Earth Day and Human Evolution: The Humbling of Humans Essay

The celebration of Earth Day marks a stage in the development of human global awareness and thus an important step, however small or tentative, in sustained human evolution. Earth Day is all about us, as a specie, trying to reconnect with the environment that has allowed us to evolve and continues to provides us with the spatial and material context within which we continuously learn and thus evolve further. Humans are but an animal Specie, albeit a privileged one for its sentience, in the so-called Spaceship Earth. Humans were â€Å"born† in the womb of this living spaceship with its potentially finite and changing resource base. Earth has provided the unique combination of elements and conditions for a sentient carbon-based life form to evolve from being a possibly simple bacteria-like existence, to become the dominant, earth ravaging specie proudly known to itself as Homo Sapiens. Part and product of the process of evolution is the creation of awareness and consciousness. Humans, as far as we know, are the only fully self-aware and conscious of all animals with his/her ability to conceptualize, think in abstractions, and even laugh at himself and his ways. This ability to think in abstract terms has led to the notion of celebrations and Earth Day is one such human creation. The designation and celebration an Earth Day marks the maturation of the human specie, in a manner of putting, as it suggests a global awareness of the specie’s need to survive given its exploding population and resource requirements. For the specie to evolve further, it must first address the more basic issue of survival. Survival in the world today means addressing global or earth-level concerns and the celebration of Earth Day is just one simple and humble way by which humans have been humbled by the Environment.