Dragons of Earth

If we think that the world is here for us we will continue to destroy it the way we have been destroying it, because we think we can do no harm.
-Douglas Adams



 We are eating the world alive. But that is okay, because the world is eating itself alive as well. And the poop that we poop contains the raw material the world needs to make more world, along with the corpses we leave behind and other odd bits of hanging that disgust us so much.

We are eating the world, but that is okay, so long as we don't eat it all up before it can make more.

And that is the problem. In the manga 'X', and the anime of the same name, we see a battle between the Dragons of Heaven and the Dragons of Earth. The Dragons of Earth are trying to destroy humanity; because left unchecked, humanity will devour the world. The Dragons of Heaven oppose the Dragons of Earth and are apparently the good guys, given sympathetic depictions and heroic character design, but these heroes never dispute the Dragons of Earth in their assertion that humans will devour the world. And thus they are us, perfectly explained.

We are eating the world, and have been for as long as we have lived on it. That is not the problem, the problem is that we are eating too much too fast, for the world to grow more of itself. The problem is that we know this, but do not want to stop.

So we live our neurotic little lives, like the Dragons of Heaven, Battling the Dragons of Earth, but offering no reason why we should be spared.

For us, there is no longer a fundamental mystery about Life. It is all the process of extraordinary eruptions of information, and it is information which gives us this fantastically rich, complex world in which we live; but at the same time that we've discovered that we are destroying it at a rate that has no precedent in history, unless you go back to the point when we are hit by an asteroid!
-Douglas Adams