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Perfect spot

It's not just a matter of making us humble, though that's certainly a piece of it. More importantly, I think, is the context we find ourselves in when we see ourselves as one young species existing at about two-thirds of the way through the Earth's window of opportunity to support life. That's right: life has existed for a little over four billion years. And in another two billion years, the sun will have expanded enough to evaporate all the water on the planet, rendering life as we know it impossible. Anything that might survive that won't be able to get through the increased greenhouse effect as the Earth's surface heats up dramatically.

Sure, that can be depressing to think about. But it's not two billion years from now. We are in this moment now, with most of us are so finely focused on profit for the now (or just surviving paycheck to paycheck) that the idea of delayed results is practically anathema. Obviously we can't just force everyone to expand their understanding of time. A lot of people have to get over the fear that if they don't acquire and everything they can get right now, they won't have enough in the future. Look at how many argue against investing resources into the collective younger generations because something about “Well, they shouldn't get handouts and nobody gets anything for free”; asking them to look at the cumulative positive effects of a more highly educated population of adults in the future won't break most of them out of their selfishness.

Bjornerud is asking us to step out of our little time bubbles into a scarier, more exhilarating worldview in which we are not the pinnacle of evolution or the chosen species—a timeline that is nearly terrifying in its immensity. But we face that existential fear because just as time has stretched on for billions of years before us, so it will stretch on after us for billions of years, and some of those billions will still feature living beings.

It takes courage to do this. And there's also a certain level of compassion and empathy that is required to really consider and act on the reality that what we do now WILL have repercussions for the future (to say nothing of the impacts today.) The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) concept of considering how today's decisions will affect those seven generations from now is just one example of people consciously choosing to exercise that empathy for people and other beings who don't even exist yet. It means we have to stop centering ourselves in every choice we make, and make sacrifices not only for those we don't know and aren't related to, but whom we will never get to meet.

So I started looking up the vulnerable/threatened/endangered species and looking at insects because that one story about that one guy sustaining and restoring the habitat of that one butterfly and saving it from extinction is pretty inspiring, alright?

Anyway, one interesting thing that kept coming up was that a lot of these are endangered due to habitat loss- not only because of development & and agriculture, but also because forests are encroaching on what used to be maintained as praires through intentional fires.

Because the native peoples here maintained and stewarded the land, and one of their tools for that was fire, and when the colonists and colonial governments came, they put a stop to intentional burns and also throughout the 1900s and into this century, have tried to stop fires from natural causes, too. So praires that support so many species are disappearing, while dried out brush and dead wood is accumulating, which leads to hotter, bigger, more dangerous wildfires- which in turn can now wipe out entire populations of praire species since habitat has become so fragmented.

It's just wild to me, because for so long the messaging was "plant trees to save the environment" while in this case trees themselves are part of erasing important habitat. Context matters.