Or at least it should. A few days ago, I showed you what the practice of grazing cattle on grassland slopes has done to the earth. Here’s an image of a destroyed slope. And here’s an image of one of the trails they make as they wander back and forth in hunger and boredom.I love cattle. That’s not the point. The point is that in this climate, the earth has a skin, made up of hundreds of species of life, and it looks like this, sometimes …. … and sometimes it looks like this …

…and sometimes like this …

… and even this …

There are hundreds, even thousands, of other local variations, but in all of them the earth has a living skin, which modulates water and gas exchange (it breathes, and not as a metaphor), such as in leaf photoplasts or in human intestines, lungs and other cell membranes, and captures seeds and water, in a process analogous to the molecular captures of the carbon strings of photosynthesis. Seeds here don’t sprout in dust or in mud. They join a living community. This “pasture”…

… is not a living community. It is dead. On an earth like that, humans start fantasizing about zombies and artificial intelligence. Oh, people, look in a mirror …

… and see poverty.