Tetsunori Koizumi, Director
There is a passage in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where Tess and her little brother Abraham engage in a conversation about stars while delivering beehives to the retailers in Casterbridge on the family wagon as their father did not wake up to do the job himself because of his excessive drinking the previous day. When told by Tess that most stars are splendid and sound, except for a few blighted ones, Abraham asks her: “Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?” Tess’s answer was: “A blighted one.”
As a country girl with no formal education, Tess was not able to give a more detailed answer than this to satisfy her little brother’s curiosity. But was Tess wrong about her description of the kind of star the earth was? When Tess of the d’Urbervilles was published in 1891, nobody had heard of “global warming.” As a matter of fact, it was only in the last few decades of the twentieth century that the phenomenon of “global warming” started to attract the attention of the general public, after the first reference to it in a scientific journal in 1975. If so, Tess’s—or Thomas Hardy’s—use of the expression “a blighted star” could be said to have anticipated the kind of climate change the earth would go through with global warming, including desertification of drylands around the world.
It should be noted that the earth, in the minds of so-called primitive peoples, had never been a blighted star but a life-giving and bountiful planet as exemplified by the Winnebago Indian saying: “Holy Mother Earth, the trees and all nature are witnesses of your thoughts and deeds.” Stewart Udall recognized, as he should have as one who was the Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, such attitude of primitive peoples towards the earth when he stated: “The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the native American shared this elemental ethic: the land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures.” (The Quiet Crisis, 1963) If primitive peoples had maintained a reverence for the life-giving and bountiful earth, it was those of us who call ourselves civilized that have transformed it into an inhospitable planet for all creatures, with the destruction of rain forests, the polluting of rivers and lakes, and the burning of fossil fuels in our passion to move around and enhance our material standards of living.
It is incumbent on us humans, however, to take care of the earth as the habitat for all creatures. Edward Wilson, an American naturalist and writer who passed away on December 26, 2021, reminds us of the need to preserve biodiversity as our sacred duty because the earth is our home, and “the human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves.” (The Meaning of Human Existence, 2014) Given that Edward Wilson used to be affectionately called “Ant Man” for his exhaustive study of ants, it is ironic that Donald Robert Perry Marquis, a fellow American writer, had warned of the possibility of the earth turning into a planet habitable only for insects like ants: “it wont be long now it wont be long/ man is making deserts of the earth/ it wont be long now/ before man will have used up/ so that nothing but ants/ and centipedes and scorpions/ can find a living on it” (archy does his part, 1935).
What happens to us humans when the earth becomes inhabitable? Some people are seriously contemplating the possibility of emigration, including scholars as evidenced by such recent titles as Emigrating Beyond Earth and Human Migration to Space. For business tycoons such as Jeff Bezos and Eon Musk, human emigration to other planets is not a futuristic dream but a worthwhile business venture as space-age technology is already available to us to carry us out of the earth. While technology is there, we humans are not ready for leaving the earth. As a matter of fact, Edward Wilson goes as far as calling emigration into space as “a dangerous delusion,” abandoning our sacred duty to take care of the earth as a life-giving and bountiful planet: “It is an especially dangerous delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when we have used up this planet.” (The Social Conquest of Earth, 2012)
If emigration into space is indeed a dangerous delusion, what are we to do? After all, it was not that we humans happened to pitch on a blighted star, as Tess’s little brother Abraham says. If the earth was once a life-giving and bountiful planet for us humans, it is our sacred duty to keep it that way by our constant effort to maintain biodiversity, with a full recognition of the fact that we share it with all other creatures. It would be useful to remind ourselves that the earth is “a little space ship,” as Adlai Stevenson, an American diplomat, so wonderfully put it in his 1965 speech to the United Nations: “We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.”