Surprisingly, the atmosphere of planet Earth as it has evolved over the last 2 billion years is almost entirely the creation of the life upon it. As far as we know, there has never been any notion of global awareness of responsibility for it among the living creatures who labored for billions of years to bring it into being.
Although the earliest extant fossils are now believed to date back 3.5 billion years, our oxygen-laden atmosphere did not emerge until about 2 billion years ago. Oxygen was a poison for the plants that produced it: the bacteria, acritarchs, prokaryotes and so forth. From their perspective oxygen was, in every way, what we today would describe as toxic waste. Oxygen emissions were the industrial pollutant released in the manufacture of plant tissue through photosynthesis, capillary action, osmosis and other internal technologies.
There is little doubt that, had such irresponsible environmental damage be allowed to proceed unrestrained, there would have been total ecocatastrophe and extinction of life on Earth, as the ever thickening blankets of oxygen overwhelmed the dwindling supplies of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Indeed, as the record shows, there were many major extinctions in this period due to oxydosis and other causes, leading up to the first great mass extinction around 600 million years ago, just before the Cambrian era and the emergence of animals in significant numbers.
It was in fact the arrival of animal life that perpetuated the potential of Earth as a haven for living forms, including the plants themselves. It's more than reasonable to assume that the early bacteria, prokaryotes and eucaryotes had neither the time nor the interest in fostering programs of social and environmental engineering; recycling; campaigns against pollution; legislation mandating the cleaning up of toxic waste. Nor did they organize transcontinental conferences, say between Pangea and Gondwanaland, to devise strategies to curb the dire effects of runaway oxygen emissions on the climate, or to fight the epidemics of plant asthma, or to guarantee a livable world for their grandchildren. Nothing of the sort occured: the botanical Kingdom persisted in its undeviating course of gross consumption, greed and environmental contamination.
What brought these senseless, nay insane, lifestyles to a halt? It was Nature itself that stepped up to the plate to rescue Spaceship Earth by creating a range of entirely new creatures that digested the waste being vomited out in such enormous quantities by the ones preceding them. It is almost as if Nature were, as depicted in the ancient mythologies, a maternal deity like Cybele, of metaontology supra-mundane and divine, ever immanent, ever standing by to redeem the folly of its own creations so that Life should never entirely perish from the earth.
If Nature, as She has done in the past, is poised to rise to the same challenges She faced in 600 million B.S. (Before Socrates), it can only mean that She is holding back an extensive, highly diversified line of entirely new creatures in the wings: living forms that will thrive on the consumption of our poisonous wastes in precisely the same way that the early animals glommed onto their life-nurturing oxygen. And the best candidate for a resource facilitating the ergonomics of Life through dependable kinetic and dynamic interactions with a richly endowned environment will certainly be nuclear waste.
These novel beings will sustain their high levels of metabolism by the ingestion of the products of atomic decay- alpha, beta and gamma rays, strontium-90, radioactive iodine and caesium - which for us are the most dreadful of poisons. They will luxuriate at unimaginably high temperatures, and probably live in the air, to avoid the injurious effects of our excessively strong gravitational field and because the oceans and continents have become too treacherous to navigate.
If this is indeed the promise of our future, it behooves us all to applaud the ideology, ruthless ambition and grossly irresponsible behavior of the Bush/Cheney administration. Since its' usurpation of power in 2001 it has worked tirelessly to bring about the destruction or contamination of every resource we deem indispensable to our continued survival.
Is it just possible that, unbeknownst to us, they and their cohorts are being motivated by a higher vision of history, based on the lessons of paleontology, that tells them that Nature is waiting impatiently with Her numberless herds of nuclear-waste-consuming creatures, that new Kingdom of Life whose destiny it is to continue, in spite of our best efforts to bring it to an end, the inconceivably long, utterly horrible yet dauntless advance of Life on Earth's towards the effulgent realm of inextinguishable light that awaits It at the very end?