Though I'm past  one hundred thousand miles,

I'm feeling very still,

And I think my spaceship knows which way to go;

Tell my wife, I love her very much, 

she knows…."

 

"Ground Control to Major Tom, 

your circuit's dead!

There's something wrong!!!

Can you hear me, Major Tom?!

Can you hear me, Major Tom??!!

Can you hear…?"

"Here I'm sitting in my Tin Can

Far above the Moon…

Planet Earth is blue 

And there is nothing I can do…"

This "dialogue" comes from the late 60s pop song titled "Space Oddity"¹   A scary but very plausible scenario.

Now, try to imagine yourself as Major Tom, victim of a high-tech malfunction in the manned space flight program, and possibly doomed to float endlessly in space.  Planet Earth looms large before your eyes as a beautiful but permanently distant Blue Ball, the home you never can go back to.

You'd probably start gasping for air the very moment you realize that your oxygen supply is quite limited; you'd probably choke as soon as you remember that you don't have an unlimited supply of drinking water, either.

You would most likely panic at the slightest feeling of temperature change inside that high-tech "Tin Can" of a spaceship, knowing well how its dead circuits would no longer be able to maintain the air pressure and temperature within the range needed to keep you alive.

Planet Earth is blue and there is nothing you can do… 'Tis so far, far away, and you're not only feeling very still -- you're simply not moving anymore from your orbit around it!

You'd probably envy the other astronauts whom you had bested for this flight for still another Two-legged Walk on the surface of the Moon.  You'd probably look with misty eyes at the Beautiful Blue Ball and envy all your "friends down there" who are safe and sound.

Don't.

They're not all that safe and sound down here.  Chances are, they would all perish like you, after you do, because this Beautiful Blue Ball is now being forced its own "high-tech malfunction," turning it hostile to the likes of you and me and all other "Two-legged Geniuses" here, and all our close and distant cousins.

Major Tom, just hang in there!  We are not in much better shape down here, believe you me!  Or haven't you noticed how the Blue Ball is slowly turning brown right before your eyes?

The spaceship malfunction has interrupted your hectic mode of existence, as the flight itself had earlier liberated you from our usually very myopic view of the world.

Quite unable to do anything else now, anyway, you have all the time "in the world" and you also have the properly detached perspective, to behold Planet Earth, and really contemplate this true story of the . . .

BIPED ON THE BLUE BALL [The supposed-Sapiens  who laughed at the Dodo...]

NCE UPON A TIME a beautiful Blue Ball came to be, and since doing so it has been spinning like a wobbling tilted top and travelling against the backdrop of an endless expanse of black emptiness studded with billions upon billions of pinpoints of light.

Completing about five billion laps by now², this Ball has been running on its own elliptical track around one of those fireballs, the one near enough to appear much bigger than a pinpoint of light and to bathe this and other balls with daytime brightness and warmth.

And the Ball -- called a "planet",  meaning traveller -- journeys on and on along the orbit third closest to Fireball Sol, which is also called Sun.  "Little Ball Blue" is the fifth-smallest of nine widely-known planets of the Solar System. It is also the fifth-largest.

Behold, the Blue Ball is speckled with green landmasses and swirling white fluffs.  It is "a sparkling blue-and-white jewel … laced with slowly swirling veils of white, like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery."³

.              .                  .                           .           .            .                   .           .         .            . .                          .       ..              .*       .     *                  .               .        *                     *        * .             *

.     . .           *    .     .  ..  .          .*               .*

The .white fluffs are the cottonlike clouds, stormy undersides and silver linings included.  These help shield the Blue Ball from the hottest rays of Fireball Sol, and shower down as cool rainwater for the thirsty green landmasses to drink.

What would seem to be a flat and boring surface of green and blue on this Ball when viewed from afar, actually embraces a breathtakingly lovely and variated family of flora and fauna.  Thriving on the symbiotic Lifeweb, the beautiful mutual life-support system, this family lives veritably as one organism, as Blue Ball Earth itself apparently behaves as a "super Plantanimal".⁴

The green masses are three-dimensional mosaics of dark and mysterious jungles and forests where dancing shafts of sunlight filter through layers of foliage swayong in gentle breezes, of windswept prairies with their grassy blankets and pillows made of bushes, of majestic mountains reaching out to the clouds, of cradled valleys and wide open plains, of laughing brooks and rushing streams and rivers and bridal-veil waterfalls, of cool and crystalline ponds and lakes, of adventure-filled marshlands and mangroves.

These are teeming with countless throbbing and quivering, breathing and growing, crawling and flying, swimming and dancing, nursing and suckling, eating and sleeping, playing and mating flora and fauna of all colors sizes and shapes.⁵

The glowing kaleidoscope of flowers mesmerizing not only the fluttering butterflies and the bussing bees. The best of painters and photo-artists could only be humbles in attempts ot capture with the blushing beauty the fragrance and fragility of these colorful children of the Sun.  Roses and orchids, lilacs and lilies, even those totally unknown -- they would, by any name, smell as sweet.⁶

And the music, 'tis exquisite symphony -- with the gurgle of the brooks and the humming and crackling of breezeblown branches you'd hear the birds twittering, the crickets chirping, bears and lions growling, monkeys chattering, flies and bees buzzing, owls hooting, frogs croacking, snakes hissing and nightingales crooning.  And don't leave out the elephants who are triumphantly trumpeting!  The great Music Bees, from Bach and Beethoven to the Beatles and Bacharach, need not look any farther out for inspiration.⁷

But, alack and alas, the green landmasses have slowly been turning desolate brown!8 And, not quite coincidentally, on this increasingly browned surface of the Blue Ball swaggers out tragi-comic hero, THE BIPED, who has also had much to do with the continued poisoning of the oceans and seas.

This Biped styles himself as "Homo sapiens", as he ego-trips, by habit, on the sound and meaning of the second word in this Linnaean name-calling.9  The word "sapiens", after all, derives directly from thje past participle of the Latin sapere, which means "to be of wisdom."

With this binomial label he has sought to distinguish himself from his immediate ancestor, the "Homo erectus",  who had abandoned swinging from tree to tree as the main mode of transportation, and started walking erect on terra firma.

With the same distinction, he regards himself distantly apart from the rest of the remarkable family of plants and animals, which has been thriving on the synergy of symbiotic ecosystems.  A disastrous egocentric alienation this has been, indeed!

With this self-image, the Thinking Biped insults with impunity his feathered but flightless cousin, the now-departed Dodo.

Webster's powerful book gives the following as the second meaning of the word "dodo": "a stupid person." The Dodo is no longer around to refute the joke that it is gone forever due its own stupidity.  Actually, the Dodo's extinction has been traced to the Biped's very own "inadvertence", to put it kindly.10

"Homo sapiens" insults the Dodo.  And follows exactly in the same path of stupidity he has been accusing the Dodo of having walked, all the way to extinction.  

"Look who's talking, and look who wouldn't be around much longer to continue such talking," the "laughable" Dodo might be wont to say, were it still around with us today.

Meanwhile, elephants, whales, rhinos, minks, leopards, eagles and dozens of other animals have come to be listed among the endangered species due to the Biped's desire to produce and sell goods made out of ivory, made out of thickly-furred or exquisitely spotted animal skins, made out of "exotic" animal flesh.11  And instead of stalking Mother Nature only with cameras, the Biped has menaced her with his harpoons, fine-grid nets and sniperscope guns.

Knowledge is power.  And having started to walk in the ground erect on his two legs, the Biped developed his hands and his brain, and embarked on a road of marvelous achievement as the "Two-legged Genius".  This has also been the infamous road of mismanagement and greed, unintended though it may be.

The Biped's thinking has enabled him to fulfill the obsession of Icarus12, on many occasions leaving the Blue Ball's surface to fly in the sky aboard fire-powered machines that imitate the glide of his feathered cousins.  This has been developed a long, long way from the oversized kites drawn by Da Vinci and tested by the Brothers Wright13.

In an event considered to be "a giant leap for mankind,"14 the Biped has even started landing and walking on the Moon, which was for hundreds of centuries only held in awe and sung about from afar by poets and minstrels, by lovers and lunatics.

He has sent out sky-scouring machines to put other planets under close scrutiny, and has even started measuring the Doppler-like redward shift in the wavelengths of radiation from distant stars, to establish the Einsteinian theory of an "Expanding Universe."15

The Biped has indeed flown a long, long way! (Otherwise, you wouldn't even be out there in a "Tin Can" spaceship experiencing a high-tech and hopefully temporary malfunction.)

His thinking has also enabled him to dive deep into the dark unfathom'd depths of the oceans, in machines that mimic the Moby Dick.16  He has drilled up and scooped earth from below the ocean floor, to study fossils, chemicals and radioactivities, and magnetic polarities, and has conducted tectonic and continental-shelf soundings, to learn more about the nature of Blue Ball Earth.17

Most of the time, however, this Thinking Biped stays and swaggers about on the surface of the Blue Ball, the surface of the green-spotted Blue Ball which, under his mismanagement, is slowly becoming a brown-spotted surface.  At the rate he's going he might soon have to lie perfectly still underneath this surface.

"Stupid Dodo," laughs the Thinking Biped, as he slowly but surely commits suicide.

That's suicide, all right, but it also has to be called a massacre being committed on the grandest scale on all his close and distant cousins in the Plantanimal Family -- his fellow-bipeds, the quadrupeds, sextupeds, octopeds, and centipedes, and all the no-peds, all who are clothed in furs or feathers or scales or chlorophyll, from the quivering microsized monocells to those towering giants honored in verdant verses by Kilmer.18  

The Biped manages to do both -- the suicide and the grandscale massacre --  by destroying the Blue Ball, by destroying the planet so thoroughly that a surviving pair of monocells would have no chance to start Darwin's long, long story all over again.19  Expected to survive the longest, even those filthy and flat insects called roaches would have to join sooner or later the rest of us in a stinking heap of carcasses or dried up foliage.20

The Thinking Biped has long invented telescopes and aimed these at the pinpoints of light in the black sky. He has debunked earlier Ptolemaic beliefs that the Blue Ball was the center of everything. He soon discovered eight other balls circling 'round the same Nearby Star. He has since conclusively vindicated Copernicus and Galileo, and has known well of nine planets.21

For hundreds upon hundreds of Blue-Ball cycles around the nearby Fireball, the Thinking Biped collected knowledge on these other balls and even on the moons circling them.  Recently, the Biped has been able to send on a precise 12-year path, quite near these  other balls, a flying camera that beamed home on radio signal thousands upon thousands of bits of information on them.22 Surface and inner temperatures, densities, chemical profiles, the atmospheres and the moons and --  ahhh! -- those breathtakingly beautiful rings.

He has also learned of, and watched with passion, the death throes of some distant stars, and felt a sense of loss as these cooled down and collapsed into White Dwarfs and Black Holes.

However, the Thinking Biped has been no more than half-conscious that one of the nine planets of the Solar System may, in a way, be dying very quickly quite near him.  So near, in fact, this dying planet is right underneath his two feet.

From all the information he has accumulated comes a repeatedly revalidated conclusion: that neither the Thinking Biped nor any of his close or distant cousins can survive even just a split second on any of the Blue Ball's fellow planets.

Mercury and Venus are too hot, the rest are too cold. Some have no air that even the "weirdest" sort of imagined inhabitants could breathe, others don't even have any ground solid enough for a featherweight Biped to stand his two legs on.

Even as he now knows well that all the other balls would be fatally hostile to his skin and blood and lungs and nostrils and his everything else, the Biped is mindlessly destroying the only place he could possibly survive in, his only environment.  Slowly but surely the Biped is turning the beautiful Blue-green Ball into a browned-blue one.  Slowly but surely killing it, therefore slowly but surely killing himself.  

But how explain that the "Sapiens" could be guilty of such plain idiocy?

It should be obvious, you might say, that many things going on simultaneously day in and day out, as part of the Biped's present-day normal life, greatly diminish his chances of surviving another century.  Unless this mindless destruction is drastically curbed or stopped altogether it would very soon be too late to do anything but weep and repent.  These things that are the Biped's doing are getting to be his own ultimate undoing.

Trees continue to be cut and sold in tremendous quantities.  The mines go on vomitting out the tailings that poison the fields and kill the rivers.  More and more chlorofluorocarbons are being leaked or aerosol-sprayed into the atmosphese, enlarging still further the hole in the ozone layer and letting in more cancer-causing ultraviolet rays from our nearby Fireball.  More and more coral reefs are getting ruined by erosion and by direct physical assaults like in muro-ami fishing.  More and more species of animals are forced down the path of the late lamented Dodo.  Smoke from fossil-fuel combustion continues to billow upwards (later, of course, to come back down) from industrial smokestacks and vehicle exhaust pipes, increasing the Earth-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and creating acid rain.  Giant oil tankers have even spilled thousands of gallons of crude oil into the sea.

Meanwhile, more and more hectares of croplands are getting poisoned by acids, nitrates and other chemicals applied supposedly to increase yield and exterminate insects.  More and more bombs are being made and deployed to threaten entire continents with sudden deletion from the Earth's face and memory, with incidents of nuclear accidents mounting.  Some powerful countries have even callously used small islands way off their own shores to test their bombs, sending many inhabitants off to early deaths and many others to a life of misery in radiation-caused illnesses.23

As the Biped pollutes his surroundings he does the same to his own body with what he eats, drinks, inhales, and injects into his bloodstream.24

With all these the Biped has been diminishing his chances of surviving another century.25

Or isn't that pretty obvious?

Couldn't the Thinking Biped, using just a tiny fraction of his remarkable brain, comprehend the peril and start mending his ways?  Yes, he could.  But he apparently has had no time for serious thinking on such matters as these that move much slower than the clock that he chases after the whole day everyday.

The Biped has been much too busy with other affairs he deems much more pressing and consequential.  And much more profitable.  He has had no time to really be the Thinking Biped.  Very ironic for one who can invent communication satellites, facsimile machines, fiber-optic cables, laser holograms and interplanetary flying cameras.

But this behavior is not at all surprising.  After all, the Biped has long alienated himself from Mother Nature.

The degree to which the Biped has carried on this estrangement from the rest of the Lifeweb that supports his very existence is not surprising, either, considering how alienated the Biped has become from his very own kind. 

This alienation has consistently shown itself in his habits of thoughtless, oftentimes even greedy, exploitation and destruction of his fellow-Biped and of the Blue Ball itself.

The Biped was not always Mother Earth's prodigal son nor was he always his own brother's slavedriver.  Right after evolving into the Thinking variety, he lived in communities that were real communities, where each one contributed quite equitably to the common good and was accorded his rightful share in food and other needs.

During the time of the Biped Brotherhood, each one owned himself and held his life in his own hands, but in harmonious sympathy with his fellow-Bipeds and all that was around them.  There was no room for greed or hunger.  As Lennon would later wishfully imagine for the present and the future, there was a Brotherhood of Man!26

That was the time the Biped did not behave very differently from his cousins in the Lifeweb.  Nature's own symbiotic ecosystems were at work with balanced and well-replenished food chains.

The strongest lion, veritably the King of the Jungle, has been wielding authority over the entire pride and over the other animals.  But he has never claimed them for ownership or subjected them to manipulation.  Have we ever known of lions hunting down gazelles and zebras not to eat but to pack into refrigerators to sell for profit?  A lion never kills more than he immediately needs to relieve his hunger.

In short, the Law of the Jungle has been a lot more wholesome and decent that what the Biped has boasted as "modern civilization."  This despite the sophistry and eloquence of the latter's apologists. 

In the same light, the snakes have had reason to protest the image of deceit and treachery the Biped's literary license has now imputed upon their honor.  "Why fault me with your own manipulative deviousness?" the Slithering Snake might ask him, before realizing that the answer is right there in the question itself.

Yes.  Ironically, it was during his primitive beginning that the Thinking Biped blended well with his own kind and with the rest of the Paradise around him -- Nature's animals, fruits, air, water and the seasons.

Things were not to be the same in other periods of the Biped's lifestory.  There was a time when Biped owned other Bipeds, called slaves.  They came to acquire these by hunting them down or defeating them in combat and, instead of killing them, treated these captives much like beasts of burden.

Much like the domestic animals, the slaves could be bought and sold, even killed, anytime.  Moreover, the children, grandchildren and remote descendants of slaves were destined to become slaves themselves, denied the basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It even came to a point when multitudes of slaves were being hunted and rounded up in Africa to be shipped and sold across oceans much like animals destined for the zoo.  Worse than zoo animals, however, the slaves were forced to work to death like camels and oxen.

The toilers always produced much more than what the owners spent to keep them alive.  Thus, with the ownership of slaves flourished the ownership, accumulation and worship of material wealth.  The root of all evil had reared its ugly head!

Thus developed the drive for acquisition, accumulation and defense of possessions that spelled power.  This quickly led to insatiable greed.  And a new type of relationship emerged within the Biped Brotherhood that poisoned its unity like venom -- the quarrelsome relationship between the owner and the owned, with the former amassing wealth by the latter's back-breaking toil.

Community ownership was torn apart.  This also destroyed basic equality and harmony.  The Biped Brotherhood was utterly ruined.  Nature was next in the line of fire, as wealth-massing Bipeds raced to plunder her bounty.

The arrangement for harmonious self-governance of communities based on ties of kinship was distorted to maintain the prevailing "peace and order" in favor of the Biped-owning Bipeds.  The new arrangement worked upon the principle that he who can brandish the capacity to end another's life and liberty can control that life and the worth of that liberty.

Weapons and prisons, along with unjust officials, and professional wielders of armed authority have been constant fixtures in this arrangement.  They were all utilized to whip non-conformist Bipeds into line, and were all controlled through the glitter of gold.  The Biped's Golden Rule has actually read: He who holds the gold rules; and he who rules gets to have more gold.

The word "democracy" -- meaning, rule of the majority -- was spuriously attached to make the coercive machine appear as if it belonged to all.  Of course, the Bipeds who were owned and did not own were excluded from the status of citizens and were effectively denied their democratic rights.  And they formed the majority.27

Many Bipeds, not the least the very victims themselves, were "educated" to subscribe to this arrangement.  The logic of force completely subjugated the force of logic. The guns guns and the prisons were unsparingly used on those who displeased and challenged the Biped-owning Bipeds.  Almost always the holders of power were challenged, when other Bipeds came to be owners, too, but the owning and controlling systems were widely accepted.

This instrument of artificial persuasion has remained to this very day.  Of course, there have been some conspicuous adjustments in the details of the arrangements, adjustments that have defined the mechanics of democracy without giving life to its socially-equitable and community-centered essence.

At another time in this long lifestory of the Biped, emperors and kings, pharaos and generals, wealth-amassing Bipeds all, were owning land, tracts and more tracts of fertile croplands.  Those who lived and worked at the farmlands were owned but no longer directly.  They simply came with the property.

The powerful Biped was operating under the concocted logic that one could claim as his property something that would definitely outlast him.28

He started buying, owning and selling Nature, which is what land unquestionably is.  Good thing no one started claiming the "right" to sell sunlight or rainfall, a "right" that could have been asserted by armed guards, sold to buyers and passed on to heirs the same way the selling and reselling and inheritance of land has thrived over all these centuries.  (However, some Bipeds have started selling "breathable air." This, about a decade after the cities of the world have been flooded with drinkable water sold in plastic bottles.)

Powerful Bipeds, especially those who wore glittering headpieces and silken capes, and clutched bejeweled canes, were owning, buying and selling plains and mountains, even entire countries, with the populace simply attached to the property.  They started owning, buying and selling even the seas around and between these land formations.

It came to a point of absurdity when one said to infallibly represent the Almighty divided up the world map between two such crowned Bipeds who were to rule over their respective halves of the world as they both sat enthroned in one small peninsular corner of the world.29  The clout of these kings perished soon afterwards.  Other rulers took up and fully exploited the Nature-owning concept for their own material gain.  

There has also been the present arrangement where the Biped no longer owns another Biped and where he amasses wealth no longer from his claims of ownership over parcels of Nature.  Instead of owning his fellow-Biped directly or through the land the latter tilled, the wealth-amassing Biped buys, at the cheapest rates possible, his fellow Biped's time and capacity to work.  By withholding from the hired fellow-Biped practically the whole amount of value created by the latter's labors, the wealthy Biped becomes much wealthier and is able to hire more and more of his fellow-Bipeds and buy more machines for them to work on.

The effects of this on the wealth-amassing Biped has been terrible.  Even without any wide-eyed agreement on his part, his ethics and sense of values have been warped by prospects of more and more wealth.

Society has been transformed into one big money-worshipping and money-controlled machine -- where factory-owning Bipeds frantically compete for bigger and bigger profits, while the majority of the Bipeds hurriedly work and exhaust their mental and physical energies just to meet production quotas and maintain the token compensation they are paid. The latter need all the money to buy all the goods they need and all the goods they are persuaded, by advertising, to "need."  The writings of Smith and Marx abound for a closer scrutiny of this dog-eat-dog system with porcine ethics.30

The respective motivations of the labor-buying and of the labor-selling bipeds have degenerated accordingly, with the former perfecting the art of  looking out for ways to rout the competition and further increase the profits raked in, and the latter getting pushed to rat-race individualism and a sense of powerlessness.  This sense of helplesness has allowed the powerful Bipedas to manage -- mismanage, actually -- the resources of the community of Bipeds, of the environment, and of the Blue Ball itself.

Of course, there have been countercurrent movements, advocating community centeredness and equitable sharing of products and resources, a social arrangement that would include a clearer-minded management of Nature's resources for sustainable development.  But these have had to march with great pain and difficulty.

Even that one great commandment -- Love thy neighbor as thyself -- the leagacy left by Jesus Christ a score of centuries ago, has not altered the Biped's culture of greed, exploitation and distraction.  This despite the overwhelming number of Bipeds throughout the Blue Ball who claim to be part of "His Faithful Flock."

The Biped has had, indeed, a long story of alienation from Mother Nature and from his brother. And this has been nurtured by money-worshipping greed. Remember the Golden calf story in the Old Testament?

So how can anyone now expect the wealth-amassing Biped to view Mother Nature and not see her entirely as an endless supply to grab and sell, a source of more and more material wealth?  How can anyone now expect the logging tycoon to behold the beautiful breathing tree and not think of it as an expensive log to be felled and sold at big profit?  Can we expect this logging tycoon to hear the trees' screams of pain under the deafening drones of electric chainsaws?31

It is no wonder, then, that the elephants, whales, rhinos, minks. Leopards, dalmatian dogs, eagles and many other animals have become endangered species, just so the Thinking but Thoughtless Biped could sell goods made out of ivory, made out of thickly-furred or exquisitely-spotted animal skina, made out of "exotic" animal flesh.  Could the Biped now be convinced to throw away his fine-grid nets, his harpoons and sniperscope guns, and stat stalking Mother Nature armed only with cameras?  No, allcaps, itals, with an exclamation point in boldface.

The wealth-amassing Biped has come to be consumed by his own greed for more and more profit (generally recycled as additional capital), he is much willing to sell Nature and destroy it in the process as long as there are buyers, and as long as there are other Bipeds, preferably desperate and destitute to willingly labor on Nature for compensation way below the expected revenues.

He would even try to sell Blue Ball Earth itself, if only there were buyers.

The profit-greedy Bipeds can never be expected to stop the mad destruction of the Earth or even just to stop and think about it in earnest.  

Hey, you suddenly look very sleepy now, Major Tom. You are obviously lacking oxygen in your bloodstream. You apparently need very badly the nap you have just… started… having…

-o0o-

"Pardon us for forcibly intruding in your dream, Major Tom. We have developed the technology to violate at will your under-standable preference to dream in complete privacy, no doubt a petty human fixation.

"This is a legitimate assertion of our superiority over humans, you who would qualify only to be our maleable minions if you could muster enough wisdom to understand and, of course, accept our superiority.

"Appearing to you like white versions of the Darth Vader,3 2 we are machine-created message carriers who have all the reason to gloat that our power over the human race is invincible; we have taken over the minds of men so you would do the justifying for us for this ongoing operation of conquest we are undertaking, for your own good, and for our ever-legitimate interest to draw profits from these most noble endeavors. You may call us the ‘Prophets of Profits.’ Completely helpless as you are now to try to do anything against us, we dare to categorically identify ourselves to you, while many economists of governments and functionaries of the academe on your planet still see fit to deny who they really have become.

"As Prophets of Profits we now enlighten you of the supreme importance and invincibility of the full Logic of the Profit Principle, as somehow explained in detail in the ‘Ten Commandments of the Golden Calf,’ that your governments have signed decades ago as the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade. Listen closely:

"Earth is now being transformed into a planet inhabited by individuals in complete competition for needs, completely rejecting the grossly unproductive concepts of Nature as a generous benefactor and people unproductively sharing the abundance of the Earth.

"Humans have harbored these concepts of ‘Dignity" and "Rights,’ without under-standing that all ‘human dignity’ worth talking about is the distinction one human can have over others in terms of ownership and command of resources. These resources not available to the common people who allow themselves to be limited in their ‘absolute right to acquire, accumulate and control infinitely.’ Your philosophers have even maligned this basic right as ‘greed,’ and promoted the unproductive superstition that having enough is enough so the others could also have enough! Bah, all those others are just lazy, or stupid, or plain unlucky!

"We have convinced you to worship the Profits Principle for the productivity, efficiency, progress, prosperity and convenience that we promised to all and delivered to a powerful handful. We have also vowed "trickles down."

"All resources on your planet should be delivered only to those who have the ability and skill to acquire and exploit these; let all fiercely compete, peacefully or otherwise, by fair means or foul, for them. In this mutually-annihilative competition for survival – humans must be capable to compete for everything; the most important is to win. Losers don’t de- serve to control anything, even their own lives. They don’t even deserve to survive and exist.

"And if parts of your planet get utterly destroyed while you nobly pursue profits and more and more profits, consider that as ‘natural selection’ – Nature is selecting which parts deserve to continue in existence! You have to repudiate such conceptual integrations in ecosystemic approaches as ‘watershed,’ ‘airshed,’ and ‘state-range conservation.’ Treat them all as many individual properties. Develop every part of the Earth for monetary value.

We are helping you to completely abandon your primitive sense of thinking of the Commons. We are helping you discard common sense. You don’t need it, and it only impedes you from optimal pursuit of profits, the real fulfillment of Human Dignity.

Your species has been described to be in a two-legged run for further consciousness evolution. But through the predominance of the Profit Principle permeating all societies as adopted by them or enforced on them by the powerful among you, all consciousness about commonalities, about synergetic systems, about synergetic collectivities – the second foot — is being pushed to atrophy by separative selfishness. We’re that powerful!

The two-legged run of human consciousness evolution has been transformed into a "monoped walk" by those who have learned that every human being is only as big as his or her skin allows him to be.

The accumulated profits of The Corporations of the world can easily refute and paralyze, silence permanently, ‘neutralize,’ all opponents of the Profits Principle.

"We have been buying off governments and mercenary scientists to bless our inventions, including those most deadly to health and to life itself. Our biotechnology on genes has created plants that need no spraying with pesticides; they are themselves poison! And they are raping and contaminating similar plants and stopping these from having seeds. We shall soon be producing and selling all the seeds, and holding hostage all the staple food supplies of your planet, and our stockholders will be much richer and more powerful than before!

"We have employed mercenary econom-ists to bless our schemes on trade rules, cur-rency rates and financial policies. We have bought off many of our foes. We can buy their not so glamorous sudden demise. We can buy you off or ‘neutralize’ you... if we need to."

-o0o-

"No, you can’t!!! Uhh! Where am I…? where are those..., uhh...messengers...?"

You fell asleep, Major Tom, but your face looked troubled all that while. Were you having a bad dream? I would, too, if I were in your place!

As I was saying before you suddenly had that yawning spell, the profit-greedy Bipeds can never be expected to stop the mad destruction of the Earth or even just to stop and think about it in earnest.

And the rest of the Bipeds? Well, they’re trying to survive from day to day, so busy they cannot afford to stop and think about their survival with the Blue Ball. Quite ironically, they ignore the ominous "Wails of the Banshee" and the clarion calls raised for all to help rescue the environment.32

Many of these Bipeds have harbored a predisposition to defeatism.  And who can blame them?  Do not the powerful profit so much from the continuing, if not accelerating destruction of the Browned-Blue Ball?  And are they not powerful enough to meet and crush any Quixotic endeavor33 to save the Blue Ball at the expense of their profiteering?  Rhetorical questions these have become, indeed!

The majority of the Bipeds have barely coped with the crisis, magnifying, and being paralyzed by, a sense of powerlessness.  This sense of defeatism has flowed into apathy, even fatalistic resignation.

This sense of fatalism has somehow combined with their propensity for small-group mentality, for parochialism.  They are now trying to ignore the fact that we are all together in this perilous predicament, the fact that the scourges to be unleashed by environmental destruction will not, and indeed does not, see differences in race and color, citizenship and nationality, creed and ideology, sex and age, and income bracket.

They are indulging instead in the faint and utterly unrealistic hope that the planet's destruction would not affect specifically their own country, their own state or locality, their own grouping or clan or family, their own bodies. Surely the Thinking Biped, the Two-Legged Genius of the Blue Ball Earth, could be capable of more rationality than this!

Meanwhile, the honorable bunch of environment-defending Bipeds have been a growing but still very tiny minority.  Shouting their throats hoarse, their have been a lonely voice in the wilderness of passivity and inaction. And destruction.

Their small Greenpeace rafts and boats have succeeded in blocking the paths of poison-carrying or whaling ships of the powerful.34 

Their declarations of concern and letters of protest have started to spread especially during "Earth Day" and "World Environment Day" commemorations.  In some instances, these have drawn support from some powerful Bipeds, including those who are themselves guilty of environmental destruction.  In some other instances, these get echoed in the august halls of legislation.  

But again, a chasm almost always yawns wide between enactment and enforcement of  whatever environment laws result from their efforts. The fate of environmentalist laws and agreements have had to hang in the balance of struggles between the powerful and the majority in each country, and between the powerful countries and the rest of the world.35

These environmentalist groups have needed more and more volunteer human-hours just to be able to keep track of environmental battlefronts.  Apparently, most of the other Bipeds have been too busy even just to listen in earnest.  Much less do they have the time to assume the pose suggested by Rodin36 and decide to join in concrete action.  

And so, the Biped continues with his lucrative enterprises and hectic labors, slowly but surely destroying the Blue Ball, barely noticing, or, worse, noticing without recognizing, the present-day creeping effects of such destruction -- a warmer, "Greenhoused" global atmosphere that slowly melts some polar caps and raises inch by inch the sea level, much longer and hotter summers, droughts that cause duels over irrigation ducts and daily cursings before dry and silent faucets, and electric power shortages.  Not to mention the fast-paced extinction of countless plants and animals, the erratic schedules of the seasons, the storms and floods that would remind us of Noah's Ark, plus all sorts of new illnesses.37

The Biped continues to look at the tree as a profitable commodity.  And, finding glamour in feigning concern, the officialdom agrees to impose selective logging bans, where tree-cutting would henceforth be allowed only in areas where there are some trees still left, and logging would be totally banned in areas where there are no more trees.38  The Dodo may be laughing aloud somewhere out there about this!

And so, the Blue Ball turns brownish as tropical areas are shaved by electric saws to become patched-up deserts, as coastal cities are gradually reclaimed by the sea, and erosion slides down to cover ocean floors with what used to be mountains most majestic.

We are not called upon to worry about the Balance of Nature.  There is absolutely no necessity for worrying about this, for balanced she will always be.  It's just that the balance of Nature at some near-future date might no longer include the Thinking Biped at all or as we know him now.

Changes in the environment may just spare the species, but in a somewhat altered form.  The Biped, for example, may very well fulfill the "Riddle of the Sphinx" in a bizarre way well beyond the wisdom of Oedipus Rex39 -- the smoothskinned Biped, well into the dusk of his existence and evolution, may just possibly mutate into, and survive as, a thick scaled Triped.40  

Of course, even in such a shape, his innate Narcissism can definitely maintain self-esteem.41  Well…!

Nature has always been, and will always be balanced in each of the other planets in the Solar System, where the Biped of any of his distant cousins can never hope to exist.

Nature will always be balanced on Blue Ball Earth, with or without me and you or any of our cousins.

The super-resilient cockroach may yet have the last laugh on the Biped who shall have completely poisoned himself with the insecticides he had invented, which destroyed his life-support systems, all for monetary gain.42

After the Thinking Biped shall have perished, who shall put to use all the money he shall have adoringly accumulated?  The pesky pest, of course!  Legal tender bills and financial certificates may all taste delicious to the ever-gnawing cockroach, until he himself has to perish.

Behold!  The Blue Ball spins and travels around Fireball Sol, against the vast expanse of black emptiness.  The fate of the Thinking Biped, and all of those close and distant cousins he has likewise so mindlessly imperiled, still hangs in the balance, as a growing global movement strains to overcome formidable difficulties and rescue the Earth for all of them.43

Will the Thinking Biped and all his cousins on the Browned-Blue Ball be able to "live happily ever after" for many more years?

Baby Bipeds now "cooing and gooing" in their cribs may indeed live and grow up, but perhaps not exactly very happily.

For the mind now staggers at how much worse our environmental problems could have gone by the time they grow up and try to live on, and make a living from, this very same Blue Ball Earth.

These cute and helpless infants are now silently but forcefully demanding from their parents a more confident assurance on their future even as we chase after the clock all day everyday for short-term survival.

It won't be long before they learn of the word "Why?" and start using it in endless strings on us, their Biped parents.

"Why don't we see around anymore any of the trees shown here in these beautiful pictures?  Why did they all die?  Why did those people kill the poor trees?  Why were they allowed to do it?  Why…?

"Why do we always have 'seas' in the streets?  Why does all that water rush down from the mountains?  Why…?

"Why can't we drink water from the faucet? Why do we all have to keep wearing these breathing masks all the time?  Why…?

"Why?  Why?  Why?" the Biped babies of today will be asking us quite soon.  

And, no thanks to us, chances are they won’t be able to "live happily ever after."

A nightmare… this is nothing short of a nightmare just waiting to unfold before our eyes that are widely awake because we have not been able to escape the haunting ghost of Malthus…44

F COURSE IT DOESN'T really have to happen just this way.  No, not at all, Major Tom!  The nightmare can be turned into a dream of paradise regained. That is, if enough Thinking Bipeds the world over validated the word sapiens on the name of the species…

For starters, nations of the  world must come together as one to stand before the rest  of the bio-diverse citizens and elements of our living planet Gaia, and take full responsibility for past and present environmental destruction.45  The critical mass is building up for this, especially with such efforts as the Earth Charter process46 and a successful series of worldwide Earth Day and World Environment Day commemorations.47

Yes, the Thinking Biped should be saying sorry not only to his yet unborn babies, but to all his close and distant cousins and their babies.  He should fully grasp in theory, policy and actual behavior the drive for Sustainable Development -- which means "meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs."48 -- and rise even beyond such framework.  As a fully Thinking, and actually spiritual being, the Biped is fully capable  of Deep Ecology.  It is only the matter of having too many blinders now that prevents him from pursuing even just the framework of Sustainable Development.

Deep Ecology goes beyond Sustainable Development. It is about respecting and preserving all life forms, loving all incarnations of all life forms, wherever they are and whatever they look, not only because  we need them but more so because we are awed and overjoyed to be part of this great Symphony of Life itself.

A person steeped in the philosophy of Deep Ecology would be concerned with the sufferings of the sea birds now awash in oil slicks from spills, or with the elephants being slaughtered for tusks they would leave behind, anyway, when they die, or with whales being beached in big numbers, as much as they would be appreciative of the plants and animals right around them, as much as they'd smile at butterflies -- and at future butterflies -- and lovingly fondle each baby leaf within reach of their fingertips.

Not many people have reached this level of consciousness, although the number is growing.  The Biped is gradually discovering an internal synergy of mind and heart

On this basis, enough Thinking Bipeds can lovingly commit a conscious synergy of efforts to rescue and heal, conserve and exalt, our Mother Earth.  Now, that would a giant leap for Humankind right back to the bosom of our home planet, undoubtedly a euphoric historic event that would herald a new way of life for all Earthians.49 It will be no less than a paradise regained where all on Blue Ball Earth can benefit from holistic progress in philosophy and science.50

You're smiling, Major Tom.  Because it can be done?  Of course, it can be done! It would take a whole lot of effort, but it can be done if everyone, including you, would take the first step and…

"Gr-xsssstt.."

…think very deeply about all these…

"Ground Control…xssst! "

…and be prepared to start acting…

"…to Major xssstt -om!"

…as a fully-actualized Human.

"Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit's back on!  Can you hear me, Major Tom?  Please respond…   We have saved this mission!"

"Greetings from the hi-tech Tin Can up here, to all you guys down there in Houston!"

"All the world down here, Sir!  There has been a vigil with full media coverage after your space capsule's systems went dead.  We've been waiting all this time to hear your voice again.  The President is monitoring.  He's really concerned about your safety and, of course, about the spacewalk mission.  Your vital signs are A-okay! How are you feeling now, Major Tom?"

"Well, you have saved your mission. And I have just discovered mine."

-o0o-

1 The song Space Oddity was written by David Bowie. It was recorded by Bowie on Mercury in 1969. [Source: Jingle Clan Publications.]  The continuation elsewhere in this booklet of the "dialogue" between "Ground Control" at the Space Center in Houston, Texas and Major Tom is added by the author and does not come from Bowie's song.