Nature always wins

I am standing on the plot of land that we cleared a few weeks ago. We have had exactly two rains since then, at the end of the dry season. The once-barren-looking land has turned into green turf. The smoothed-out terrain is starting to look something like the beginning of a reforestation project. A bunch of plants are coming out here and there.

What surprises me most is not the volume of the new plants (very high), but their variety. It is not a monolithic invasion by one dominant plant-mafia decided to take over the land after the other families had been eliminated. I could count no fewer than 10 leaf shapes in an area suited for a two-bedroom house. Where were those seeds hiding?

It is not only the baby grass/trees. I see a new strand coming out of an old stump. The previously withering ones are fully standing up or blossoming flowers. I don’t even remember what a spot looked like before. It is the opposite of a city block getting demolished, where we forget about the previous stores and houses immediately.

Life finds a way if given even the tiniest of opportunities. That is what nature does, and how it survived several mass extinctions. The almighty AI gives out a clear verdict: yes, past mass extinctions were much worse than all-out nuclear wars. The detailed, most sensitive parts of the ecosystem die out, obviously, which coincides with what we admire and treasure, such as golden beetles and rainbow corals. But life forms themselves march on, disregarding all our doom fantasies.

I think about the group of people who advocate or predict radical depopulation through massive wars. In their view, the world would turn into a complete wasteland dotted by the bunkers that serve as modern Noah’s arks. Eventually, the “chosen” ones (somehow whitish, just like the Medieval painting of biblical events) will come out and repopulate the earth.

But I have a feeling that this “plan” will be disrupted by Mother Nature, which will repopulate the wasteland faster than the doomsday billionaires can strategize their coming out (from the bunkers). Instead of having a fertile meadow that somehow looks like the Italian countryside, they will be facing the cutthroat survival environment of untouched jungles or savannas, already occupied by new breeds of predatory animals that are more nimble and deadly than the slow-moving targets of lions and elephants. Perhaps mutated mosquitoes that can survive extreme temperatures.

We are living in an era where the “evil plans” from the dominating class are played right in front of our eyes. Everything seems to be dismantled, and that includes… the “plan” itself. I mean, looking at the Middle East situation, I don’t think there is anyone saying that they had their master plan executed flawlessly. The whole conflict has been a series of mishaps and miscalculations that somehow kept ending up in favor of the ruling class, not because they predicted everything, but because they already owned everything.

Individually we humans are smart, but collectively we are dumber than a single cell structure. That has been playing out, and I feel that will surely apply to the “post-apocalypse rise of a new human civilization” as well.