Crichton, Heston: You Can’t Destroy Earth

So I asked the guide, “Where do these mountains come from? What are these mountains?” and he said, “Well, all this was a long time ago underwater and you can see the sediment piled on top. We know this was all underwater and the oceans receded, and this is what was left. Now, the Rocky Mountains were created by continental plates colliding, and, bam! Something had to give, and the Rockies were created,” and I said, “Well, what did people do when this was happening?” “They probably didn’t notice it. It happened over millions of years. It’s not like the Rocky Mountains were created overnight and if your house was sitting there it’s destroyed. It took millions of years for these mountains to pop up because of continental shift,” and I said, “Well…” and I knew what the answer to this was, and don’t laugh at me on this, but I wanted to ask it anyway. I said, “Well, what stopped all this from happening?”
“Well, it hasn’t,” he said. “You ever heard of the San Andreas Fault? We’re waiting there. The continents are constantly shifting. In our lifetimes we’ll never see it,” and I said, “Oh, do you mean to tell me that we’re not causing all of this?” and this guy kind of looked at me. He didn’t know who I was, and he looked at me, “Why would you ask that?” I said, “Well, you know, we’ve got a bunch of wackos out there that claim that humans are destroying all this, and I’m looking at this and I don’t know what we would do to create it. If somebody said, ‘Rush, go make a mountain tomorrow,’ I wouldn’t know what the hell to do. By the same token if they said, ‘Rush go destroy a mountain tomorrow.’ Short of a nuclear bomb I wouldn’t know what to do.” He said, “Well, you couldn’t and you can’t stop what’s happening.” Bam! Thank you, sir! Exclamation point. It’s all such a bunch of hocus-pocus. I’m not saying, folks, that you go ahead and throw the wrapper from your Monster Burger from Hardee’s out on the street and pollute things, but it’s not going to cause global warming. We’ll be back after this — and screw the red milkweed at the same time.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, we found this Charlton Heston piece. You people will remember this, some of you. Some of you will not. I forget what year. I think this is 1995 when we first aired this. On February 3rd of 1995 Charlton Heston called the program and wanted to read from Michael Crichton’s prologue of Jurassic Park, and this is what it sounds like.
HESTON: You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away — all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time.

It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that’s happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.
When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. Hundred years ago we didn’t have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
RUSH: Charlton Heston on this program from 1995 in February, and that’s from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. He called here and wanted to read that. It was in the midst of some, you know, massively insane, absurd, radical environmental argument at the time.
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