Imagine our Sun, in about 5 billion years, expanding into a red giant star. After it uses the hydrogen at its core, it will swell dramatically and engulf Mercury, Venus, and most likely Earth. Before then, the Sun will brighten gradually at about 1% every 100 million years. This will make Earth’s surface too hot for liquid water within 1 to 1.5 billion years. Imagine this, if only for a moment. The unimageable beauty here….lost.

That’s what I think of, what my heart aches about. It’s long after everyone I know dies and most likely long after humans exterminate ourselves from our toxic ways…emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual toxicity. But the mountains, oceans, wildlife, plant life…unimaginable loss of beauty.

With this ending of life as we know it a billion years or 365,242,500,000 days away, it makes everything here so much more precious, so sacred. And yet, since 1760, when the Industrial Revolution began, 266 years ago, we have systematically destroyed entire ecosystems. Between 1500 and 2004, 784 species have been listed as extinct. Over 160 species were declared extinct between 2010 and 2019. 2024-Slender-billed Curlew; 2023 eight different species of honeycreeper birds and eight different species of freshwater mussels. In 2020 31 species were declared extinct in a single update including several freshwater fish species and the Splendid Poison Frog. 2011…the Western Black Rhinoceros. The list goes on….

So, in other words, humans are doing quite a fine job of destroying life on Earth long before the Sun vaporizes all water on the planet. In fact, we have been speeding up the process by shifting from traditional energy to burning fossil fuels and creating massive deforestation, both of which release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. Since 1850, this has increased atmospheric CO2 from 280 to 419 ppm, causing a rise in temperature. This creates climate instability which intensifies weather events such as droughts, wildfires, and floods. It’s estimated that switching from human and animal power to fossil-fueled machines established a 50 times faster rate of warming compared to previous natural variations.

Since I documented the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster  from April 2010 to April 2011, I have been keenly aware of the damage humans do to our planet. I felt shame at being part of a species that in its greed for more, more, more is destroying such a precious jewel of a planet—a rare place that we take for granted every single day.

It’s beyond my capacity to understand how humans, as a collective, can create so much destruction and not understand the consequences of our actions. Many of us are awake to the reality of how every action we takes has an effect, for good or bad. But the rape and pillage of Earth continues. More! More! More! is our chant and as more species are lost, more catastrophic weather events occur, more deforestation occurs, we are truly creating what we focus on. Though perhaps not the ‘more’ we wish for.

I didn’t intend to write a depressing essay on the death of Earth. My intention was to write something that somehow illustrates the depth of love I have for this planet and all life here. And yet, to do that, I must share what is at stake: beauty so profound, life so sacred, that even with astronomical observations over the past 100 years, we have found nothing like it within or outside of our solar system. That’s not to say it’s not out there somewhere. But so far, life as we know it exists here. Now. The depth of grief I have over our collective destruction of it is immeasurable. 

But when I journey into the grief, I find a depth of love and appreciation so profound, it lifts me into ecstasy. I remember looking a baby humpback whale in its massive eye as it swam past with its mother. I remember a sea turtle and I diving together, sharing a morning swim in Bonaire…a sea lion and I exchanging acrobatic play in the Sea of Cortez…a deer emerging from the forest, walking up to me, and licking my hand while gazing into my eyes…a juvenile manatee chewing my hair while its mother took my hand with her flippers and placed it on her heart…a baby manatee resting its head in my hand as tears of love filled my mask (and roll down my face as I remember now)…a spotted dolphin pushing against my body to help me keep up with the pod…fog hovering over the creek as sunlight created a golden color that transformed the world….a double rainbow filled with golden light that caused me to stop my car and dance along the side of the road with joy….the aurora as it illuminated the sky in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and caused me to laugh hysterically at midnight as the wind carried my voice up the mountain at Kuwohi…the bear emerging from the steep bank with his 350+ pounds and allowing me the grace to back up and allow him to cross my pass as my knees knocked…the snowfall in Canyon de Chelly that transformed a hike down the trail into a magic so powerful it forever changed me…the birth of my daughter that showed me what love truly is…all of these moments of beauty and countless more, come from an appreciation of beauty, a realization of how rare and unique life is and a willingness to feel the grief and choose love. Choose life. And do whatever I can to raise awareness of beauty and how freaking lucky we are to live on a planet that is a precious, rare jewel in the Cosmos.