Earth Day images from Jamaica

I always find Earth Day rather emotionally draining. A couple of videos made me weep. A book discussion had me thinking. Two webinars about bird conservation and monitoring, in the Dominican Republic and in Jamaica, induced feelings of hope and gloom, in almost equal degrees. Our Earth is under extreme pressure, right here in the Caribbean.

Part of today’s experience reminded me of being up to my shoulders in the sea on a Jamaican beach. At times I was bobbing along quietly, taking mental notes. At other times, I felt a swell that made me move to shallower waters. And in those shallow waters, pottering around, a sudden, jolting wave smacked me in the face.

Our “Pale Blue Dot,” according to Carl Sagan.

Also, if you have not read this before (or heard him speak it) here are the famous words of the all-seeing Carl Sagan (scientist, astronomy professor and for me, a visionary) on our fragile, tiny “Pale Blue Dot”:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
― Carl Sagan