Bring Back the Dinosaurs
Sitting in the Bristol Museum with my three year old the other day, three dinosaur books down, I came across this little beauty, “Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish” and was struck by its prescience.
Written in 1972 by Michael Foreman, it’s a cautionary tale for our times, that uncannily seems to have predicted the bizarre, billionaire bro space race between Musk and Bezos. Hear me out. The story features a super wealthy man of industry who becomes fixated on a star in the sky. “I must fly” said the man./ I have money./ I have many men working for me./ I must fly, somehow I must fly”. So he channels his energy and power into building a rocket to reach this star. Sound familiar yet? In so doing, he plunders and pollutes the earth, but he reaches his star.
Meanwhile, the dinosaurs return and stamp on all the rubbish scattered across the industrial wasteland that was once the earth. They stamp and stamp and clear it away. Soon, it is said that under their protection, “green shoots appeared/ bursting through cracks and climbing over forgotten walls”. The longed-for star is a let down (hello Oscar Wilde quote).
So the man sets off to conquer yet more stars but boomerangs back to good old Gaia again instead. He doesn’t even recognise the planet he left behind, so transformed is it by the diligent dinosaurs. After a dressing down by a brontosaurus, the moral of the tale is clear, “the earth belongs to everyone, not parts of it to certain people/ but all of it to everyone, to be enjoyed and cared for”. The sky rings with the sounds of the birds and beasts proclaiming this truth. That is the end of that, we assume. Lesson learnt.
Perhaps in the 70s the idea of an individual funding and achieving space exploration was as far-fetched as the idea of, say, dinosaurs returning. Who knows, maybe let me know in the comments if you remember that decade and the original space race of the 60s. However, this children’s story is actually the teensiest bit true.
The space race is hotting up and with it the atmosphere. They say that increased space exploration comes with climate costs: pollution, carbon emissions and even environmental risk from falling space debris and harmful chemical substances. What on earth is going on?! Shouldn’t we be funnelling everything into fixing our own planet before we go off and colonise Mars? What do you think? I think it might just be time to bring back the dinosaurs. Or failing that, maybe someone should send Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos a copy of, “Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish”. It’ll be available on Amazon after all.