While looking into this issue I watched the Leonardo DiCaprio documentary called “The 11^th Hour”. This film is a complete buzz kill; if you are having a good day don’t watch this film, it makes you feel like a total waste. The film has many noted politicians and scientists who talk about how we are near impending doom if we don’t fix something in the near future. It has all your basics for a good environmental documentary: ice caps melting, global warming/climate change, over population, extinction and the eventual end to human kind. However, through the doom and gloom, the end of the film has a tone of hope and an optimistic view that everything will be well in the end. 

From this film is where I acquired the idea of whether to live for today or tomorrow. The film made me believe that we need to live today however not for today. We need to live for tomorrow but to do this we need to be changing things today. In the film they state that we don’t know how long we have before things really get out of hand, but by the models it doesn’t look like we have much longer. This is a scary and sobering realization; we need to change things now.  

After watching the documentary, I read an article from Spiked (an online magazine) titled “The Deification of Earth” by Rob Lyons. In his article he talks about James Lovelock’s idea that the earth “Gaia” is a living entity and how he doesn’t approve of the idea. Lyons believes that as a human race we need to live for ourselves and not towards the planet. He doesn’t express his own ideas as much as Lovelock’s, he just goes on explaining how he does not agree with Lovelock’s ideas.

So after seeing the film and reading the Lyons article the question arises, what do we do, live for ourselves or live for our earth. In Lyon’s article, he makes it clear that the earth is not a living organism and how we should live for ourselves rather than the earth, he states, “That’s a very different thing from suggesting that we should care about the Earth for its own sake rather than for human interest.” Living this way is exactly why our world is in the state that it is. We live in a current need and want mindset; however there is a larger picture behind everything.  In “The 11^th Hour” Dr. Andrew Weil and Theo Colburn talk about how cancers, birth defects, childhood disorders, and many other diseases are on the rise due to pollutions here on our earth. Now if living for today has consequences like these I’m not too sure if this is what we want to be doing.

Between the film and article there were differences on the outlooks of the human species. In the film David Suzuki states that, “life has existed on earth for 3.8 to 4 billion years. Over that time there have been a lot of species. But you know what, 99.9999, four decimal points, percent of all species that have ever existed are extinct.”  That’s a real eye opener when the earth has been around for that long and it has only taken less than two hundred years for us to put it in danger. Turning to the article, Rob Lyons states that, “In this respect, Gaia is mysticism, pure and simple, an anti-human concept that really suggests that our existence is no more worthy than that of any other living thing.” Here are two completely different views, my outlook on the topic is that if all those other species have gone extinct, why not us, and when is it our turn? I would like to think never, but to be realistic, the odds are against us. I don’t know how Lyons can say that we are not on the same playing field as all the other species of animals. For a situation like this, I believe in the long run we might even be at a disadvantage compared to other animals. The way that we are currently living our lives on earth the chances of our survival goes down due to our pollutants, emission of green house gasses, and lack of natural resources, I believe without a doubt a change is needed.

In all honesty, I wish we could live our lives without having to constantly worry about how we are constantly endangering our planet, however that is not a possibility in our day and age. We have to live for our planet now. Now with knowing how bad we are truly treating our earth, the question changes from do we live for today, to, can we live for today? I believe that we can live our lives happily today we just need to have the future in mind. Both “The 11^th Hour” and Rob Lyons article talk about how we are just another species, the world will go on without us like it did millions of years before us and we as humans are just changing things up a little bit. In the film some consider that the earth a living organism and we as humans are killing it. However in Lyons article he states, “Even if the Earth were to meet some internationally agreed, dumbed-down definition of life, it would recognize that the Earth is alive in much the same way that bathroom mould is alive.” To an extent I agree with both points of view, I don’t necessarily believe that the earth is living but I do believe that we are harming it with our actions.

It’s all up to us, what do we want to do, live in a dark wasteland or live harmonically on our flourishing earth. I believe that if we live for today, that imminent wasteland will be surrounding us and taking us with it. But if we live for tomorrow I believe we can happily live with our planet without it chewing us up and spitting us out. So to wrap this up, I would like you to think; if I don’t change the way that I’m living who will make the change? Will it be your children or possibly their children or will there be no significant change, who knows I guess that’s for time to tell. However, that’s not the point, my point is to get you to think, should I live for today or live for tomorrow?