In the past, natural forces have shaped the environment. Now, unless a new round of volcanism erupts worldwide, or a comet courses in from outer space, or the possibility viewed by many of the "second coming," human activities will govern the destiny of earth's ecosystem. If humanity fails to seek an accord with nature, controls may be imposed involuntarily by the environment itself. It may soon be within human power to produce the republics of grass and insects that writer Jonathan Schell believed could be the barren legacy of nuclear War.

Is there room for optimism? Yes, but only if one can imagine the people of the year 2050 looking back at the mad spasm of consumption and thoughtless waste in the 20th century as an aberration of the history of human existence on our own earth, our own little island of consciousness somewhere in solar time.

To bring my discussion of conservation ethics a little closer to home I need to refer to a statement made at a recent Wasatch Front forum meeting that had to do with why more wasn't done in Utah and specifically in the Salt Lake valley to preserve a better quality of environmental life. Utah House Representative Frank Pignanelli stated that "One has to remember that the majority of the Utah legislature, 93% to be exact, believes in the second coming."

In a Time/CNN poll, over 800 Americans were asked, "Will the Second Coming of Jesus Christ occur sometime in the next 1,000 years?" 53% said Yes, and another 16% thought it highly probable.

Can one not ask the question: "At what point and time can the expectations of religious dogma become a self-destructive behavior to humanity?" Can not an occasional voice of Humanistic reflection, speaking directly, play a greater role in community interaction and individual thinking?

I would like to share with you my own Earth Day spirituality. For the sake of this presentation I wish to emphasize a highly personal, simple statement that I view as support for my own spirituality, deeply felt, that flows from my own experience as a student of the genealogy of life on planet earth. A genealogy of almost four billion years of life. Only in this context can I appreciate the millions of years of the evolution of man's imagination that gave rise to his dogmas and superstitions. One can almost come to some form of understanding, appreciation, and occasional forgiveness.

We now have evidence in fossils of simple cells, and the mats of sediment that aggregates these cells, that life on earth arose at least 3.5 billion years ago. It has, since then, extended upward in time in unbroken continuity to the present. We can all, quite literally, trace our ancestry from moss to mayfly to walrus.

The tree is an accurate metaphor for life's history: the origin of each current twig (we humans are one) is found going back through branches ever wider and sturdier to the common trunk of original cells nearly four billion years old. Extinction of a twig is a breach of continuity on this great scale. Of course, from a geological perspective, extinction is inevitable and necessary for maintaining a vigorous tree of life. We may also argue, both in the abstract and for life's actual history, that an occasional catastrophic episode of mass extinction opens new evolutionary possibilities by freeing ecological space in a crowded world.

But, you may well ask if these geological scales are appropriate for contemplating our own life and its immediate meaning.

Ours is a small twig indeed, but remember that it runs back four billion years to the central trunk itself. Our origin in Africa and our subsequent spread throughout the world form a complex and compelling tale expressing our continuity with the entire history of life. If we extirpate this twig directly by destroying our own ecosystem or lose so many other twigs that our own eventually withers away, then we have canceled forever a most peculiar and different, unplanned experiment generated among the billions of branches---a twig that could discover its own history and at the same time can appreciate its continuity via consciousness. Some of us have never extricated ourselves from the chain of being, and view life's history as a tale of linear progress leading predictably to the evolution of consciousness.

Some paleontologists and others who are knowledgeable tell us a much different story of the evolutionary life process. Stephen Jay Gould, a noted paleontologist, reaches, in his Reflections in Natural History, quite a different conclusion: "Consciousness is not a linear progression of evolution...Consciousness is a quirky evolutionary accident, a product of one particular lineage that developed most components of intelligence for other evolutionary purposes".

Through no fault of our own and by dint of no cosmic plan or conscious purpose, we have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited for such responsibility, but here we are. If we blow it we will permanently rupture a continuity of eons that dwarfs our own puny history to geological insignificance. I cannot imagine anything more vulgar, more hateful, than the prospect that a tiny twig with one peculiar power might decimate a majestic and ancient tree, whose continuity stretches back to the dawn of earth's time. If this twig is lost through man's extinction, consciousness may not evolve again in any other lineage during the 5 billion years or so left to our earth before the sun explodes.

Consciousness is the one characteristic we share with our own species. Though other life forms communicate their own self-awareness, the essence of life simply cannot be reduced to a simple fairy tale of presumed supernatural origin.

My own spirituality comes from both knowledge and the gut feeling that this very moment of consciousness is the result of over four billion years of evolution of life on this planet earth. I stand in absolute humbleness of that consciousness and it is this spirituality that I wish to share.

--Ron Healey, Earth Day 1993