A Small War
Of course, all of life has ever lived on the tectonic plates, drifting over the hot mantle of the Earth. As you read this, magma is drifting beneath your feet. Our world is an eggshell, inside which is boiling magma. Everything we have ever done we have achieved on this little ball of concealed fire. We have build civilizations here on Earth like we think they can actually last forever.
It has always made me wonder: does the fact that humans are the only animal capable of knowing just how small we really are make us more inclined to violence, or more opposed to it? On the one hand, to acknowledge that, relative to the greater universe, we are insignificant, would be to normalize death and destruction. “If we are so small, then surely we must die small deaths,” one may say. On the other hand, to view our lives as small and insignificant would be to say that life is too short for death, and that we are above it. We just seem unable to make up our mind.
Every species fights the war of nature. Do we, all of everything alive here on Earth, hate nature? Or do we simply take what we want from it and leave the rest for others? For some reason, humans seem to see the circle of life as a line, and a line that leads straight to them. But, in reality, no matter what happens on this Earth of ours, the fact remains that it is simply a rock in space. And no matter what we did on it or to it, after all of us are dead and gone, it will still be a rock.
The war on nature cannot be won, it can only be survived for as long as possible. Yet, even as veterans and soldiers die, day by day, their legacies are still contributing to that great conflict, if only for a little while. It does not matter if that legacy is a brilliant book or a rotting corpse in the ground. The book will raise new minds and the corpse will decompose and raise new trees. Nature’s war is the only war where the dead have a say.
This conflict is not only necessary for survival, but it is purely nature. Regardless if there is any meaning to it or not, it will happen because nature is a part of all of us. And as long as we are made of chemicals it will always be a part of us. This could be interpreted both with thankfulness and with spite, but it is the truth nonetheless.
Humankind, in my opinion, is the most impressive thing the universe has ever seen. And yet, we are merely another generation of soldiers fighting this eternal struggle we call life and nature. “Peace” does not exist, it is only the word we attribute to the periods of inactivity between humankind’s horrific, modern wars against itself. If we take the words of John Stuart Mill to the extremes, everything that lives does what it does for itself.
Humanity sees itself as a whole, for the most part, thus, whatever benefits some group of humans should theoretically be a reason for all of us to cheer. However, history has shown that we are extremely complicated, and every now and then, nature likes to throw us a joker card. Nothing can live without consuming, destroying, or harming, but in nature’s war, this is not such a bad thing.