Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it wrote Buckminster Fuller. Spaceship Earth, I like the term! I like Mother Nature too! Today as I write these words millions around the world are stranded as volcanic ash clouds have claimed full right to the sky, not willing to share it with our tiny Spaceships. There is no alternative but too wait for the clouds to pass.
Nature often calls us to order, but we rarely listen. We always find a way to wriggle out of the situation. This time it did look different though there are now pressures from commercial interests to once again not listen. You see too much money is at stake. As we all know for the past many days flights have been grounded the world over leaving people stranded and lost. All carefully conceived plans went awry, our supposedly reliable flying machines became unsafe, the sky we had thought was ours to conquer was reclaimed by its rightful master. Nature had rapped us on our knuckles and we just had to listen. Man’s hubris was suddenly shaken, albeit for a short time.
As I write these words many are looking for that non-existent instruction book in the hope to find a solution that would restore man’s supremacy on everything: land, water, sky, space. But till then we just have to wait.
There is a lesson to be learnt: patience. Something we have forgotten. The clouds will pass and things will come back to what we call normal till the next warning. Sadly it is a foregone conclusion that we will again not mend our ways and continue our frenzy to master all with the sole objective of earning more wealth. We will continue to build on flood plains, to expand our concrete jungle, to cut trees, to rape Nature. We will insist on writing our own and faulty instruction book, one that suits our petty and pathetic interests and doggedly follow it.
Where will it all end? No one knows. Prophets of doom and cynics have their own interpretation. I am still looking mine.
