Earth: An Incomplete Ranking

There's some good stuff in there. You should check it out.

As you may know, today is Earth Day.

This annual observance has taken place every April 22nd since 1970, after environmental activists proposed the idea of a holiday that would honor the Earth, conservation, and peace. Admittedly, it’s not a holiday that most people celebrate or even observe past their elementary-school days, and that’s a shame.

Earth is pretty nice! I was born there, and all my stuff is there.

Today, I’d like to offer up an (admittedly-incomplete) ranking of Things About Earth.

1. It Being Habitable

Number one and holding strong.

Whether you credit it to scientific wonder, divine providence or miraculous coincidence, it’s pretty great that in a very large universe comprised of environments that would almost universally kill us immediately, there is a rock that is warm enough to live on but not too warm, wet enough to sustain life but not become Waterworld, fertile enough to grow crops and hasn’t been hit by a giant asteroid in many years. Those are all things I look for in a planet!

2. Other Planets Not Being Habitable

This one’s actually kind of important.

I know there are people—some of them unfortunately quite prominent—who are preoccupied with the idea that we could establish human life on other planets such as Mars.

That is a bad idea!

First of all, we already have a perfectly-habitable planet (see item #1).

Second, we do not do great with neighborly rivalries. I grew up in Ohio and I have seen how Ohioans and Michiganders get towards each other about football. We do not need to experience that sort of thing on an interplanetary scale.¹

3. Plants

They’re food that just comes out of the ground!

Well, not all of them. Some of them can be clothes or tools or other useful stuff. Some aren’t useful at all but they’re pretty.

Shout out to plants. They’re just a hair above—

4. Animals

Whole lot to like here. There are animals that we can eat (if that’s your thing)², animals that can help us do jobs, and animals that just like to hang out and vibe with us. There’s also animals that just look hilarious and we can do funny voices for them.

I mean, look at this guy!

Getty Images / Guahim

He’s just happy to be here.

6. Dogs

Sure, I already counted animals as a whole, but let’s single out these guys. They were wolves for millennia and then they just decided “you know what? Those humans look like they could be a good hang, let’s go say hi and see where it goes.”

Now they have birthdays, and we have little guys we can put birthday hats on.

The greatest win-win in the history.

9. Oceans (top 30 feet only)

Lotta great stuff there. They’re fun to look at, super-useful for transporting things, and there’s even a whole category of food that you can just reach down there and grab. They offer calming breezes, great smells, and Jimmy Buffett would’ve had a really weird career without them. The top parts of oceans are great.

(Anything that happens below the top part is none of our business.)

11. Sunsets

Absolutely beautiful, and they never get old. Honestly, they’re even better once you’ve gotten used to them:

16. The California Redwoods

Trees are pretty solid in general, if you don’t count Bradford Pears.

These are the best trees, though.

18. The cosmic coincidence that makes a total solar eclipse possible

This fact was bandied about a lot around the North American total solar eclipse last summer, but it’s still pretty darn neat. The moon is 1/400th the size of the sun, but it’s also 400 times closer than the sun, a remarkable coincidence that makes it possible for the one to complete obscure the other.

[Marge Simpson holding a potato voice] I just think they’re neat!

23. The Grand Canyon

You think it’s not gonna be as big or impressive as you’ve imagined, and then it’s bigger and more impressive. Great value. Just don’t get too close to the edge, okay?

35. Whales

Incomprehensibly massive creatures that are smart, social and like to sing, AND they made possible the greatest commercial to air during football games.

This video just wouldn’t work without them.

43. Cats

Now, I’m probably going to make some people angry ranking cats so much lower than dogs, but HEAR ME OUT:

Depending on their breeding and training, dogs can herd cattle, hunt waterfowl, protect homes, root out vermin, assist people with disabilities, perform at halftime shows, and execute myriad other tasks.

They have to do all that to get into the top 10.

Cats? They’re just showing up and being cute and kinda rude and still getting on the leaderboard. The New York Yankees spent like $300M to make the playoffs last year, while the Cleveland Guardians spent seventy-three dollars and a few shiny rocks to face them.

You tell me which is a bigger accomplishment.

48. The Great Lakes

I recognize that my picks are weighting heavily toward North American things, but hey, that’s the part of Earth I know best. Also, the Great Lakes are awesome. They contain 21% of the world’s fresh water!

Heck, one of them inspired “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, a song that I will continue to put on our shared fire pit playlist no matter how many times my wife removes it:

And that’s a song about the lakes at their absolute worst.

Cat-like overperformance from the Big Lake.

56. Birds

There’s a lot of variance within this group. At the top end, we’ve got corvids—beautiful, intelligent, smart creatures. At the bottom, we’ve got Canada Geese. Between those poles there’s tens of thousands of kinds of beautiful, weird and wonderful birds without whom outside would sound pretty boring.

68. Mountains

1. Fun to look at

2. Tell you where not to go

3. Tell you when your beer is cold

75. The Gulf of Mexico

I have been to the Gulf of Mexico once. The place we stayed in was lousy, I did not care much for the town it was in, and we saw a shark on our third day there.

Still the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen!

82. Humans

We’re not the best. I mean, we’re directly responsible for bespoiling many of the other things on this list, and we’re often quite crappy to one another. Still, we’ve done some pretty remarkable things in the past, and you can’t keep us out of the rankings.

It’s like putting Alabama football in a preseason poll—you gotta do it no matter how they looked last season.

83. Agriculture

An important back-to-back ranking here. Like humans, it’s not perfect—we’ve torn down a lot of irreplaceable, biodiverse habitats to plant farm fields—but it has been pretty darn important for our evolution as a species.

Also, we basically invented modern corn and carrots from scratch. That’s pretty cool.

138. Fungi

Pitch: a weird giant brain that lives in the woods and can communicate in ways humans do not fully understand.

Also, consuming pieces of it can be alternately delicious, psychedelic, and/or fatal.

Getty Images / Eva Katalin

I couldn’t make my Sloppy Julias without them!

213. Australia

I’ve never been, but I think it’s cool.

I mean, one entire continent evolved seemingly for the sole express purpose of killing humans, and yet all the people I’ve met from there have been pretty nice.

532. Recursive Islands

Somewhere in Lake Yathkyed in the northern Canadian territory of Nuvanut, there is a lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake, and there’s also an island in it.

It’s in there, but you gotta zoom more

It has taken every bit of will I have as an elder millennial to not make an Xzibit-in-Pimp My Ride reference while talking about this, and—ah, crap, I guess I did.

668. Caves

You can age cheese in them, or die and never have your body found.

It’s a mixed bag.

1,684. Cicadas

The greatest “you crazy for this one, nature” that Earth pulls off on a regular basis. Sometimes there’s a handful of them, and it sounds like summertime. Then, once in a while, there’s TRILLIONS OF THEM and it sounds like the end of the world.

Then the next year it’s normal again.

You crazy for this one, nature.

Getty Images / Adisak Mitrprayoon

2,928. Oceans (below 30 feet)

I told you. That’s none of our business.

113,712. That stretch of I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati

As previously mentioned, I am proudly from Ohio, a state that does not deserve the public maligning it’s often subject to.

That said, this is 100 miles of highway so featureless that we all slowly came to love a crazy person’s sign about hell just because it breaks up the monotony.

It’s not our best work.

2,392,428. Stinkbugs

A few years ago, I was shooing one out of the house, and I thought “geez, I don’t remember these things being around when I was a kid.”

Then I figured, no, I’m being silly. It’s not like new bugs just show up.

Turns out? They showed up in 1998.

That shouldn’t happen! No new bugs.

In 1997, we had Bob Hope, Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and no stinkbugs. Now we have no hope, no jobs and no cash, but we do have stinkbugs.

926,138,680,553. Microsoft Teams

I think a good way to celebrate Earth Day would simply be to turn it off for 24 hours every April 22nd so that people could stop and appreciate the finer things in life, like redwood trees, dogs, sunsets, mushrooms and stinkbugs.

(It’s all relative.)

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

I didn’t get everything. What else would you throw into the rankings, and where?

1. I feel like I should use this to once again recommend Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. I am not a huge science fiction reader and the books are *dense* but the second installation, The Dark Forest, is one of the best things I’ve ever read.

2. I admit it’s not necessarily in the spirit of Earth Day to note that but it is what it is.