Plants exhibit various survival strategies that amount to something resembling ecological wisdom. To endure drought, mesquite send roots ever-deeper seeking water while the creosote sheds leaves and limbs.

Animals, too, endure; some shelter during the heat of the day, foraging at dawn and dusk. Others sleep through the day to come out in the cool desert night to hunt for food.

The best blueprint for enduring such an extreme environment is not necessarily a vigorous struggle, but perhaps a certain amount of patience.

Organ Pipe Interpretive Sign

So go now, you go and you rape this Earth
You take her for what you think she’s worth
You take and you take, til there’s nothing left
I don’t call that business, I call that theft

So who the hell do you think you are?
Why do you got to take things so far?
Screw the Earth, and then look towards the stars
Tell me man, why do you got to take things so far?

All for your money, sweeter than honey
Tell me man, can you eat your money?
Cuz that’s what’s gonna be left
So tell me man, can you eat your money?

John Butler, Money

We do not see and hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition—And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis.

Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither see nor hears others.

But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.

Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries

Isn’t it funny? We can make a lot of money
Buy a lot of things just to feel a lot of ugly

I was yea high and muddy
Looking for what was looking for me

Mac Miller, 2009

Suffocate me
So my tears can be rain
I will water the ground where I stand
So the flowers can grow back again

You cannot eat money, oh no
When the last tree has fallen
And the rivers are poisoned
You cannot eat money, oh no

Aurora, Seed