Save the planet? The planet’ll be fine!
Is the human race in massive denial?
Whatever damage the human race manages to wreak, our lovely blue planet will ultimately survive. It’s not going anywhere. When we talk about saving the earth, surely that’s not what we mean?
In actual fact, what everyone’s running around in a panic trying to ’save’ is the human race. Without us, the earth would still turn. Life in all its variety would thrive, evolving peacefully across silent, clean millennia. But our own greed and stupidity have finally turned against us and we’re being slowly throttled.
It takes a monstrous collective ego to believe that we have the power to destroy an entire planet. But perhaps we’re not that silly or egotistical. Maybe we talk about saving the world because we’re too scared to admit that it’s actually our kids’ lives that are under threat. Perhaps we hide our terror behind the bigger and morally grander title ’saving the planet’. The equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears, squeezing your eyes shut and singing ‘la, la, la’.
Individuals are mostly good and kind and worthy. But as a race we’re despicable. A filthy, wasteful, ugly, murdering tide that spoils and dirties and smashes our fellow creatures into extinction. With no consideration for the beautiful balance and the interlocking pattern of everything. Most humans believe that our species is superior to other creatures. I beg to differ. We’re dangerous children. We’re the chavs, the hooligans, the emotionally under-developed youth. The monsters. We’re the baddies and we wear the black hats. As a species we’re contemptible, beyond redemption.
Believers in the Giaia theory might compare climate change and it’s attendant chaos to the earth’s organism twitching its skin. Trying, like a dog in hot sun, to dislodge an irritating fly. Fanciful? Perhaps. But on several levels I’m inclined to agree. The concept’s pleasing.
I believe wholeheartedly that we should make every effort towards conservation, minimising and reversing the appalling damage we’ve done. But my ego doesn’t extend to believing that the human race deserves saving. We don’t. When I say I’m interested in saving the planet, that’s exactly what I mean. Humans simply don’t qualify for a place in the equation.
