Dear Little Rubbery Lumps Who Love Metal And Fire So Much

Hey everybody,

It's me, Earth. Yeah, I know you thought my voice would be a lot lower, like that Morgan Freeman guy. Or maybe I'd be a woman and more matronly.

That's kind of the problem: You have a lot of misconceptions about me.

Like, first of all, that I give a shit about you.

Get this, I am 4.54 billion years old. Life has been around for 3.5 billion. Mostly boring single-cell colonies. A bunch of slime. -Literally. Not much for personality, but at least they were predictable.

Then about 500 million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion (your term, not mine) happened and trilobites showed up. They looked sort of weird but were mostly harmless.

Then, my favorite: dinosaurs. 160 million years of dinosaurs. That was pretty awesome. There were these giant plants everywhere, and you had crazy shit like sauropods stomping around. (Argentinosaurus: 100 TONS!) So much meat, and life, and excitement.

They got taken out from orbit. *shrug* It's happened four other times. I think of it as putting on a fresh change of clothes.

Most recently, i.e. around 6 million years ago, you all showed up. We got along pretty well for... basically the first 5.99995 million. Honestly, I thought you were a bunch of charmingly-unsophisticated savages who were happy to eat berries and grunt at one another. Once in a while you got lucky and killed a mammoth, it was a great day for team sports.

But then you developed this unhealthy fascination with metal and fire.

And hey, don't get me wrong, metal and fire are great. There's nothing I love better than a good volcanic eruption or a rich vein of hematite weaving its way through a majestic outcropping of stone. Heck, my core is an iron-nickel alloy.

But does it have to be fucking EVERYWHERE?

I mean, the past (wow, it hurts my brain to think in such short time periods) 300 years have been pretty fucked up. First, you seem rather intent on killing each other - which is actually a rather natural phenomenon when one species achieves some sort of unnatural imbalance over everything else. (Ask me about ichthyosaurs sometime. SO ill-tempered.) But second, you seem really big into having it YOUR way.

Like, a while a go, someone really smart I know came up with this thing called horses. They're pretty awesome. In fact, you guy were best buds for the longest time. But then some genius decided it was too much work to grow oats and give them apples. It was much better to drill a hole in the ground, suck out millions of gallons of oil, refine it, and pour it into a 2000-lb. metal machine that turns gasoline into poisonous smoke. Somehow that was better than shoveling shit and putting it on your roses.

And before that, there was coal. (Actually you still have this sick dependence on coal, but I think you get my point.)

Yeah, yeah - call me a crabby old simpleton who hates technology. What do you want? I'm the Earth. I'm 4.5 billion years old, I have maybe another 500 million years of habitable climate left in me. I'm entitled to be a little judgmental.

So now, apparently, I get this day. Sooooo typical human short-term mindset. Imagine your birthday celebration was 1/100th of a second of your entire life, how appreciated would you feel?

But of course, Earth Day is actually all about making YOU feel better. It's not MY day. As I mentioned earlier, I don't need your recognition. I don't even need your care. To be honest, if you fuck things up for yourselves, something else will come along. It always does.

Like a fresh change of clothes.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to calving off chunks of the polar ice caps.

Best of luck to you in your future endeavors,

-The Earth