Life and Earth Cycles

I was watching the first episode of Planet Earth the other day, and it was great. It was the British version, with David Attenborough, a fact which was very important to my friend R. and has subsequently become very important to me because as I understand it, I either get Sigourney Weaver on the American version, or I get Sir Attenborough on the original BBC one. The only upside to the American one is that they took the time to cut out all that fucking bullshit about global warming.

So anyway, I had an idea that at the time I thought was great and since have decided is probably more in the OK range. I was thinking about how life cycles differ from earth cycles, and I've long hoped for a way to talk about this and may have found a way to articulate myself. First off, my terms are completely arbitrary, so I should probably define them. Life cycles are the paradigm in which we mostly operate because we're people. We anthropomorphize things and seek out a beginning and end that define a period in between that we call life. Life must have both beginning and end because that's pretty much how we define it. If it had neither it would either not be alive, or else it would be a fictional fantasy of the ideal, of perfection, and would be God or some thing like God. And whether even God is alive--well--that's a much harder question still.

Then there are what I'm calling earth cycles. These are the cycles that don't involve any beginning or end that one can say exists. Take for example the rain cycle that involves glaciers, rivers, lakes, the ocean, rain, hurricanes, winds, bird migration, etc. They involve living things, but those things are often part of how the earth reproduces itself, though even that is slipping into life cycles and anthropomorphization. The earth continues and, and it functions (here we got with a functionalist explanation, of course) so that it might continue to function. In this sense, birds and insects pollinating plants that prevent erosion of soil and shape a landscape and the weather of a region, well, that's part of a process that I'm calling an earth cycle.

This is all pretty obvious, but it's useful for helping me think about that process of anthropomorphization, whereby I attribute a life cycle, with its beginning and end, to something that is an earth cycle. The confusion of these two types of cycles is, I believe, the cause of certain difficulties. In life cycles there is always morality because inherent to them is the affirmation of life. This of course becomes problematic again and again because when one life takes another life in order to continue as life, then this can be immoral, or at least it has become immoral. If life cycles are taken as earth cycles, the moral component falls away because everything is life affirming, or rather, nothing is life affirming and everything is continuous and as a cycle is an endless life in perpetual affirmation.

These cycles are at the heart of my moral questions because on the one hand, I have a culture that affirms life and is always working to define what is and isn't life and how valuable each life is (e.g., PETA vs. the NRA). On the other hand, I have a culture, particularly middle class intellectual culture, that... oh my god, I can't finish this. There's nothing interesting going on here. I'm sorry for making you read this far.