Published in Issue 15 of Pagan Ireland (Spring 2025). Get a copy of this issue here: https://paganireland.com/buyissues
Why are we here?
Good question!
Why indeed?
The planet has no use for us.
We are a blight.
For countless eons the Earth revolved around its sun. Forming and re-forming without any help whatsoever from humanity. Oceans and landmasses. Shifting and shuffling round the surface of the planet. Volcanoes erupting. Earthquakes and inundation. Life, somehow starting to take shape. Plants to produce the oxygen necessary for animals to emerge. Fossils show us the myriad forms that came before us. Extinction events that occurred after millions of years of stability. New life-forms gradually re-inhabiting the newly-formed planet.
Life and death in a constantly shifting harmony. A perfect synergy on land, in water, in the air. Each living being provided with its individual needs. Eventually settling into the Goldilocks world, filling up with life from equator to poles. A self-replicating, working mechanism within its protective atmosphere, just right for every kind of plant and animal to inhabit.
Until…
Humanity reared its large-brained head and started to assert its dominance. For the first few million years, this consisted only of hunting and gathering, not making too much of an impression on the planet as a whole.
But in the last few thousand years, all this has changed. No longer content to be part of the planetary being, modern man has increasingly made detrimental changes to the environment.
There are other questions, of course. Where did we come from? Does anybody know? Theories exist, but that’s all they are. In reality we have no idea. So, why are we here?
The speed with which we have evolved and developed is nothing short of astonishing. Stone tools were superseded by metal when some bright spark had the idea of digging ore out of the ground. Slowly at first, we developed agriculture, and animal domestication. What harm?
Warfare has been a constant, seemingly. Humans have an inbuilt desire to kill their fellow-man. Weapons were invented to make this more effective. It didn’t take long, in geological time, for flint-tipped spears to become atom-bombs.
Now we have the capability to destroy the planet, many times over.
Is it possible that the reason we are here is to cause the final extinction event? To destroy the beautiful intricate natural world we have been gifted? We are already well on the way.
Del Richardson
