Sitting here a dozen yards from the Gila River, with my two boys, it becomes easy to see the eternal aspect of nature. Things like the growing plants and the flowing earth brown water aren’t affected by who’s president. The red warted toads which hop over the damp desert don’t know if someone is racist or supports fascist politics. These creatures and the wilds around them are eternal.
Or are they?
Could an official decide to close this area. It would exist, but we wouldn’t be enjoying it. It was closed in 2025. Someone could decide to mine the area or damn the river or perhaps use this thread of life through the desert to cool a data center. Many have chosen fake life over real life before.
And of course, nature isn’t really eternal, close, but not completely. The red warted toads might still be here, but not the same ones. Over the centuries and millennia, the forests of cactus come and go spread north and then retreat south. The Gila could grow or recede. The temperature change over time will affect the fauna or… humans could figure out a way to kill most of it off.
We often think of ourselves, humans, as being outside of nature. Nature does this, humans do that. But we are part of this planet too; Children of this Earth. We should deserve to live here, although the way we act, I often question that we do.
As we evolve, the planet tends to be damaged on a correlating level as our “progress.” The more we advance the more nature fades from our life and is removed from much of our daily existence. Of course we need natural things to survive, but for most of us, they come in thin slices of trees pressed into cardboard boxes or the goo from previous lives cut into plastic containers.
The once eternal need to hunt and gather is converted into trips within a metal box to a warehouse full of food which often looks little like its natural state. Chickens become nuggets and corn is placed within cans of tin.
All life is created from the energy the Sun provides, but where animals might munch off a solar ray gathering leaf or the herbivore which has done so, Humans use not only current reservoirs of this energy, but mine the stored energy created from this process millions of years ago. The current time is not enough for us, we must use the energy collected throughout all of our planet’s existence and do our best to use it up within a two century time span. The sun is as close to anything eternal which we have, but its current output isn’t enough for us. We are currently gulping down billions of years of life within an atom of time.
At the risk of sounding cliché, I’m going to propose an answer. If the Sun is the source of all life and energy, then the obvious answer if to use it to the maximum amount. It is really the only answer which makes sense. Trying to rob the environment of a few billion years of energy in less than two hundred has gotten us where… climate change? Not quite a win. With clean, abundant, and eternal energy we have a chance. A chance to have less reasons for wars, less environmental damage, and waste.
Before I end, let me just throw a fact at you. With the amount of money the USA spent in the second Iraq war and the follow through in Afghanistan, we could have placed solar energy on the rooftop of every home, apartment, and business in the country. No more wars for oil, no more would we be the worse polluter on the planet. No more environmental terrorism. No more reason for the countries of the Middle East to hate us.
But I guess the wrong people wouldn’t have been making money.
We need to choose. Are you going to let the billionaires decide the fate of the world or are we going to do what’s right instead of helping them make a few billion more? Are we going to be the solution or keep helping the ultra rich destroy the world to the point where only they will have enough money to live on it.
Do you want a short term trip to the end or an Eternal fix. You decide.
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