living as if there is no death

Maybe we are living as if we have more than one planet to occupy, but to me its more like we are living as if there is no death - no consequences, no final moment where we have to cash the check we wrote. It is fascinating to me that we as a species consider ourselves to be just IT, the bees knees, the very tippy top of the pinnacle of intelligent life. We think we are the smartest of beasts. You get funny looks at most gatherings if you start talking about how humans only think we're the smartest because ours are the only smarts we know - because we are myopic and disconnected. Oh but we are the ones that can reason and think and plan and invent. We are the ones that use tools. We made the internet - could a monkey do that?

And yet - we seem to be the ONLY species that just cannot get it through our fabulously intelligent heads that our lives depend on the health of the living system that we are embedded within. Would we treat our children or our mothers the way we treat our earth? Would we find every opportunity to suck all the life out of them every chance we get? Would we enslave them and squeeze every bit of short-term profit out of them, and if we can, capture our neighbors children and do the same, but even more so? Or, at our best, do we try to have a long-range plan for their success, survival, and continued thriving through the generations? I think this conversation can not exist without talking about class separation, the privileged and elite that use resources because they think in the privileged western world that we are entitled to more, much more, of the resources than someone born and bred into a culture where they live five to a small hut and still carry water from the creek on their heads. We don't need three Earth's, as long as the rest of the world doesn't expect to enjoy all the resources that we simply cannot live without. We burn resources from our embedded inequality, denial of death, and species-wide mama issues.

The way we use resources treats the Earth like a dead dispensible thing, a rock without intrinsic value or feeling, like a finite system, like a bank account - we'll use it up and when runs out, we will figure out how to get more with our genius and if we need to that can certainly involve commandeering the moon and beyond. I haven't a doubt in my mind that someone in some diabolically dazzling office somewhere *at this very moment* is working on lining up the next spinning space rocks to mine.  It is truly stunning that human beings think that our manifestation of technological magic and creature comfort is the most important and desirable thing. It is mind-bending that we as a culture haven't copped that the elixir of life, the holy grail and lowest-hanging fruit to ensure our own relative immortality, is to cherish and tend the one who feeds us, to care for the one who will give life to our grandchildren. To be in reciprical connection, in service to and in love with the Earth. We must have some pretty deep species-wide trauma to hate our mother as much as we must to treat her the way we do.