I visited the dinosaur museum in Drumheller last week, officially known as the Royal Tyrrell Museum. It's an incredible place with all sorts of information on prehistoric times. You want to know about the geological time periods? The answer is there. How about the theory of evolution? Yes, you can learn about it there too. However, the most impressive aspect of the museum is the amazing collection of skeletons it owns, a testament to the massive animals of a bygone age.
Like many people, I have seen those incredible movies in the Jurassic Park series, but nothing compares with actually looking up into the open jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I am so glad it was only a skeleton, for surely a close encounter with the real thing would have been terminal. It was massive, with the fleshless head towering over me, and the menacing jaws almost threatening, even now. Creatures like that roamed the earth and ruled it by virtue of their size and ferocity, but now they are gone. We even use a phrase to describe their demise, "gone the way of the dinosaur." And that got me thinking. What about us?
Today we are the top of the food chain, the king of the animals, and the cream of the crop. Nothing on earth compares to us, we have the technology and intelligence to elevate us so far beyond the rest of the animals that we have no rivals. But does that mean we are a permanent feature?
We are a supremely arrogant species when you think about it. We raise and kill animals for food, and most of us don't even think about it. We over-farm our lands and throw chemicals on the ground to enhance yield, and often care more about production numbers than we do about the nutritional content of what results. We deplete the earth's resources and pollute the planet with all sorts of muck in our water and atmosphere, and we demonstrate that we think we will never go the way of the dinosaur. How daft can you get?
Thankfully, there are voices that try to make us wake up. There are people who use organic methods of cultivation, inventors who seek alternative energy sources, politicians and activists who say "enough is enough" and stand up for sustainability. But so often they are ridiculed and sometimes silenced permanently, all because they dare to question the status quo of our advanced lifestyle, and the economic stronghold of certain industries.
Surely it is time to learn the lesson of the dinosaur. If they could have been asked, they might have thought they were permanent too. Maybe one day we will be blown apart by our own weapons of mass destruction. Maybe the ancient Mayans have it right and some interplanetary body will return in 2012 and smash us to smithereens, or maybe a new era of enlightened awareness will be ushered in, or a saviour will return. One thing is for sure, we cannot continue on our present path, for we are destroying the only lifeboat we have and threatening our very survival.
Do I have the answers then? Of course not, but I do have enough faith in humanity to believe that we are capable of making the changes we need to maintain our survivability and that of our home planet. But we need to wake up from our self-imposed slumber, we need to stop ignoring the cries of voices of reason in favour of the call of the mighty dollar, or one day there will be nobody left to spend those dollars.
We need to clean up our act and get serious about eliminating the use of fossil fuels in favour of clean energy. We need to redirect budgets from weaponry to sustainability. We need to stop thinking diversity and start thinking unity, the unity of the human spirit to ensure the human future. Degradation of the soils must be addressed, healthier nutritional content of food must become a goal, and after the recent Japanese disaster we even need to re-think the use of so-called safe nuclear power. Because, if we don't address these issues now, the alternatives that await humanity are frightening.
Imagine this... A million years from now, some intelligent species from another world visits a museum called earth; they walk through multimedia shows and finally come to the prize exhibit, a skeleton of a creature once known as man. Is this really far-fetched fantasy and science fiction? You decide!
