In my mind is a scene in “Sunshine”, Danny Boyle’s film. In it, Cory, or the actress Michelle Yeoh has been hacked to death and yet she holds in her hand the survivor seedling from the horribly destroyed greenhouse of their ship. It’s in my head because in reel and real life, nature is being butchered and most people forget that plants are alive and the best part of their being alive is that they allow people to live. Isn’t it blissfully simple? Yet people are lazy and just whine about global warming. Hello! A decade ago, I was doing a thesis about information from TV (at that time, there wasn’t cable and National Geographic-the magazine came out on a regular basis and the TV program has pretty rare sightings hereabouts.) and how it affected the behavior of high schoolers. Greenhouse effect, global warming, deforestation, the ozone layer were terms I included to test their ability to recognize telltale signs of environmental disaster. It turned out they knew, some of them knew the definition of such terms. But behaviorally, I should’ve said at the time, that knowing what those kids knew then, they hardly made an effort to sort things out and prevent what the majority of them and their contemporaries are whining about today: global warming. Leo Di Caprio today is calling attention to global warming and its serious effect on the world and it’s good that some are paying attention due to his stellar contributions to the environment. But the tsunami, the hurricanes, the landslides and the freak floods, are enormous signs we experience nowadays and still many are clueless, that many of these big, easy to see, very obvious manifestations are connected to human wastage of energy, pillaging of natural resources, and picnicking outdoors and leaving their trash and causing brushfires. Yes, many shrug and to appease themselves say to themselves , “It was on fire when I sat on it”. Now, I’m not gonna be the person these people (you know who you are) pinpoint as exaggerating and anti-progress or the unflattering “tree-hugging chick”. I’ve been wheezing in the mornings again, because people have gone straight back to the dark ages and despite the Philippines’ Clean Air Act have deemed it very responsible and clean to burn the trash they sweep. They make it a high point of their day, striking their matches, burning plastic, paper and whatever stands between their feet and the pavement.
Thing about Mother nature (happy mother’s day in advance Mama Earth), she doesn’t nitpick. She doesn’t care who or what stands in the way of her spring cleaning. She’s just like these people I’m talking about here, only she follows no timetable (ergo, volcanoes explode at will) and spares no saint nor sinner. To her we are but inhabitants of her vast space and she moves and grooves no matter if you built your high society dream house right on the rim of an active volcano in Tagaytay. Scenes of calamity are beginning to roll in your head too huh?
So like Cory in the movie, I’ve gone back to the dependability of nature, because we are for most of our lifetimes here on earth, very undependable, very selfish, and think we are so godly. Millions of us think we’re cool, not stopping for a second to think if we’re so cool, why then are we whining in 2007 about global warmin’! How I’ve gone back is by eating veggies (no, I’m not vegan), pulling out seeds and putting them in some soil so I could grow me some veggies at the same time, “grow” me some oxygen for my hardworking lungs. Plants are so dependable, my ampalaya seedling, has yielded no fruit yet, but lotsa leaves for a simple vegetable salad. I had okra for dinner last night and before cooking, I took some seeds out to plant in a pot of soil. I’m thinking, I should’ve done this earlier, like in February or March so I’d have big seedlings by now already. I always think like this when it comes to such plants because unhindered growth results in many happy harvests. It puts global warming in a better perspective too. Yes, I know that in your head you’re also saying we should have done better things before our current blistering condition. Yes, we’re too late the hero; Jacques Costeau was just in the nick of time. It was on fire when I sat on it.
That’s the difference between our species and the plant species. They’re dependable and do not have think tanks that twist ideas into complicated, fuzzy ideas that aren’t cool at all (yes, I’m trying to make you remember about the Guimaras oil spill here that Petron wrought not long ago).
We have cool, hi tech, next level ass-kicking little machines already in our hands.
Try not to use them for corny thoughts that people usually put out there for friendster, google and youtube.
