The Ecosystem of Earth

Earth is a tiny thriving planet in a vast universe, sandwiched between two worlds gone wrong—Mars, which once had water but is now a dry and freezing desert, and Venus, which was once similar to Earth but is now swirling with boiling, toxic cloud. Spinning on between them is Earth: golden, ripe for life. It’s is not a cold, indifferent place—it’s an ecosystem, a sprawling network of interconnected life, and you are part of it. Humans can’t be separated from nature, because we are connected to every living thing. We were an accident, grittily surviving and branching out in the tree of evolution to become what we are today. We are dominating this ecosystem, and the consequences of our actions ripple out to affect every other living being on the planet—sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way, but we don’t know how to balance. We search for life on other planets when we don’t even know how to look after our own. This is the only Earth we have, and perhaps it has created its own destruction.  Perhaps our ever-growing desire for technological advancement will bring about our own demise, our own extinction, in order to save the planet from ourselves—a Shakespearean tragedy on an immense scale. We are children of Earth, and we are killing it.