Are we extinguishing the secrets of our future success?

I just saw the film "The Wild Ocean" at the Mugar Omni IMAX Theater in Boston's Museum of Science. It was a nice documentary, and I enjoyed it along with my wife and daughters. It wasn't the most thrilling film I've seen -- my wife poked me once to stop my snoring -- but it was relaxing and contemplative (maybe too much so after a week of the flu and the business of the Christmas holidays).

The movie was about the oceanic ecosystem off the coast of South Africa, the centerpiece of which are the swarms of sardines that have attracted humans, whales, gulls, sharks, dolphins, seals and other sea creatures for tens of thousands of years (they actually claim over 120,000 years -- but I may have been asleep when they explained the evidence of this). It showed this awesome ballet and interplay of this diverse "community" of beings, and it warned that -- because global warming is changing the coastal sea temperatures, and because of overfishing by humans -- this ecosystem may be destroyed in our lifetimes.

Another sad story of a beautiful example of life's balance and diversity now at risk. And for what? A few extra hors d'oeuvres?

A bigger thought than the sardine ecosystem of South Africa occurred to me at that moment. I began to think about all of the human inventions and designs that are a direct result of nature. I then imagined each of those natural patterns as a hidden secret needed for us to solve the puzzles of life into the future. And I thought through the implications of losing any of nature's wonders.

What if, by losing part of the natural design of the earth, we are destroying the solutions to the problems we and the earth will face in the future? A picture became starkly clear to me: the earth was made up of all the answers we need to live happily here. Yet, when we neglect the earth and all its wonders, we destroy another clue to our future posterity. And, an earth filled with man-made conceptions -- at the expense of the natural -- would leave us with many things we understand, but nothing to extend our understanding. No more clues for the future.

I don't know if this is they way the world really works, but I don't think I'm alone in my thinking. As today was the first day of the New Year, I read the Creation story from the book of Genesis in the Bible. It's account of the creation of man and woman -- after the rest of nature was put in place: day and night, the sky, land and sea, sun, moon, stars, vegetation, fish, birds and animals hit the scene -- was that man and woman were given the responsibility to take care of the place. All these things were here for us to be responsible for.

It seems like, in our race for productivity and comfort, we are acting like college kids who have been lent a beautiful mansion to enjoy, only to end up trashing the place in a night for a keg party that everyone is too hungover to remember what happened.

Maybe this global recession, and our melting polar ice caps, and the barrage of hurricanes and tornadoes and floods, and the possible loss of the sardines off South Africa's coast -- maybe these will wake us up to get back to our first job on this planet -- to take care of it.