Crazy nutty freaky nature

People are sometimes surprised that I’m trying to make a career in environmental law because I don’t seem like a tree-hugger. Because I’m not really a tree-hugger.

However, I’ve been watching and re-watching the BBC’s Planet Earth series, which has been a profound and even spiritual experience. But it’s more complicated than a wonder-of-nature feeling. The wonder-of-nature thing is the starting point. The series brings out like nothing before the jaw-dropping amazingness of our planet and its crazy assortment of life. Holy crap, nature is beautiful and cruel. So many kinds of creatures, such an infinite variety of expressions of the life force. And yet all this beauty and variety is all in service of two things: eating and procreating. Penguins standing around at the South Pole all winter freezing their asses off to protect their eggs and give the hatchlings a head start on whatever great resources there are to exploit at the South Pole. Snow leopardesses, pure gorgeousness in motion, in motion for the sake of killing something to feed their overgrown helpless cubs. Those poor, poor seals just trying to get some dinner for themselves, instead become dinner for an enormous and completely terrifying shark corkscrewing its whole huge body out of the water. All life wants is to keep itself going. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be a point.

And yet probably the most touching thing is to see those animals who can easily get enough food and raise their young, who have time to play. Animals goofing off and enjoying themselves are so wonderful. When you get the eating and fucking out of the way, all this energy is freed up for new and better things

That raises the issue of humans, we with far too much left over after eating and fucking This series seems so profound because it represents humans exhaustively documenting and celebrating the planet we are simultaneously destroying. I can see why people get cynical and misanthropic and start thinking that things would be better if humans weren’t around.

But if we weren’t around, would nature know it was beautiful and amazing? Do you think the hippopotamuses would film the giant crocodile snatching the baby gazelle? Do you think dolphins wonder about what’s outside where the water ends, and contemplate the beauty and cruelty of nature? Do polar bears look at the stars and think, what the hell are those things? We are the only ones who do those things. If we disappeared maybe some other species of ape would eventually get to the point of looking around and trying to figure things out. If they evolve to that point, is it also inevitable that they will fuck things up like we have?

Beneath those questions are another level of freaky existential questions. Like: why does anything at all exist? Where did it come from? What is life and where did it come from and what’s the fucking point? But I can’t do anything with those questions other than ask them. And to posit that maybe the point of human life is to look around and try to figure it out. (530)