Speech

When I was about 8, my grandfather gave me and Philip a VHS tape for Christmas. Being basically extinct itself, it was fitting that the VHS tape was of the movie Jurassic Park. Philip and I probably have watched that movie dozens of times, as well as the cinematic mediocrities of Jurassic Park's sequel and it's third counterpart. So with Jurassic Park in mind, I want everyone to imagine that you are a dinosaur. Suddenly you hear a loud crash, as a meteor the size of Texas plunges into the earth, filling the sky with thick black clouds that starve the earth of sunlight for the rest of your dirty reptilian life. In fact, only about 7 or 8 of us would even make it to 5th hour. The taller dinosaurs, demanding a larger amounts of food for sustenance, would be the first to whither and eventually die – sorry Alex. It's a morbid picture.
And this didn't just happen one time. Before the infamous Cretaceous extinction, earth's flora and fauna fell victim to the Triassic-Jurassic extinction, the Permian-Triassic extinction, and a personal favorite of mine, the Devonian Die-off. Even before then, the
Ordovician-Silurian extinction wiped out almost the entirety of the earth's sea life, due to the earth's oceans actually freezing.
The one real discernable pattern that can be observed from all of these apocalyptic events is that they were instigated not by the Earth's inhabitants, but by the universe itself. Thanks, mother nature. Ancient Greek mythology tells the tale of the Titan King Kronos, the God of Time, who devoured his children one by one in a cannibalistic father-son bonding time rampage of death. Historians maintain that the verbal interaction preceding this event went something along the lines of, "Hey dad, I'm hungry" "hey hungry, I'm Kronos, and me too." After devouring the majority of his children, however, Kronos learned that his wife had secretly given birth to another son, smarter and stronger than the rest. Zeus escaped the wrath that Time had wrought upon his siblings and slew him, eventually cutting the Titan open and freeing his siblings.
But enough history, let's move on to science. National Geographic claims that humans will be able to revive Wooly Mammoths within the next couple decades.
Just as Zeus broke free from the clutches of time to free his divine brothers, Humanity too has taken complete control of our natural context. But at great expense. We are on the verge of reanimating a nonexistant species. But at the same time, we're killing the one who created it in the first place. Unlike the God of Lightening, we don't want to destroy our parent, mother earth. The problem is, with the firm hold we have on the planet, it's destruction is absolutely imminent if we continue on this Sherman's March through the world's resources. Our Earth may have devoured its first 5 populations, but it is Humans, not nature, that is devouring the 6th. 99% of endangered species are threatened by humans. Like Zeus, we are cutting open the belly of our father to reap the rewards, but for coal, paper, oil, and ivory; not our fallen comrades. The irony in the Mammoth situation is of mammoth proportions itself. Extinction naturally occurs at a rate of about 1-5 species a year, but scientists maintain that our current rate is 1000-10,000 times higher, with dozens of species going extinct every single day. As articulated by Edward Norton in Fight Club, "In a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." Do we humble
homosapiens really walk in the footsteps of Zeus, seizing control of the planet to rule in prosperity for eternity? Because the story of Prometheus also comes to mind. At the dawn of history, Prometheus stole a flaming torch from the Gods and gave it to mankind, giving man ultimate power over the Olympians. As a result, the Gods chained Prometheus to a rock so that eagles could eat him forever. Maybe we should learn from poor Prometheus.
The fact that it was Fire that ultimately gave humanity power over the Gods is what really ties the story to our current situation. Cooking food is what ultimately provided the brains of early humans with the calories to become the world's apex predator. But thousands of years later, we've almost made enough fires to turn our home planet into a giant smoked ham. This brings me to the thing that epitomizes humanity's gradual asphyxiation of earth; climate change.
Something that walks hand in hand with the Earth's rapid depopulation is climate change. After his defeat in the presidential election, Al Gore went on a quest to bring this momentous problem to
light. In a more recent quote, Al Gore summarized the main point of his film An Inconvenient truth: “Here is the truth: The Earth is round; Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11; Elvis is dead; Obama was born in the United States; and the climate crisis is real,” The 10 hottest years ever recorded occurred in the last 14 years, states the former presidential candidate. The guys who put a man on the moon claim that Carbon Dioxide levels in the air are higher now than they have been in 650,000 years, and Greenland is half as big as it was in 1996. The sea level is rising 3.4 millimeters per year, and we're losing 13.3% of the Arctic's ice every decade. Prometheus may have been a martyr to the early homosapiens in their struggle with the natural world, but his fire is melting away not only the ice caps, but possibly even as much as 2/3 of the world's wildlife, according to a report from the World Wildlife Fund. By playing god, we may have doomed the entire globe to an afterlife on Prometheus' rock, being pecked to death by the Spotted Owl. Our species is fueled by burning the habitats of others animals, cooking them in it, and then letting the heat melt away entire land masses. As Anthony
Hopkins sinisterly states in HBO series Westworld, "Do you know what happened to the Neanderthals? We ate them."
Hopefully, everyone in this room knows that the concept of global warming was not created by the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non competitive. But awareness doesn't always breed action. Coal might keep the lights on, but our dependence on it encourages even more burning. By turning off your lights, you are also turning off a steady plume of billowing black smoke that is smothering our planet. And the EPA says that 20-30% of what we throw away is either yard waste or food scraps. Not only are both of those things that can be composted rather than thrown away, but all of this "trash" actually comes from living organisms - plants and animals whose lives we ended, only to sacrifice their remains to the gods of the landfill. Humanity's ignorance of nature's welfare can be accurately measured by the mass of the Pacific Trash Island, which chokes enough sea life to become the Ocean's next apex predator in the next century. It won't be long before Dorothy's fear of Lions and Tigers and Bears will be wholly
irrational, as at least 8 species of bear are endangered, lions could be extinct by 2050, and there are more tigers kept as pets in America than there are anywhere in the wild. It also doesn't help the tigers that there's a growing population of weird Asian millionaires that consider the big cat's genitals a rare delicacy. Is this not a sign that enough is enough?
One day, humanity could rise to Olympian status and rule the Earth in all its glory. But being the champions of the earth isn't the same as playing god. Only a tyrannical god would sacrifice its creatures to attain a higher degree of luxury. Humanity's focus should be on conservation, not the conversion of nature into fuel for our F-150s. It's not our right to pull an Andrew Jackson on the entirety of the Earth's life by either killing them or putting them in zoos. The first 5 extinctions paved the way for renewal, eventually leading to the evolution of the ultimate wild animal: humans. However, the theoretic end point of our current trajectory is a hot, lifeless wasteland void of all creatures other than humans. And on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

Works Cited
Fight Club. Dir. Chuck Palahniuk. Perf. Brad Pitt, Edward Norton. 20th Century Fox, 1999. DVD.
An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Prod. Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, and Scott Z. Burns. Perf. Al Gore. Paramount Pictures Corp., 2006. Film.
NASA. NASA, n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.
Society, National Geographic. "Mass Extinction, Mass Die-Off Information, Prehistoric Facts -- National Geographic." National Geographic. National Geographic, n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.
"What You Can Do: At Home." EPA. Environmental Protection Agency, n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.