my brain was full of color and imagination when i was reading the book a life on our planet by david attenborough. reading the book brought me to a next level of experience than watching his documentaries. i ended up re-watching planet earth and other ones i had seen a while ago, which i had already forgotten most of, as if i were just an outsider observing what happened. but the truth is, i am part of this history - the anthropocene.
please sit down quietly and spend the next two minutes with me reading this beautiful paragraph from the book:
we often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves. with or without us, the wild will return, evidence of this is no more dramatic than that to be seen in the ruins of pripyat, the model city that had to be abandoned when the chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. when you step outside the dark and empty corridors of one of its deserted apartment block, you are greeted by a most surprising sight. in the 34 years since the evacuation, a forest has taken over the deserted city. shrubs have broken up the concrete and ivy pulled apart the bricks. roofs sag under the weight of accumulating vegetation, and saplings of poplar and aspen have burst through the pavements. the gardens, the parks and the avenues are now shaded by the canopies of oaks, pines and maples, 20 feet above the ground. beneath, there is a strange understory of unkempt ornamental roses and fruit trees. the football field, which 34 years ago served as a landing pad for military helicopters sent to evacuate the city's inhabitants, is now covered by a thicket of young trees. the wild has reclaimed its territory. (p.110)
i was so moved by the scene of his interaction with a gorilla, how similar we are in seeing the world. naively, i always saw gorillas as scary giant animals (king kong?) that i needed to stay away from, but attenborough described them so beautifully: "it seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolize everything that is aggressive and violent, when that is the one thing that the gorilla is not - and that we are."
i realized how i see myself as separate from mother nature and the rest of life on earth, taking pride in being a human being, living in a different way than other animals, in my comforting myopic little electronic world. i found myself having a hard time focusing and spending a meaningful amount of time just doing one thing. so many distractions surround me, appearing more attractive than the small succulent sitting next to my window, the bird holding a branch in his mouth standing on my balcony, the street trees expanding their branches to provide shade to the road and houses nearby.
next time if i felt lonely, i'll soak myself in nature.
stop,
stand,
observe
and
listen.
'we came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth.' we had all simultaneously realized that our home was not limitless-there was an edge to our existence. (p.25)
on aug. 23, 1966, the world received its first view of earth taken by a spacecraft from the vicinity of the moon. the photo was transmitted to earth by the lunar orbiter i and received at the nasa tracking station at robledo de chavela near madrid, spain.
citations
attenborough, david. a life on our planet: my witness statement and a vision for the future. grand central publishing, 2020.
nasa: the image was taken during the spacecraft's 16th orbit.
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