A CREATION MYTH: THE RETURN OF THE GIANTS

Here is a story that runs counter to the current human narrative. Life is abundant by nature, and is always unfolding into new forms, guided by the care and imagination of Mother Earth. The plants were the first to cover the earth in their abundance. The animals, a different kind of life, were enabled to prosper by the plants. It was the time of the giants, both plant and animal.

But as the plants flourished, they used up their food, carbon dioxide, storing it in their bodies as they died and rested underground.

 

Humans arrived when CO2 had reached a record low: much lower and plant life itself would have been threatened. Plants by this time existed in nowhere near the abundance of their glory days, and most of the giants were long gone. Humans quickly spread over the earth, and in the blink of an eye by geological time, began to use the buried plants for their own prosperity. Insodoing they also began to give food back to the plants, which responded with the great re-greening of the earth that we are starting to see. Already an area 1.4 times the size of the USA has re-greened.

 

It is early days yet. CO2 is at 400ppm, while the historical norm is several thousand ppm. Temperature is also at a historic low, and that too is currently recovering, though for reasons that are less clear. It is a wonderful win-win, as human prospering spawns a wider natural prospering.

 

The purposes of what we call Evolution are mysterious. But did Mother Earth have a hand in creating humans partly to help her first children, the plants, prosper again?

 

Humans are a tropical species. We eventually die of exposure unclothed in temperatures as high as 60 F. The warming of the earth and its increasing abundance reminds us of who we once were, that we have maybe forgotten.

 

Humans are contrary, easily thrown out of alignment with the natural world. A large part of the species currently sees the good they are doing to nature as a bad thing. But that is to be expected from this species, the new-born ones who do not yet know who they are, or their part in the bigger scheme of things. Will they gain more sense over time? It is Mother's Earth's hope.