On Writing -6-

“The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.” 
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

I finished Jurassic Park—loved it, 8/10—and in particular there's a long quote I'll paraphrase uttered by Ian Malcolm to John Hammond about the environment.  The above it a good reference to it, but in context, Hammond is talking about how humans are destroying the earth, while Malcolm essentially tells him to stop being so egotistical.  Humans are destroying the earth but it doesn't matter, because the earth will bounce back, will take over, will create a new environment, even if that environment is unsuitable for life as we have come to know it.

This is interesting to me because of the nature of my second manuscript, which does explore some of those concepts.  In general I do a cheapish thing and play to the pathos of our world, and the adventure it holds, but there're bits in there that focus on what it means to have a relationship with our earth as our civilizations change.  I try to walk the fine line between two separate spheres, but Malcolm's quote is something that I actually do believe, and have explored in a few drafts, and will explore in upcoming ones.

If you've read The World Without Us (which I'm re-reading, currently) or watched those fun Discovery Channel programs like The Future is Wild (probably crediting the wrong broadcasting network), future exploration and prediction is fun but wildly speculative.  Thing is, though, Malcolm, and by extension Crichton, is very correct when he says that the earth will certainly survive us.  It's popular to talk about how our resources won't be able to sustain a population that consumes it as we have been doing without any change, and that much is true, and so some imaginations run wild and we talk about building colonies underwater or on the moon.  But I wonder how many people think about the earth reshaping its atmosphere, or its landscapes, or its seas and lakes, to the point where we realize what once WAS hospitable is no longer?  That's a thought.