This land was made for you and me ... and ants too!

It is Earth Day!

I worry about the natural environment, the living and the non-living, to qualify as an tree-hugging nutcase according to some. But, I am not ideologically fully in the environment camp, leading some to view me with suspicion that I am one of those right-wing guys.  As always, I don't belong to any party.

I am concerned about all things around me.  I don't even want to kill spiders or ants.  Unless they directly interfere with my life.  I don't want to see ants in my kitchen, but I don't care if they are having a party on the sidewalk outside my home.  I don't like to see spiders or flies or gnats inside my home.  When I do see them inside, well, I do kill them.  But I feel bad for them.  I feel guilty when I crush those tiny critters. Sometimes I even apologize to them, as if that makes any difference to the ant!

I care for, and worry about, the natural environment--the living and inanimate--because of a deep conviction that the cosmos is not merely about us humans and our own comfortable material existence.  My sincere belief that there is nothing for me after this life ends does not mean that I am going to trash this place while I am here.

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Even when I kill ants and spiders that come into my home, I make sure I kill them as fast as I can.  I don't want those critters to suffer.  I cannot imagine how scientists do experiments on animals; I would think that it is nothing but watching them suffer.  If from those experiments we derive some life-extending benefits to humans, are our additional years worth all that suffering we put the animals to?  Why this supremacy of humans?

I don't ever get trapped into the Earth Day rhetoric of "save the planet" either.  The planet has no feelings.  It just is.  It is not "save the planet" mantra; it is about saving ourselves.  It is about the every day life (and death) issues, starting from how we treat the rivers and the mountains, the ants and the elephants, and fellow humans, ... that Earth Day should be about.  

We need to think of every single day as Earth Day.