"Today we call these dead bodies coal. Carboniferous scale trees are still the largest single part of our CO2 emissions, and largest part of our fossil fuels. If there is a god looking down on all of this, the act of us digging up these old carboniferous remains to return their stored heat to the atmosphere must have a pleasing symmetry to it.
We are killing ourselves with climate change (again), by returning the scale trees to the surface of the world, and undoing their oxygen crimes with our own carbon dioxide crimes. We are releasing their ghosts into the air we breathe in our wild and unstoppable desire to grow, use more, burn more, spread more, be everywhere and always the sovereigns of the earth, like the Lepidodendron once was.
This time though, we are the kind of Earthlings that can know what we're doing while we are doing it. It remains to see if we are the kind that stop the cycle in time.
Life learns, but it never learns easy, including human life. We've replaced the plant-greed with a greed for the imaginary ideas of money and power. We're rationalizing it in our society based on a certain capitalist theory of economy, which has often depended on the coal graves of those trees. (And more recently, added the dead, compacted bodies sea creatures as oil and natural gas)
Organisms, I tell ya, they never stop being crazy."
https://cassandrazine.com/the-symmetry-of-suicidal-capitalism-and-carboniferous-forests/
#Ecology #Environment #Capitalocene #CarboniferousForests #Coal #FossilFuels #ClimateChange #Capitalism
