Need not Save the Earth

The good people who care about the environment, animals, and nature in general tend to speak of Earth in emotional and anthropomorphic way, I think, to the detriment of their cause. “Save the Earth”, or “fragile Earth” are common phrases I hear, and I think people use them to elicit protective feeling in the audience. Not only does this strategy fail to capture the true sate of Earth as a complex system, it distracts from the true victims of the changing environment: people.

I am not denying that the environment is changing. It is in fact changing at unprecedented speed, and we are causing it. But the change we are causing is a minor one for Earth as a whole. What’s living on it today might not in the future, but something else will surely thrive on it. Once it gets going, life is very very hard to extinguish. Even if 99.9% of all life dies, given time the remaining 0.1% will re-colonize Earth. Each individual or each species may be fragile, but Earth and life as a whole is not.

Nor does Earth need saving. “Saving” requires a trajectory toward “bad”. In order for Earth to be saved, it has to be moving towards something bad. But there is no value in changing Earth. Let’s say the Earth is changing the way it is now but there are no humans on it. Will it be bad? Will the Earth need saving then? It’s really not the Earth that heads toward something bad, it is the human beings. It is not the Earth who needs saving, it is we.