Mother Earth

Today I was afraid of night.

You know that feeling you get when you're walking alone in the dark, and suddenly the hairs on your arms and the back of your neck stand up and you glance back over your shoulder to see if anyone is following you but you find nothing, and simultaneously your heartbeat and stride quicken?

I had that sensation all the way home, and what's worse, I didn't even feel safe once I got inside my house and locked the doors. I'm listening for all sound and have the creeping suspicion that someone is watching me even though there's no one around. There's an unusual scratching at my window that has me on edge. Maybe the source of my paranoia is the mere four hours of sleep I blew through in the past 48 hours.

I notice that I've been posting fairly regularly, almost on a daily basis. I guess that's what I intended when I started this though, a regular outlet for my rants and ruminations. It's channeled some of my mental energy in a more productive way, it seems.

Tonight I saw the new M. Night Shyamalan movie, The Happening, with Loopis. To the best of my knowledge, it's his first R-rated film, and not at all what I expected. It's probably the best yet of all his films.

Essentially, the main plot was Earth recognizing humans as a threat, and biologically retaliating against us.

I enjoy but am also terrified by this new wave of what-will-happen-to-humans-if-we-stay-on-this-destructive-path films. The Happening in particular struck me.

It's difficult for me to imagine how few people respect the planet on which we live. We as a race litter, pollute, exploit and degrade all of Earth's natural resources. We fail to realize that Earth is itself a living organism, though it's easy to deduce that we are living organisms, and living organisms must be supported by an environment of other living organisms; therefore in order to sustain life Earth must itself be living.

This is what I liked about the movie: plants of all species began to target humans as a threat, and respond chemically to protect themselves and ensure their survival. I'm no biologist, but I believe that there is an exchange of chemicals and energy between living things in an environment, and I also believe that an organism can withstand only so much damage before it evolves to protect against further destruction.

Being a psychology major, neuroanatomy is only a small portion of my studies, and so I am not nearly an expert on the subject. However, if it has been shown that plants being eaten by caterpillars (thus viewing them as a threat) can release a chemical to attract wasps which in turn eat the caterpillars, then why can't they evolve to release a chemical that is detrimental to human life in some fashion?

I am not a proponent of Shyamalan's movie-theory, which is that plants will evolve to emit a neurotoxin that prevents the binding of certain neurotransmitters with the receptor sites of an axon in some specified serial order; I disagree because there is not a serial transmission of neurochemicals in the brain. Nor is there any airborne toxin I know of that will instigate mass suicide.

Regardless, I believe it will come to pass that Earth will reach its limit and retaliate against us for all of the stress we have placed upon it, and will involve an extremely large number of deaths.

The message here is respect yourself, respect your home. Your planet is your home.

I would like to move to a more rural area to better connect with nature, and to ask for its forgiveness.