No Place Like Homeworld

So earlier today I was watching the BBC/Discovery Channel series "Planet Earth" because hey, who doesn't like to hear about their own planet. It's easy, especially when you live in a densely urban metropolis like New York City (or all of New Jersey for that matter), that there are vast stretches of the world that don't have buildings and electricity and highways and Fox News (oh what a wonderful place that would be). The things that are out there, and down there and way up there, are mind-blowing (much like last night's season finale of Battlestar Galactica, but let's not go there). It's impressive, and a little sad too given that many of these creatures are bound to die out because of human expansion.

To be fair, nature is harsh, and when one species expands, others tend to suffer, and I'm not suggesting that it should be us to suffer. I'm supporting the home team. But as much as possible, we should protect the natural world, if only so we can go make interesting documentaries about it. For instance, feel free to eradicate all of the viruses you want, and the giant, creepy looking fish that live in the depths of the oceans can f*ck themselves for all I care. But really, we can stretch our legs, build our cities, and still find room for Elephants and Penguins, right? With only minimal effort we can reserve some biodiversity. If you want to think of it in selfish terms, the more species there are, the more we can learn about life in general and perhaps one day we'll learn that the cure for cancer can be found in some obscure creature that we were just paving over, literally.

It should also be noted that studies have found that humans have a natural fondness for the appearance of young animals, especially mammals. Now, it doesn't take a detailed study to tell me that baby polar bears are adorable, but they've found that this adoration crosses species, meaning that even a Wolf thinks it's adorable when your kid runs around the house in his feety pajamas. Genetically, naturally, we have an inclination to be fond of the young...meaning that across the board we are less likely to kill young creatures, even though they are helpless and it would be easy, thus ensuring that more animals will survive to adulthood. So it's not just tree-hugging hippies, but all people who are, through the miracle of evolution, compelled to protect life, even when it's not our own or even our own species'.

But on that note, what is wrong with Germans? Yes, that's a phrase I've probably used often, but I'm sure you've heard of the German "environmentalists" who are demanding a baby polar bear in captivity be killed because it's mother rejected it. Their argument is that in the wild, without its mother caring for it, it would be dead, and so the natural thing to do is kill it. But really, once you're taking animals out of the wild and putting them in small cages where you feed them out of a bucket at regular intervals, haven't you thrown natural selection out the window. Yes, nature is cruel sometimes, but that doesn't mean we have to keep it going. This bear is most likely never going back out into the wild, and if it does, sure it may not be able to take care of itself, but that's no reason we have to end its life now. You know what, if a human baby was rejected by its mother and left in the wild, it would die too, but we still have orphanages. We don't leave them to fend for themselves. It's one thing to allow nature to happen and not want to interfere in natural occurences, but it's quite another to idolize nature as though anything that happens naturally should be encouraged or idolized. There's a reason people built societies, because nature has a lot of flaws.

So, to some up: Nature can be stupid, but let's try to keep a lot of it just in case. Also, feel free to kill anything with tentacles, cause those things freak the hell out of me.