The
Little Green Planet
There was once a
Little Green Planet circling a beautiful golden sun. Every day the
little planet would turn slowly round to warm all of herself except
her top and bottom which only got warmed a little each year, such
that they wore pretty white ice caps. She was a contented planet. Her
oceans, drawn up by the sun to form clouds and rain, watered much of
the land and fed rivers which returned the water to the sea. Many
trees and flowers grew; their leaves clothing the land with beautiful
greens of every shade, which the flower petals dappled with colour.
On the land, and in
the sea, animals, fish, birds and a host of other life forms were
born, lived and died. They obeyed the rhythm of life, built up over
the millions of years that the little planet had existed. Each living
thing had found a place to live and a food supply to meet its needs.
And for many, many years, the Little Green Planet hummed a happy tune
in harmony with all the life she supported.
But something
happened. For reasons no one knows, one sort of animal living on the
Little Green Planet started, ever so slowly, to grow a bigger brain
and become clever. Clever, but not wise.
These Brainies began to think about ways of getting food more easily
and building
more weatherproof places to shelter. When lightning came, they took
the fire it caused and found they could keep and use it for
themselves. They captured the young of some animals and tamed them as
companions and helpers. The men trained some of these to help in the
hunt for animals to bring back as food, while the women collected
roots and berries and minded their children and the fire.
The Little Green
Planet loved these new creatures, just as she loved all the others,
and they, in their turn, loved and respected her . Everything the
Brainies used, returned to the ground. The tools and clothes they had
learned to make, were mostly of animal or vegetable origin, and when
of no further use , broken or worn out, they decayed to feed the
soil. Of course, the stone tools remained stones, as they had always
been.
But cleverness, it
seems, leads to ever-more cleverness, with wisdom left, always
farther behind. One day, long, long ago, one of the Brainies found
that the clay underneath a cooking fire had gone hard. Up till then,
he had seen clay as something you could shape, but it always lost its
form when re-wetted. Being clever, he realised that they could mould
pots for food, water and the like, and then heat them in the fire to
become hard. But he was not wise enough to considered that pots might
get broken. Nor did he ponder how long a broken pot might lie about,
untidily, on the Little Green Planet, when its usefulness to the
Brainies was over.
The Little Green
Planet felt a tiny shudder go through her. Not an earthquake, they
were commonplace and part of growing up, but an emotional shudder,
like nothing felt since she had first cooled from a ball of molten
rock, all those millennia before. From that day, wherever the
Brainies lived on the Little Green Planet, they would leave broken
pottery, called shards, littering the ground when they moved on. “No
matter“, she thought, “the shards are only like stones, what’s
a few stones more or less?”
The Brainies would
travel from place to place, finding food where it grew naturally.
They collected seeds, roots and fruits. Being clever, they noticed
that whole new plants came from seeds, and they wondered if they
might grow their own food, handily in one place, saving a lot of
travel. At first they would just poke a hole in the ground and plant
the seeds. As time went by, they realised that digging the ground
gave their seeds an advantage against the weeds. In the beginning,
they dug their fields by hand and then, later, with a plough pulled
by animals. They used their clever brains to find the best land to
farm and this gave them more food. They discovered ways to store the
food through the winter, protected from weather, rats and decay by
cleverly built store houses. Their wandering days were over.
The Brainies soon
realised it would be a good idea to put all their rubbish in one pile
and slowly the pot shards and animal bones accumulated, as the rest
rotted back to the soil. And the Little Green Planet felt a tiny bit
itchy and dirty from these heaps, and sighed a small sigh.
But the Brainies did
not stop there. They found that fire could release metals from rocks
called ores. Gold, silver, copper, tin, and others, with which to
make wonderful jewellery and drinking cups - and weapons for hunting
and for killing one another. They replaced their old stone axes with
bronze headed ones, the faster to fell trees and to change the
landscape to their wishes. Then they learned how to make hotter fire,
using charcoal as fuel, and bellows to force the air through. The age
of iron was born.
And the Little Green
Planet looked on, a little unsure, as they dug great holes in her to
obtain the prized ores. But the Brainies still respected her, and
some even filled in their diggings when all the ore was gone, such
that she felt reassured - almost. As time went by they added
new-found chemicals to the iron, to make quality steels; swords of
great strength and sharpness, to wage ever more fierce war. (These
would one day followed by cannon, guns, tanks and warships to enable
terrible slaughter.) Steel fittings were added to wooden equipment
such that farming was even more efficient. When the steel broke or
wore out, it would lie in the ground, sometimes taking a very long
time to rust away, pricking The Little Green Planet like a splinter.
A sense of urgency
and agitation now filled the, slightly smoky, air round the Little
Green Planet. Brainies seemed always to want to go faster and to get
more for less effort. They seemed drunk with their ability to be more
and more clever. They began to sing a harsh song, no longer in tune
with the gentle, timeless hum of The Little Green Planet, as she went
on her measured way in space. Indeed, they sang so loudly that they
drowned out the Little Green Planets hum altogether. She looked on as
the Brainies built villages, then towns and cities, and ingenious
machines driven by the power of the flowing rivers. And as women and
children became enslaved to the machines, the Little Green Planet
became ever more sad.
Now in a mad rush
they called “progress” the Brainies discovered the power of steam
and the energy of coal and oil. They attacked the Little Green Planet
without restraint, leaving vast amounts of waste, compared to which,
the little shard and bone heaps, were as nothing. And the skies
became so smoky, in places, that even the Brainies could not breathe.
But still they were not done. They found out how to destroy tiny
amounts of a magic metal, dug from the Little Green Planet, to
release vast energy which rivalled the sun. They were now so short of
wisdom that they accepted, as a price worth paying, the terrible
waste matter produced. Worse by far than the mining slag-heaps which
had dwarfed the shard and bone piles, the Brainies were faced with
what they should do with this terrible rubbish, radiating deadly rays
for tens of thousands of years. After much arguing about the cost and
the trouble, they made deep holes in the Little Green Planet and hid
it inside her. They had lost all sense of respect for her. As the
underground dumps burned her, her love for the Brainies was sorely
tried. Then the Little Green Planet began to feel unwell - strangely
warm. She was getting a temperature. Whether from worry or from the
many attacks on her, she could not tell. Her pretty ice caps melted a
little and the oceans filled, ever so slightly, up.
But the Brainies had
no inkling of her distress, they were too busy with the next wild
dream - space flight. They started with little satellites on little
rockets, and as years passed, they invented clever fuels and clever
engines with which to throw more and bigger stuff into orbit, and
more smoke into the air. Soon the Little Green Planet was wearing a
lace wrap of criss-crossed rubbish orbiting equator to poles; every
point of the compass. Her sadness now became so overwhelming that she
turned blue. No longer was she the Little Green Planet, in harmony
with the Solar System and all the life forms she nurtured among her
greenery; now she was but a scraped, scarred, despoiled, disrespected
and polluted wreck, overrun by Brainies. When they finally became
clever enough to go to their Moon, the Little Green Planet felt the
heat of their giant rocket’s flame. She tried to warn the Moon but
he was dozing as usual. The Brainies rocket blasted fiercely away,
with all it’s clever technology working to perfection. When they
looked back, excitedly, out of the window at their home planet, the
Brainies were amazed to see how small and blue she looked. But to
this day, they have not found the wisdom to understand why.
4.1.05
Posted 3.5.06
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©
2006 Barrie Singleton. All
rights reserved.
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