Make you Fink on Friday

Forget life on Mars, it’s closer to home that matters

Our obsession with escaping to outer space is more to do with what’s wrong down here. We cannot relocate

‘Sending a single person to the hostile, arid environment of a planet just next door like Mars would require years of training for a fabulously expensive trip.’ Photograph: Denis Scott/Corbis

If they found on Mars a single blade of grass there would be ecstasy at mission control, unleashing visions of humanity spreading out across the cosmos. But does the obsession with finding life on other, potentially habitable planets somehow excuse and blind us to the trashing of this one?

News of the discovery of yet another Earth-like planet fuels the fantasy that if we scorch our own, we can always relocate. From Richard Branson to Stephen Hawking, there’s a hypnotic fascination with the possibility of escape which somehow relieves the pressure to look after our own, extraordinary planetary home.

As we tremble with anticipation at the prospect of finding a single microbe on another planet, under our feet we’re wilfully executing a mass extinction event. Once a fashionable cause, threats to our forests, cradles to the diversity of life, have been largely forgotten. But this century we’ve been losing them at the astonishing rate of 50 football pitches per minute. That’s an area the size of Greenland since the turn of the millennium.

All attempts to reconcile the industrial-scale exploitation of the biosphere by staying the right side of key environmental thresholds are failing. Forest-certification schemes, for example, have done nothing to slow their degradation. Why do we treat the abundance of life on our doorstep with such disrespect, when it throws up glories like the Namibian fog-basking beetle, which taught us how to build greenhouses in the desert? Or the bark beetle, which can detect a forest fire 10km away and is showing how to make better fire extinguishers? Even worse, the very people who put their lives on the line to protect land and the environment are being killed at an accelerating pace.

I was an infant when the Apollo programme was happening and understand the obsession with exploring outer space. But sending a single person to the hostile, arid environment of a planet just next door like Mars would require years of training for a fabulously expensive trip. The question of whether or not there is life “out there” is often asked. But, from a different view of the cosmos, aren’t we ourselves also and already “out there”?

First contact: the US landed an explorer on Mars, Viking 1, in 1976. Photograph: SSPL/Getty

Perhaps the greatest gift of space exploration is that it enabled us to see ourselves as an island planet, where the greatest wonder is to be found in the world around us, the relationships between living things, and even within ourselves. A single tablespoon of soil contains more micro-organisms than there are people on the planet.

In Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting there is a scene involving Kundera and his father who, a stroke victim, has difficulty speaking. The father had studied Beethoven’s sonatas and their magical variations for years. His barely coherent remarks trigger in Kundera an understanding that the greatest journey is not into the infinity of the external universe, but to “that other infinity, into the infinite diversity of the interior world lying hidden in all things”. To explore that is more than a lifetime’s rich work. Right now, the greater challenge is to offer an irresistible invitation to look differently and afresh at the world, and imagine how we can allow life here to flourish.

The German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg: she dreamed of changing this world. Photograph: AP

We sense we’re living through hard times, and that makes the idea of fleeing to other worlds attractive. But times have been harder. On a cold dark night in prison during the apocalyptic upheaval of Europe of 1917, the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg found her spirits lifted, despite her perilous situation, by an awareness of the strangeness and beauty of the force of life. Her heart “beats with an inconceivable, unknown inner joy”. The secret, she decides, is “nothing but life itself”, and even in the sound of sentries’ heels grinding in gravel outside, “there is the small, lovely song of life – if one knows how to hear it”.

A couple of years ago I saw for the first time at dusk a field of fireflies. They were all around me, pulsing, drifting, lighting-up the darkening landscape. I thought Luxemburg’s song of life, and of the millions of people around the world who, rather than dreaming of escape, don’t accept the world as it is, but use their life’s pulsing energy to protect and improve it.

Source: The Guardian