There are a few bumper sticker slogans that I enjoy reading. Like the one that said "Visualize Whirled Peas." Even funnier was the sticker on a bumper that said "I Hate Bumper Stickers."
There are bumper sticker slogans that I used as examples of incorrect grammar. "Eat Local" is my favorite. I have always felt the urge to take a sharpie and add "ly" to make it a grammatically correct "Eat Locally."
One of the most incorrect and arrogant messages in bumper stickers is "Save The Planet." Are these people so vain that they think they can save the planet? A planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years, on which we homo sapiens have existed for a mere 200,000 years.
Let's do that math here: 200,000 out of 4.5 billion is 0.00004. We haven't been here for a measurable fraction of time and we think we can save the planet?
COVID-19 has adequately demonstrated that we humans cannot even save ourselves from an invisible virus, which has set us back in so many ways. If anything, such a humbling experience should lead us to yelling out mayday! "Save Our Souls" should be the bumper sticker. But then that would draw unnecessary attention from the religious fundamentalists. Perhaps the bumper sticker ought to be a simple "SOS.” But that would mean something else to ABBA fanatics!
Plenty will be said and written about Earth Day, and I am getting a head start here!
My atheism and a sincere belief that there is nothing for me after this life ends does not mean that I am going to trash this place while I am here. I care for, and worry about, the natural environment—the living and inanimate—because of a deep conviction that the cosmos is not merely about us humans and our own comfortable material existence.
I am concerned about all things around me. I don't even want to kill spiders or ants. Unless they directly interfere with my life. I don't want to see ants in my kitchen, but I don't care if they are having a party on the sidewalk outside my home. I don't like to see spiders or flies or gnats inside my home. When I do see them inside, well, I do kill them. But I feel bad for them. I feel guilty when I crush those tiny critters. Sometimes I even apologize to them, as if that makes any difference to the ant!
I cannot imagine how scientists do experiments on animals; I would think that it is nothing but watching them suffer. If from those experiments we derive some life-extending benefits to humans, are our additional years worth all that suffering we put the animals to? Why this human supremacy?
I worry about the natural environment, the living and the non-living. But, I am not ideologically fully in the environment camp, leading some to view me with suspicion that I am one of those right-wing guys, even as the right-wing people think that I am a tree-hugging nutcase!
I don't ever get trapped into the Earth Day rhetoric of "save the planet" either. The planet has no feelings. It just is. The mantra should never be, should never have been, "save the planet" when it is about saving ourselves. It is about the every day life (and death) issues, starting from how we treat the rivers and the mountains, the ants and the elephants, and fellow humans, ... that Earth Day should be about.
We need to think of every single day as Earth Day.
The undergraduate years gave me the time and space for me to figure out how I viewed many aspects of life, including religion. The internal tensions related to religion and the various daily practicalities of life resulted from the years of brainwashing. I had yet to start any serious reading and thinking about how screwed up other religions might be.
Graduate school provided me that opportunity too. While I did not take courses on religions, many of the books and articles that I read, and the lectures that I attended, gave me insights. One of those was about the relationship between god, nature, and humans.
In the traditional approaches in the various strands of Hindu faith, and among indigenous peoples across the world, there is plenty of nature worship. Mountains are sacred as are rivers and trees. Like how Mount Kailash, and the nearby Manasarovar Lake, are sacred to Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and the traditional Bon faith of Tibetans. Even killing the damn roaches troubles the really faithful ones. It is a tragedy that despite such messages in the religion, the devoutly Hindu nationalists care less about pollution and are far more interested in the pursuit of absolute power.
I suppose one thing that is common to most believers around the world. irrespective of their religions, is how much they are in favor of trashing the planet, instead of observing every single day of life as Earth Day!
Three things that we can all do rather painlessly in order to save our souls ourselves:
1. Reduce consumption
2. Eliminate (or at least reduce) food waste
3. Vote for people whose policies are the least destructive to the immediate and the global environment.