GAIA TWO.....................................
Here's some material from Earth Days of Yore...still rings true...c. 1982...
Nature is represented here as a young sapling, in a primeval forest...Willow, or Aspen...quaking in a gentle breeze, slender, supple, green, and bent to make a snare.
Along comes a rabbit.
Snap!
Nature and Mankind co-operate. Mankind survives.
Later.
The Human who made the snare, to catch the rabbit, to feed his family, is hungry again. The kids are screaming. His mate is in a fury.
This Human goes to the same tree over and over again. Soon, his scent pervades the area. His snare works once in a while. He catches hedgehogs and water rats.
Eventually...
The snare turns up empty every time. His family despises the hunter.
But, he never thinks to move to a new tree.
Nature has become his enemy. He bends and bends the sapling, angrily wrestling with his snare.
One day...as he struggles with the no longer so sapling, sapling, his foot becomes entangled in the snare.
The sapling is now a strong young tree...a snapling.
The persistent, but not too clever Human hung by his ankles for three days, until the vines he had used for his snare rotted and broke.
He fell on his head.
Starving, semi-conscious, barely sentient, and ever more intolerant of nature's ways, he spent the next two days crawling back to his cave.
There, his starving wife and children attempted to nurse him back to health.
He was their only hope for survival.
I don't know if those humans survived. But, I think they did.
I think they proliferated.
I think their progeny exist to this day.
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