What a Wonderful World…
…it would be without us.
I watch a lot of nature and wildlife programmes. They’re real balm to the headlong madness of living as a human on this planet in 2024. I just watched a short series, following a presenter travelling round Argentina and Chile. Camera shots swooping down to the tip of Patagonia to the ocean, beyond which is Antarctica, Magellan penguins on the beach, then back up through fertile farmlands to the deserts of Chile and the reaches of the dense Amazon forest, it was stunning. And that was just a random programme I watched recently. There are thousands of others on the subject of the incredible beauty and diversity of our planet. Take the Attenborough output, forever a library of extraordinary footage and facts about our natural world. All the world’s writers could forever eulogise about the natural world surrounding us, so I won’t even attempt to portray its utter breathtaking beauty. Assume and imagine several paragraphs here describing spectacular images from all over the world, and even then you won’t have scratched the surface of the subject. It is endless beauty.
But nowadays, watching wildlife and nature programmes, there’s a problem. I see the beauty, but of course I know what Man is doing to destroy it, everywhere. As we all are, I’m increasingly aware of the darkness behind the beauty, the threat of my species throttling the life out of this wonderful world and stamping on the remains. There are several great short animations by Steve Cutts depicting this in different ways, and they’re all so true, or will be soon. I’m increasingly badly affected when looking at nature, on the telly or up close in real life (which is always astounding, don’t you think? Animals actually do what we’re told they do!), and increasingly resentful of my own species and its capabilities. Nowadays I see wildlife and Man as white and black. Or vivid, dramatic, exciting colour vs. our own grey drudgery and depravity.
And the driving force behind the desecration, it seems to me, is greed. Money. We’re insatiable, and allow nothing to get in the way of making a buck. We destroy the natural materials of the world to create a material world for ourselves. And the fuel on the ever-flourishing fire of the destruction is the fragility, the ego and paranoia of our leaders. Almost all men, by the way, who in their mindless lust for power, whatever that is, will not yield to anyone – that would be seen as weakness, not global-friendly sense and futuristic thinking – even to the point where they have at their disposal weapons that if used, will kill us all.
And right there, ladies and gentlemen, is the point. Man, the most advanced species on Earth, will in his accelerating and short-term greed finally actually do the planet a favour by self-annihilation. The rollercoaster of Man’s selfish ambition will hurtle into the bumpers. And it will be a wonderful world again, but this time without us in it to spoil everything. How that fits in with Darwinism is ironic; perfect in a way. As I said earlier, though this time in a more convoluted way, it is endless beauty.
The maniacs, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are perhaps the ones most prominent in a maniacal world but there are many, many more. In Britain we have plenty of our own Kings of Greed, politicians whose self-interest tramples on that of anyone else, and epitomised by the despicable and utterly honourless Johnson. Trump isn’t in power yet (June 2024) but he could well be from November. And I cannot possibly blame just our leaders, because in some cases (only some) they’re our leaders because we asked them to be. We’re to blame: Man.
At the time of writing it’s getting like the 1980s again, the height of the Cold War. There are several major and highly dangerous wars going on right now. And with Mr. Trump the Republican candidate in the November U.S. election, things are starting to look very scary for us all again. If he gets elected again, which is possible in a country as jingoistic and gun-totin’ as America, we’ll all be plunged back into the dark fear and uncertainty of the 1980s. I really think that his ego is capable of pressing the button. He’ll regret not having done it in his first term of office; I bet his fingers are twitching already.
The 1980s were scary, and I think we all went about our lives with this fear at the back of our minds, like a black atomic mushroom cloud, distant but lurking, a Mordor to which we were all being drawn. It was forever there, a restrictive terror making everything slightly unreal, disabling and distorting everyday life globally and entirely. But we lived through it. So far. Why don’t I just put it out there and prophesy that we will all become smithereens in 2028.
Here’s an extract from an article by Brian J. Morra on the extreme paranoia of the 1980s, and an amazingly little-known moment in history, which took place in 1983, and which could very easily have been the last moment for all of us. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world was almost certainly saved by the actions of one single man, Vasily Arkhipov, who refused to launch a torpedo strike on an American fleet. In 1983, communication between the West and East had broken down. There was extreme distrust on both sides, with Ronald Reagan at the helm in America, and Yuri Andropov in Russia.
Weeks later, early on the morning of Sept. 27, the USSR’s National Missile Defense Center received warnings from its new missile detection satellites that the United States had launched intercontinental ballistic missiles from Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D. (one source cites F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.). The Soviet watch commander that night, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov of the Air Defense Forces, was a signal processing engineer—not a typical watch stander—and he was subbing for a sick comrade. Petrov possessed unique knowledge of the strengths and flaws in the Soviets’ new satellite warning system, and assessed that the launch reports—which came in several, harrowing waves—must be false alarms. Petrov advised his leadership against a retaliatory attack.
Petrov—the accidental watch commander—was truly the right man in the right place at the right time. It took Soviet technical experts months to determine what went wrong that night. Eventually, they concluded that a highly unusual set of atmospheric conditions over the northern tier of the United States caused sunlight to be reflected off high clouds in such a way that the satellites’ sensors mistook the reflections as ICBM launches. Petrov had to make an assessment in minutes, not months. Had the Kremlin ignored Petrov and instead acted on the phantom American ICBM attack, the world would have been plunged into global nuclear war.
Next time, which will be the third time the world has come SO close to nuclear obliteration, we might not be so extremely lucky to have one man ‘in the right place at the right time.’ Man will have wrecked his own planet, forsaken all the beauty for greed, and caused his own self destruction. Homo Sapiens will have evolved, come down from the trees, then cut down the trees, and blown itself up. But the trees will grow back, in a very short space of time, as our cities fall down and are engulfed in the burgeoning jungle. The birds, insects and animals will move back in, the waters will replenish, the world will no longer be a ball wrapped up in dollar bills, the air will completely refresh, only the sounds of nature will be heard, and Mankind will be an unwritten very short passage in the story of the planet. They say that if the history of the planet can be seen as a single year, Man only makes an appearance in the last minute of December 31st. Perhaps now the calendar can flip over, start another year.
And the world can return to being wonderful.
July 2024