Reflections on being an Earthling

Today has been declared by modern humans to be ‘Earth Day’. Which is lovely, but also a bit strange, because surely as Earthlings, every day is Earth day. As I watch people around the world launch events, share discussions and post many (many) promotional messages and images on social media platforms to celebrate this ‘event’, it encourages me to ponder what it means to be an Earthling.

What does it mean to be a member of the Earth community, busying ourselves on our little blue and green planet, hurtling through the dark inkiness of space?  Perhaps it depends on which Earthling you ask.

As I write this, I’m in the garden behind my house, scribbling in my notebook, while also watching three glorious Blue Banded Bees buzz sturdily about in the mass of delicate native white flowers that seem to ‘float’ above the plants that brought them forth. (Western science calls these plants Orthosiphon; gardeners call them ‘Cats Whiskers’, I’m still searching for the First Peoples’ words for this gorgeous plant.) What must it be like, to be a Blue Banded Bee Earthling? A being that is born in a warm burrow in the soil and climbs out, shaking the dirt off its intricate wings, to spend its days obsessively chasing the magic of pollen in diverse and vivid flowers. At night, the boy bees climb onto branches and hang out together, buzzing and bumping into each other before settling down for their evening; the girl bees return to the burrows they’ve made for themselves – the places they dug out with their tiny little mouths, and where they’ll lay their tiny little eggs, to make the next generation of their truly glorious bee selves.

I hope their existence as Bee Earthlings – especially in my garden, which I have planted with their lives and happiness in mind – is a joyful buzz of plenty. Plenty of flowers, plenty of pollen, plenty of good company with other bees, butterflies and friendly insects.

As I can’t be a bee – much to my disappointment – I can probably only really write with any authority about what it means to be a human earthling. So what does it mean to be a Human Earthling? Perhaps that depends on which humans you ask, and where they are in time and space when you ask them. If we could ask the First Humans – who climbed down from trees and walked around carefully, charged with an electric wariness of predators, testing out their skills in standing upright – I wonder what their experience of human-ness was like? Did it echo much of their pre-human experience? Did they dream of tails and trees?Or of long, long walks in open savannah?

And what about the First Humans who explored Sahul (the name given to the previously connected landforms now called Papua New Guinea and Australia). What must it have felt like, being the First Humans in that landscape? I can barely imagine it – such small groups of humans, overwhelmed by the hugeness of the world, outnumbered by other animals and plants, living under deep dark skies uninterrupted by today’s violent night lights. I guess their world was one of plenty as well – plenty of new adventures and threats, plenty of plants and animals, food and drink. And, I like to believe, connectedness. Plenty of connectedness – to each other, as they sat in the deep dark, listening to the sounds of the world around them, and to other species, as they tracked, hunted, watched, laughed with and listened to the animals and trees around them.

And what of my European ancestors? What was it like to be a Human Earthling born in an ice-age in Europe? Or in the relative climatic pleasantness of Late Mesolithic Europe? As a history enthusiast, I often try to imagine what it must have been like for my European ancestors, at any time prior to the massive changes brought by the Industrial Revolution, before electric lights and hurtling traffic. Many aspects of human life must have been harsh – but at the same time, they lived in times when there were more forests, more birdsong, more flowers, more animals and fish; no plastics, no chemical pollutants, no artificial flavourings, colourings or packagings …

I’m aware that these imaginings are blurred together with a sort of self-pity and longing – a longing for a world where non-human earthlings still dominated the world, where skies filled with millions of birds, and the oceans were full of millions of fish. A world of non-human plenty.

These longings then bring me back to a version of my question: What does it mean to be a Human Earthling … today? Do we still hold common threads with those First Humans, or have we become something else? Is our story, our journey, a long continuum of human-ness or have we, as many people fear today, entered into an entirely different human existence, now that we are no longer a small number of humans among a vast number of other species; and now that we’re no longer reaching for each other and our community in the deep dark nights, but rather we reach for our electric lights to disperse the darkness, and we reach for tiny pre-recorded people on devices rather than real ones in our huts or round houses.

For me, being a Human Earthling today means living in fear and joy, all mixed up, every day.
Joy is brought by the non-human earthlings around me – the bees, the butterflies, the dragonflies, the wallabies, the lilliypillies, the eucalypts, the flowers, the cockatoos, the magpies and the pee-wees – all are my ancestors, and the landlords of the land I live on. Joy is also brought by loved ones and other humans who are near and dear. Fear is brought by an understanding that we are terraforming our planet, changing our climate and losing so many of our evolutionary companions, every day. It’s a fear for our rapidly disappearing future, and the death of so many in our present. It comes to me every day, in different ways, and fills me with a terror and a guilt that’s getting harder and harder to cope with, with every news article about extinct species and ecosystems changed forever.

When I feel overwhelmed to be a human, alive today in the year labelled ‘2024’ by the calendar created by Christians in the Western World, I cling to the things that continue to tether me to my biophysical connection to my earth: I breathe in and out, sharing oxygen which first emerged on our planet about 2.3 billion years ago, and I sip water – which is the same water that’s been in the water cycle for about 4.5 billion years. And I also cling to my human-imaginings of my place in the world – I remind myself I am sitting in this garden today because of a remarkable, unbroken chain of life. Life that emerged in ancient seas, and evolved into multiple forms, and I’m a survivor of all that which has been thrown at the non-human and human ancestors who lived before me. And in the face of these rememberings of awesomeness, I can continue.

One of the Blue Banded Bees, her legs laden with pollen, the fuzz on her thorax starting to thin out because she’s an older bee, buzzes close to my face and makes me smile with delight. I’ve been sitting so still she probably no longer notices me as something distinct from the flowers. In a moment I’ll put down my notebook and return to focus on my garden. Regardless of when I visit the soil, or how crowded my brain is with human fear and noise, as soon as I’m kneeling in the dirt, planting, pruning or gently weeding, the soil creates some magical alchemy with my skin. New messages seem to travel from my soil covered hands, to my noisy, overwhelmed brain. Then my Earthling-self starts to recalibrate with the soil and the earthworms, the flowers and their stems, and the mulch and the dirt, down to the bedrock of this planet. And I’m grounded again. And in those moments, I really do feel like an Earthling who knows how to celebrate Earth Day, every day – in the soil, with the plants and the bees, breathing in and out. It reminds me how to handle the fear of being a Human Earthling too: connecting with others, tending to my home and caring for everything in it, as best I can, in my own tiny way.

Happy Earth Day to all Earthlings xo