The Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You

Fri, 02 May 2008 09:41:45 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Despite its many flaws, I’m a big fan of human civilization. I marvel at our capacity to organize matter and information, at our ability to learn from mistakes and pass that learning down to subsequent generations. Civilization—writing, cities, trade, the whole lot of it—makes us unique on this planet and, as far as we can tell so far, in our part of the universe.

Clip Source: ieet.org

The grand myth of environmentalism is that it’s all about saving the Earth. It’s not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves.

That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly central to the rhetoric, the memetics of environmentalism. Most environmental discussions focus on ecological dynamics, with references to human beings typically limited to enumerations of the various insults we’ve visited upon the planet. Given the degree of culpability we bear for the current state of the planet, this is entirely appropriate.

But the rhetorical focus of environmentalism on the planet obscures the fact that what human beings have done to the Earth pales in comparison to past disasters hitting our world, from massive asteroid strikes to super-volcano eruptions killing off 90+% of the Earth’s species

And in every case, the Earth has recovered, and life has once again flourished.

Tags: myth, environmentalism, conceptual mistakes

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The Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You