To be alive these days is to be conflicted. I sit on the edge of a 5000 feet deep hole in the ground in Arizona. Grand Canyon. Nature's power illustrated in no ambiguous terms. In front of me, I see beauty, immense and powerful, 6 million years of water's war against rock, against Earth. Scale is impossible to grasp when faced with this. It's like trying to understand the moon as viewed from Earth.
To be alive these days is to be conflicted. Conflicted in our perception of the world. The largest hole on Earth (that's not underwater, anyways) in front of me, and to my left, a mere 150 miles or so, Las Vegas. The contrast is stark and obvious, black versus white, earth versus sky. When here, if you can ignore the throngs of tourists, walking and laughing, you can feel truly humbled.
This is hard to explain. There are thousands of cities on Earth, housing the vast majority of the 6.5 billion of us. They reach nearly every corner of Earth, yet as long as I don't turn around, I could go hours, maybe days without seeing another soul. All I see is nature's forces in front of me. But I see something else too. Nothing living, but evidence of life, of civilization, nonetheless.
Haze. The air is hazy, and the north rim of the canyon, approximately 10 miles away, is fuzzy. The haze causes a group hallucination that our eyes are failing us. The haze is pollution, trapped in the canyon by its unique weather patterns. It drifts in from Vegas, from LA and San Diego. From Phoenix and smelting factories in northern Mexico. One of natures finest achievements is being blighted by unforeseen consequences from another of nature's wonders: us. This is the conflict that the modern human exists in today, whether we are conscious of it or not. Our world is immense, and in its immensity, we forget how truly delicate it is.
For most of us, our lives exist in the city. Our friends, our jobs, all of it. It's easier this way, of course. The good jobs are in the city, along with a much larger spattering of the gene pool. We are a social species and the city is the ultimate community. We build our cities, constantly expanding out and up as necessary. We deem our priorities more important than Earth's. We think and exist in the short term; the Earth is long term. We will blight the Earth until it blights us back. And it is quite a bit more powerful than us. We need to remember that.
