We Humans Are The Most Destructive Species Ever

We humans are likely the most invasive and most destructive species ever seen in the complex history of this planet. We have the capacity to kill massive numbers of people and destroy entire nations with the push of just a few buttons.

We are currently on a cruise to various ports in Alaska. A few days ago, I spent the morning just staring at the Hubbard Glacier. The Captain kept the ship moving in a 360 circle while many of us braved the damp and chill to move around on the open top deck and seek to take it in.

Which is impossible. The age, the history, the massive size, the ever-changing nature of it… all this combined with the unending wilderness that comprises much of this giant state—I realized again how tiny and unimportant I am.

Most maps that we are familiar with include a distortion that diminishes the actual size of Alaska. For more accurate representations, check out this site and its series of maps. It’s eye-opening.

Wish we could have stayed for hours, but other cruise ships were awaiting their chance, so we headed back into the Pacific to head to our next destination.

But this whole experience, plus continuing to educate myself on how much havoc invading forces create when descending on areas where indigenous peoples have carved out a good way of life that has served them for thousands of years, left me with a myriad of thoughts.

Course Corrections Become Constant Necessities

For most of hominoid existence, we lived in small bands, constantly moving around, working in reasonable harmony with the surrounding plant and animal life, never “owning” the land or the resources within or under it.

That slowly began to change with the advent of planned agriculture, which provided, for the first time, an actual surplus of food. People, freed from the daily need to go out and find what would sustain them until the next day, began to develop new skills and create new ways to interact with the world around them.

Now, several thousand years later, we humans are likely the most invasive and most destructive species ever seen in the complex history of this planet. We have the capacity to kill massive numbers of people and destroy entire nations with the punch of just a few buttons, held in the hands of ever-capricious, ever-power-hungry humans. Nothing is truly safe from those with evil intent and/or lacking the capacity for self-restraint.

I do not doubt that we will eventually wipe out life as it is presently known and poison the air and earth for eons until, perhaps, it eventually heals and can support life again.

So what does this mean to me, as a tiny piece in this interconnected world?

Two intertwined values keep surfacing in my brain: kindness and integrity. I need to be true to myself, and that means consistently re-evaluating how my actions are impacting both my soul and the lives and souls of those around me. Course corrections become constant necessities.

I also need to show kindness, mercy, and grace to myself and then to as many as I can around me for as long as I can. Only in this way can I see a reasonable way through the world that is generally self-centered and self-focused.

Kindness to myself also means embracing the need for self-protection when necessary. The challenge, always, involves holding onto integrity while enforcing my own, to use a trendy term, boundaries.

Faithfulness to both kindness and integrity demands significant self-restraint, a notion that appears to be in steep decline. I can only hope that such values will see a resurgence, or that the inevitable doomsday will appear far sooner than necessary.

Making Room For One Another, Even Those Who Support Being A Destructive Species

We are all in this together. When we can’t make room for one another, offering the same grace we long to receive from them, we doom ourselves.

So, speaking of making room for one another, I am aware that much of the Christian world, particulalry the evangelical portion, would be horrifed to read my words and recognize that I don’t believe the earth was created 6000 years ago or that a “literal” Adam and Eve were the progenitors of all of humankind.

Plus, I believe many of that theological bent welcome the prospect of full destruction of the earth, assuming that means that Jesus is about to come back and, somehow, turn what will be a pile of nuclear waste into the perfect society, “perfect,” of course, being in the eye of the beholder.

Essentially, it means a society run only by powerful white men (who will have erased Jesus’s actual ethnicity and turned him into a white man), with their women quiet and having one baby after another. Elon Musk, the baby daddy of many but the father of few, will serve as the ideal role model.

Now, my question for myself: Can I make room for them? I already know they can’t make room for me. In their world,  my views condemn me to eternal conscious torment (shorthand: ECT).

That’s not the issue here. My question: Can I look upon those who smile approvingly at our tendency to be the most destructive species ever, with grace and an open heart?

And herein is my problem: I just don’t know.