A Plea for Mercy

If nature had a voice, it would be crying out to us to have mercy. In all of human history, we have only now started to wonder about how we are effecting our over-all world.

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We may not live to see the results of the stripping away of the things that have supported us through millions of years of evolution, but we may glimpse what it looks like from around the corner. In less than two hundred years, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have witnessed a stunning reduction of biodiversity on this planet. Our planet, the only body we currently know of in the entire universe that has the chemical balance to sustain life, has relatively lately, lost hundreds of thousands of species. Hundreds of thousands of extinct species, which up till then, had an unbroken genetic line that had survived cataclysmic volcano eruptions, meteor impacts, ice ages, viruses and more. Through all that time they had lived long enough to find food, have sex and produce offspring. Yet they were no match for us. In less than two hundred years they were gone.

There is still a lot of beauty left, many wild places remain, but forests can't buy us off on their own volition. They will only remain if we have mercy.