be WILL be, no matter what we do now. The most anybody can do is the best they can do or are willing to do. It’s like religion – there are various levels of belief and action. There are those who are fanatical about it. There are those who believe, but do so in private (my favourites). There are those who don’t believe, but pretend to do so to conform, or for worse self-aggrandising reasons. There are those who don’t believe, and say so loudly and often (which is very nearly as bad as the fanatics). And finally, there are those who don’t believe, and do so for the most part without shoving their disbelief or unbelief down everybody’s throats. Most of the time, I belong to this last group. (It’s only since this blog that I’ve moved up to the last but one category! Blame the blog.)

So, do I believe that the world is coming to an end? Yeah, I do - but in its own time. All the frantic scrabbling of little human creatures (in the larger scheme of things), who have an ego all out of proportion to their importance, isn’t going to make a great deal of difference one way or the other to the future of the world.

You could believe that the world is going to hell in a petrol-driven handcart (is that possible?), and live a life that’s totally eco-friendly and totally lacking in modern comfort, in the belief that it will slow down that handcart… but a whacking big meteor could wipe out Earth and all life on it completely randomly at any time. Not in a million billion years, but at any time. And there wont be anything that anybody will be able to do about it.

And me, since I know that life is equally random, I’d rather live my life as best I can, as decently as I can, with as much comfort and luxury as I can afford, seeing as many different things in this world as possible, and with as much joy as possible.

Because you see, when I die, my world dies with me.