The Human Cancer

For some indefinite time (it probably gurgled up during my undergraduate years, when such metaphysical ideas tend to gurgle up, adolescent, often with the aid of various medications, legal and otherwise) I’ve had the notion that the human species is a cancer on the earth, destructively eating away the planet, at least metaphorically if not actually. But as I grow nearer to my end, I suspect more and more that it may not be either adolescent or metaphoric, that the escalating climate degradation, carbon emissions in the atmosphere, proliferation of pesticides into the soil and streams, spread of floating garbage (pelagic plastic) throughout the oceans, and mountains of toxic trash that ring the planet – all of this detritus of human civilization is but Nature’s dark side, the proliferation of a cancerous species whose purpose is to procreate exponentially, waste, and finally wipe the globe clean. It doesn’t matter to me or my generation, or any other – except the last one, the final generational pustule that dies with the planet, viral but innocent, infected by those of us who preceded, left to wither, waste, only to wonder why.