This is a book about climate change and how to fix it. Full disclosure, I did not read it all. I have a real hard time with socialist ideas because they lead to a slippery slope towards Communism. But I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to try to read this book because we have to solve/fix global warming if we are ever to be human on a gene and cellular level. If we want to continue living on Earth we have to stop destroying it. It is just that plain and simple. We are a worldwide community. This is what globalization has done to us. Yet, we have not caught up socially to this idea. We are a globalized community. We need to act like it. I am just not sure what that looks like. And I think that is the problem. We don’t know what it looks like to be a healthy global community. Instead of thinking it out, we throw money at the problem and expect others to fix it for us. Or we recycle and hope that is enough. I love to recycle, but I know that is not even close to enough. But I don’t know what else to do in the big picture.
But maybe that is the answer. We don’t need to think about the big picture. Global warming is just like epigenetics. Epigenetics are the most effected by the everyday things we do. The small daily things have the most influence on how human you are on a gene and cellular level. Those really big healthy things you only do a few times a year, they have very low return on investment(ROI). However the little things you do daily or weekly, those are the things that will change you big time. This is how global warming works. Global warming is basically a whole bunch of negative epigenetic triggers in all the organisms that make up Earth, as the collective of organisms we are.
Did you know the negative epigenetic triggers in you are contributing to global warming? When you breath and pooh you are contributing to global warming. I mean with everything you do you are contributing to global warming. But just you existing without doing anything is causing global warming. Because you have an overgrowth of bad bugs which causes an overgrowth of bad bugs in the environment. The more you cleanse your body by balancing your microbiome the more you will help fight global warming. Because you will share those good bugs you cultivate with the world, both human and Earth.
Global warming is a mix of micro and macro. Global warming involves everyone and everything on Earth. Earth is just a collective of organisms. Humans are just a collective of organisms. As a human you are more bacteria, parasite, and virus cells than you are human cells. And humans belong to the even larger collective of organisms called Earth. So, we literally are all in this together. Earth is one large organism.
Let me give you my favorite example. The Redwood forest in Northern California is beautiful, right? You see all those trees and they are majestic and nature seems overwhelming in the best way possible. However, the Redwood trees in Northern California are not individual trees. They are all connected. They are one large organism. The Redwood trees in Northern California are the largest organism in the world. Their roots are all connected. It is one large organism. On the surface they look like individual trees. But when you look at the truth and the big picture, they are all connected. They are a collective of organisms. The largest organism in the world. Pretty neat, huh? Humans are the same. Our roots are all connected. We share a collective microbiome. This is why Covid was such a scary thing. One person got sick in one part of the world and we all ran the risk of getting sick. Because we share bugs. We share roots. We share a collective microbiome. Things would not be contagious if we were not connected.
Okay, I rambled. Let’s look at some quotes from the book now:
“Easter Island is Earth writ small. Today, again, a rising population confronts shrinking resources. We too have no emigration valve, because all human societies are linked by international transport, and we can no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean. If we continue to follow our present course, we shall have exhausted the world’s major fisheries, tropical rain forests, fossil fuels, and much of our soil by the time my sons reach my current age.”
“The person who felled the last tree could see that it was the last tree. But he(or she) still felled it. This is what is so worrying. Humankind’s convetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn. Selfishness leads to survival. Altruism leads to death. The selfish gene wins. But in a limited ecosystem, selfishness leads to increasing population imbalance, population crash, and ultimately extinction.”
Okay, I have so much to say about these two quotes!
The second quote references Richard Dawkin’s book “The Selfish Gene”. Which says that those of us alive today are the descendants of the most selfish people who ever lived throughout history. And there is a selfish gene, which we all must have. It was a book I read years ago. I didn’t like it, but it did make logical sense. But my guts said something was wrong with it. I couldn’t argue because my family members are the most selfish people on Earth. But it didn’t feel right.
Last month, I read “Darwin’s Lost Theory-Who We Really Are and Where We’re Going-Book Three by David Loye This book explained how Darwinism has been looked at through a skewed lens. Survival of the fittest is not about hurting others or being selfish, it is about altruism. True sustainable survival is about altruism. And it goes into to touching on how we are all connected. Humanity has an interconnectedness that cannot be denied. It doesn’t go into science as much I expected. But this was the best book I have read on Darwinism that explained a lot the feelings I felt in my gut that I could not find the words for.
David Loye said, “…we can be-and generally are–more powerfully driven by concern for the regard of others and by love.”
Love conquers all, right? Just like Ken Kesey says in the book “Sometimes A Great Notion”.
The most selfish people on Earth have lead to global warming and the crisis we are in. Tue survival is about seeing the truth. The truth is that we are all connected. There are two kinds of relationships in the human body between organisms: parasitic and symbiotic.
Symbiotic are win-win relationships. You know how you have an immune system? That is a symbiotic relationship. Those bugs take care of you because you take care of them. You are their home and so they do the upkeep needed to have a good home.
Parasitic relationships are where one organism eats and/or destroys the other until it dies. Then normally the parasite dies too because it killed it’s home/environment/host. Do you think we are partaking in a symbiotic or parasitic relationship with Earth?
Just for clarification, there are parasites that we have symbiotic relationships with. For instance we all have these bugs that live on our skin and eat our dead skin cells. This seems parasitic on the surface. But these bugs make us better by helping to dispose of our dead skin cells. So, this is a symbiotic relationship. It is win-win. The bugs get an all you eat buffet and we get healthier skin.
The selfish gene does not win as the quote from Planet on Fire says. It leads to extinction. The selfish gene gets us all killed. The selfish gene is about reverse Darwinism. If you want to watch a movie about Reverse Darwinism check out “Igby Goes Down”. It is a great watch. Salem can you make this available to the people please and thank you. Reverse Darwinism is about survival of the weakest.
Survival of the fittest does not mean that some of us have to win and others have to loose and/or die. Survival of the fittest is about sustainability. It is about the collective of organisms that is Earth. We are all connected. The stronger we all are the stronger we are as a collective. Your neighbor being stronger does not diminish your chances for survival, it increases your chance of survival. At least when we are truly playing by Survival of the Fittest and not Reverse Darwinism.
Global warming is caused by our misconceptions about Darwinism and survival of the fittest. We are all here to not only survive, but to thrive. And we can all do this at the same time. Our potential does not have to come at the cost of another’s potential. We are a collective of organisms. The more we support each other, the stronger we all are.
Easter Island is used in this book, “Planet On Fire” as an example of what will happen to Earth. We cannot escape to space. And even if we did we would take our problems and overgrowth of bad bugs with us. Our problems would literally follow us because the problem is in us. The problem is in us on a gene and cellular level.
You know how some people are diagnosed with SIBO(small intestinal bacteria overgrowth). Global warming is a lot of pollution and many different factors. But the biggest factor in global warming is the Earth has SIBO. The bad bacterial overgrowth in all of us that leads us to being a subhuman slave race on a gene and cellular level causes global warming on Earth. Bacteria dictates the health of mitochondria. And mitochondria dictate epigenetics. Epigenetics determine how human we are on a gene and cellular level.
…So this means this bacterial overgrowth is causing us to be a subhuman slave race on a gene and cellular level. But it is also causing global warming on an Earth level! This is the boiled down version that no one really talks about. They make it all complicated.
“…one constant has remained: the externalisation of nature from most human societies, its brutal transformation into unequally shared wealth, and the organising of the environment to benefit human hierarchies of wealth and power, regardless of the consequences for the stability of natural systems.”
We are apart of nature. We are apart of the collective of organisms that is Earth.
“Will we succumb to chaos, division and inequality? Or will we right the wrongs of the past and move forward together, for the good of all? We are at a breaking point. But we know which side of history we are on.” –Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general
We are the world. And we are the ones who get to decide if and when we are going to clean up this mess we have made. If we don’t clean it up soon like in the next decade, we will never get the chance to be human on a gene and cellular level ever again. And we won’t have a place to live for very much longer. We run out of top soil in about 20 years and the food shortages will begin. Did you have children so they could grow up and starve to death? Because that is the direction we are headed.
I think I am going to finish reading this book. I will do a part 2 to this review in a few days.