by Andru McCracken, Editor
I was in the middle of a food battle with an overtired, underfed, dehydrated toddler, wild eyed and plummeting down from a sugar high when my phone rang.
A man from Dunster was calling. He had the solution.
That’s what he said.
“I have the solution.”
It was in regards to the Earth. Until that moment, I had completely forgotten all about Earth Day , I was fully wrapped up in the chocolate covered holy feast day of the Easter Bunny.
I told him if he could be brief, I would give ear to the solution.
The Dunster man consented, and in a few words spelled out the solution that has evaded all since we have started dealing with the whole climate change, degraded Earth thing.
“Grow the Earth,” he said.
It’s simple. Grow the globe.
Even if we widened the Earth just a wee bit, by golly the volume of the atmosphere would increase many fold.
The bigger the globe, the bigger the atmosphere around us.
A bigger atmosphere could absorb more carbon dioxide.
A bigger Earth means new resources, new land, a fresh start and hope for the future.
From day one, environmentalists have been going about the whole thing all wrong.
We don’t need to change human behaviour to save the Earth, it’s the Earth that needs to change.
How big should we make it? Well, the sky is literally the limit.
I thanked the man and hung up the phone, feeling glad knowing that I held the answer to humanity’s looming environmental crisis. Centred now, I looked my toddler in her little red eyes and got in touch with my own feelings.
By golly, I was really hungry myself.
I took a scoop from the bowl of neglected toddler food and brought it to my own mouth. It was good.
“Mine,” cried the toddler, promptly discovering a competing hunger.
Ah yes, I thought.
We need to work with human nature, not fight it; that’s how we do this thing.
The only small question left is how – a question easily solved by peoplekind.
Considering Earth’s population creates 1.2 trillion kilograms of garbage every year, I suggest garbage injection.
Critics may say that expanding the Earth would be catastrophic, with earthquakes, wild continental shifts and so forth. Yes, it is possible we may lose an existing continent or two in the process. Yes, it is possible that changing our mass as a planet could send us plummeting towards the sun (generations hence). But would it be as bad as climate change? We hate climate change, because it’s kind of like a toddler’s dinner, something forced on us from outside, an imposition, and hence awful. It means change and it wasn’t our idea. The Dunsterian concept of planet expansion? Now that is just an ingenious strategy to get what we want, it’s as sweet as stealing a bowl of food from your dinner time foe.
