I applaud Daniel Brown for his forthright column “When global warming stares you in the face,” (Recorder, Jan. 19). I agree that “saving the Earth” is narcissistic but also, I think, hubristic. We do not begin to honor our interdependent relationship to the earth. Nor do we own it, we who have wrongly deemed ourselves the most superior of beings. We are guests here and intricately bound to all the other beings residing here.

Some time ago I was at dinner with an Abenaki man who said, matter-of-factly, ” The buffalo is on its last leg.” I understood him to be saying that the cycles of life on earth occur without human influence. Most importantly, I heard it said with reverent acceptance. It made our insane destruction of the earth feel, for a moment, inevitable as well as thoughtless and brutal. It is also important to view our demise as the result of a flaw of an entire species … not one of individuals. Many, indeed most of us, care deeply for the land and the animals.

I read in the Guardian that in the last two years, 1% of the humans on earth have garnered two third of the wealth. It is a species completely out of whack with its habitat. The earth can’t tolerate us any longer.

The wanton destruction by the very few … just witness the decades of lies by Exxon in name of profit … is disgraceful and shameful, but what feels truly tragic to me, is that the gift of imagination that our brains, by chance evolved, failed, in the end, not to enhance the earth, but to destroy it. An object rare and beautiful afloat in a wondrous universe.

I fear climate catastrophe is as inevitable as the asteroid Daniel Brown reminded us of. Still, the earth will endure. I am learning to take bleak comfort in that reality.

Margot Fleck

Northfield

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