“It took hundreds of million of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth -- eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with it surroundings.”
- Rachel Carson, p. 6
Perhaps it is man’s justification and hypothesis that if it took such an immense amount of time to create and establish life and all the living things’ behaviors, that it will take just as long for life to deplete itself. Perhaps we have spent too little time -- or rather, no time at all -- in accessing the potential dangers and outcomes in our actions. Perhaps this is all a part of our evolution as an especially unique species on this planet -- a sort of trial and error process that decides the general stasis of our ecosystem judged upon the way we behave amongst it. It seems as though the latter is most plausible. Through out our existence, we have duly acknowledged our superiority with much pride -- a pride so arrogant that most often than not, the human race has then had to learn the hardship of their actions. It is expressed through years of war, especially. We wage with war with ourselves, and unknowingly, with the environment around us. Only so few have recognized the strong bond we have in our place in the ecosystem. In the human mind, it is possible that these “eons of time” also reflect, again, the time it take for life, or more specifically, a species, to disappear. From observation, the general consensus believes that this is logical because things must operate symmetrically -- if you traced the growth of a species until its climax, it then has to reflect the same pace in the decrease. Unfortunately, considering the rapid rate at which we have grown, that is not the case since our creations have seemed to begat more bad than good. Carson mentions the “rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created” and how they “follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.” (Carson 7) Humans have distanced the gap between ourselves and nature, and the more we expand the gap, the more me make our connection with nature more obvious by the amount of harm we are inflicting upon it.