Dear Humans,
Nature is both generous and cruel.
I should know.
I have endured a fiery birth and aeons of barren solitude.
I have had fecund periods when my lands and seas have teemed with the joy of life.
I have a deep attachment to the life I nurture, but I know that I will outlive all the species that are born to me.
Better-equipped ones will supplant some. Others will go extinct as catastrophe strikes. I had a particular attachment to the dinosaurs but could only watch mutely as the meteor hit.
I am deeply attached to you too. I love your ingenuity and your boundless imagination.
You have invented civilization, language, art, science and even God! Your possibilities are immense. You dream of being immortal as a race even as you steadily increase the span of each individual life.
However, going by experience, I would be sceptical of your species achieving immortality as long as I am your only home. Sooner or later, disaster will strike, and this home will no longer be yours. So your only shot at immortality is if you become a space-faring race and make multiple planets across the galaxy your home. And if you exist long enough here, you have the potential to do so.
I write to you to express dismay at what you have done over the past 150 years or so. I have had countless species come and go, but none have committed suicide. But to my dismay, you are pretty close to doing so.
In polluting my air, soil and water at a reckless pace, you are not harming me but yourselves. I measure time in terms of epochs, and the change you have wrought on my body is but a passing sickness. But, on the other hand, you measure time in decades and centuries, and if you don't wake up soon, your time with me is measured.
You have realized the danger, but you are yet to wake up to it as a species. As a result, for all your intelligence, or perhaps because of it, you have a remarkable capacity to delude yourself.
Your scientists have built careers theorizing about climate change. Your engineers have come up with solutions in the realm of fantasy. Your politicians regularly hold talkfests.
But life goes on as usual. For all the talk about mitigation and adoption, little has changed. You act as if you are the only species to inhabit me.No thought for the countless others who do you no harm. No consideration even for your future generations. Your species still consumes like there is no tomorrow. And soon enough, if you continue to do so, there will be none.
You do not have the time to develop remarkable new technologies to ward off the impending disaster. You have no time to become a space-faring species.
You can do all that in the future if you act now with what you have in hand. Starting now, your lifestyles and the organization of your societies will need a paradigmatic change. The more developed a nation and culture, the greater the change and deeper the pain it will experience. That goes against the grain of the realpolitik of your civilization, but you have no choice.
I write to you because I love you and see the potential in you to be the enduring symbol of my fecundity and my ambassadors to the universe at large. If you will yourself to extinction, I will be very disappointed. However, my disappointment will fade as my world goes on, and you become only a distant memory. However, I would rather that I become a distant memory with your species than your species become a distant memory with me. You can do that. You need only to give yourself enough time.
Love
Mother Earth.
