The Earth Doesn't Need Us

The Earth doesn't need us. Agent Smith, "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."

A little far fetched in terms of what the machines did to earth in The Matrix but he definitely has a point when one sees what the world would be like without us. BRT 07/21/07

This view about Earth not needing us is further reinforced when viewing the excellent History Channel show Life Without People which shows a similar timeline to Alan Weisman's World Without Us bestseller. The part that really struck me was the program's take on the after affects of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster from "which people left suddenly, and to which--even more than 20 years later--they still have not returned."

In the first months after the meltdown, the radiation, as expected, killed off most of the plant and animal life in the immediate area of the plant and, as expected, life slowly returned but not to the extent that anyone could have imagined. Researchers estimate that not only 15 times the amount of animal life have been seen in the countryside since man's 20 year departure but that the animals themselves are huge and healthy. Link that astonishing statistic to the amount of life the seas would support without man and one can logically deduce that Agent Smith is right in terms of stating just how bad a steward we have been to our world. Click here to see a quick timeline showing just how transient a species we really are. Click on the image below to see how not to care for the environment.

"A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States."

Who knows, maybe Gaia is telling us something by accelerating climate change in order to get rid of us. After all, she has survived many extinctions before so having another one wouldn't be such a bad idea when needing to reestablish the natural balance of give and take that drives all life on the planet known as earth.