I could list hundreds of examples of what I mean. This is one of those obvious ideas that seem childish once it’s thought of. I don’t care whether or not it’s profound thought; it has meaning for me. But as far as I know, we humans are the only species that’s obsessed with ‘change’ , and ‘progress’ , and ‘controlling or mastering nature’ ; with learning about our past and with charting our future. We strive toward an impossible , or at least rosy, future in which we will have met all our challenges, so that we’ll live in some sort of unreal wonderland on earth. What do we do next — or will we give up on that idea too? Perhaps we’ll spend all of our time contemplating each other!

The rabbits in our neighborhood would continue to live as usual without our help. although they might miss nibbling upon the leafy vegetables in the local gardens. The fish and all of the complex minutiae of the local river bottoms would go on living as they always have. The sheep I see in the woods north of Vegas would continue to bound through the brush and among the mountains. They’d live  the same as ever, since it’s illegal for us to feed them — although they do like to move down the mountains at night and sample certain shrubs we have kindly planted about our houses.

In my darker moods I find myself thinking that I love the earth and everything upon it except the increasingly destructive activities of human beings — and sometimes I wonder about the human beings themselves! I love the deserts and forests, the oceans and rivers and lakes of the earth, the plains and the poles, the marshes and the mountains. And I know that in the Puerto Rico trench in the Atlantic Ocean, life in the sea at more than 8,000 feet down goes on just as it has for many millennia. It’s been like that for all of the interwoven life forms of the poles and the tropics, of the deserts and woodlands and prairies. Each species lives within its environment, whatever its conditions. And I think that in it way each life form must know that and love its home and has no desire to change or destroy it.