Sometimes when I’m kneeling on the outermost rocks in my favorite cove in Big Sur, the spray hitting me in the face and the endlessly popping champagne stallions rearing up on both sides of the cliffs, I feel one with this powerful dynamic being called Earth. I understand that, though I will disappear, it has been a great privilege to have been here. The Earth will go on, regenerate, prevail. If necessary, it will shake off the “disease” of humanity, as my favorite movie hero, Agent Smith of The Matrix, called us. I’m feeling one with the eternalness of the Earth (which doesn’t have anything to do with other human beings) and I’m positive that I know what’s goin’ on, what’s goin’ on — it’s washing over every cell in my body, it is my body. I’m in tune.
And then I see a documentary like Chasing Coral about the destruction of the world’s coral reefs and I think everything could be gone in about 50 years. The Earth does not seem so powerful. It’s on the run from capitalism and the beings that capitalism created.
1) Time-lapse photography covering a two-month span of a section of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of northeastern Australia. Day 1: amazingly colorful and thick vibrant forests of undulating striped and spotted corals, inhabited by fanciful fish and other creatures — symbiotic, neighborly, cooperative. When the corals open their mouths their insides are as spectacular as their outsides. Everything about the corals…