A DIFFERENT WINDOW: MAYBE, MAYBE NOT

We human beings get great satisfaction from classifying things. We separate everything into neat little boxes with labels on them. We have invented a box called the food chain. In this box we have compartments where we have put everything that takes in food.

We have decided which of these objects is "highest" and which is "lowest." We, being the conceited beings that we are, have put ourselves In the compartment that has the label of highest. Plants we put in the area called lowest. Plants are considered to be lowest on the food chain. Maybe, maybe not.

Could be we have gotten it backwards. We seem to be in the habit of doing that. Don't we?

Most plants don't kill anything in order to eat. Plants don't waste anything. Vegetation is 100 percent recyclable. Plants don't even need us human beings, who have declared themselves to be the highest on the food chain, to live.

Plants give back everything they take from their environment. Plants nourish the world. They produce our food. Whether we ever eat a fruit or a vegetable we are still I dependent on plants for our nourishment. if all we ever eat Is meat, we are eating animals that have eaten plants.

Everything In this whole system we call the food chain can be traced back to being dependent on plants is some way. No one would ever say that plants are not a living thing. Whether we eat meat or not, we are still eating a living thing.

Of course it is us human beings who have decided what is to be labeled as living and what isn't. We have chosen to classify animals as more "alive" than plants. We have declared that earth, minerals, and water are not living things. Maybe they are. Maybe not.

The Indians considered the earth and sky as living things. They considered the earth as their mother. The sky was their father.

Plants and animals were their equals and were treated as gifts, as were the earth and sky. These gifts were treasured and cared for. They were treated with reverence and respect.

Plants are dependent on earth and sky in the form of sun and rain. Earth is more than dirt. It is living. It is constantly changing. It yields Itself up to plants for their life. In a sense plants eat earth, sun, and water. Can you see how dependent we are on the things plants are dependent on?

Chief Seattle warned Congress as far back as 1854, "Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself."

We are intelligent beings. We tell ourselves we are the most intelligent beings on earth. Maybe, maybe not. We have put ourselves in box and labeled it: 'Closest to God," by reason of being able to reason. Maybe, maybe not. It certainly doesn't look as if we are able to use our reasoning powers very well.

Albert Einstein said, "The benefits that the inventive genius of man has conferred on us in the last hundred years could make life happy and carefree, if organization had been able to keep pace with progress. As it is, in the hands of our generation these hard earned achievements are like a razor wielded by a child of 3 .... the results of technical progress are most baleful where they furnish a means for the destruction of human life."

We human beings have so far removed ourselves, placed ourselves so high above all things, that we are using the very things we depend on for our life as places to dump our garbage. We are dumping our refuse in our water, our air, and burying it and dumping it on our earth. Unlike plant refuse, our garbage is not food for other living things. Our garbage poisons all living things, including ourselves. What are we doing? Poisoning ourselves doesn't seem very intelligent, reasonable, or close to God.

According to Paul Hawkins, author of The Ecology of Commerce,"We have decimated 97 percent of the ancient forests In North America; every day we use 20 billion more gallons of water than can be replaced by rainfall, globally we lose 25 billion tons of topsoil every year, the equivalent of all the wheat fields in Australia."

Maybe it's time we stopped thinking of ourselves as being the most important things on this planet. Maybe we need to not just realize, but act as if we realize, that all things are put here by an intelligence greater than ours. That all things are here for a reason and that the existence of everything is dependent on the existence of all other things. Maybe all our eggs belong in one basket after all. Maybe it's time to realize that all things are equally important. Maybe it's too late to undo the harm we have done. Maybe not.