Why We Cannot Save the Earth
A Dangerous Hubris that Prevents Solving Climate Change
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The Earth will save itself, thank you very much. There is little you or I can do to stop her. And therein lies the terror of climate change.
Remember spring of 2020? Some people dubbed it “the great pause.” People stopped commuting. Highways were empty. Everyone slowed down. The price of oil went negative — meaning that companies would pay up to $37/barrel for someone, anyone, to take it from them. We stopped burning things. We worked from home.
All of it happened because of a biological occurrence. A pathogen that causes COVID came into the biosphere, and the biosphere is precisely what most ecologists and environmental activists want to “save.”
The idea that humans can save the Earth involves profound hubris. It suggests that we are somehow outside the biosphere and outside the earthly systems such that we can manipulate them to save them. We can’t do that. We are in the biosphere. We breathe. We eat. We drink water. We are part of the Earth.
The crisis we face needs to be redefined so that we can see it clearly. The Earth was here long before there were humans, and it will be here long after humans are gone. We are not saving the Earth; we are saving ourselves.
Any objective assessment of nature must result in a cold conclusion — no matter what we may wish, nature doesn’t care about humans. From volcanic eruptions to hurricane destruction, wildfires, tornadoes, intense heat waves, earthquakes, disease, cancer, and all other natural disasters, nature is a killer of human beings. Nature gives life, and nature takes away life. We can romanticize “the circle of life” but it could just as easily be called “the circle of death.” Everything must eat, and eating means death. Natural disasters create a lot of food — dead organisms that are eaten by those that remain living. If there are enough disasters, it will slow down the march toward an uninhabitable Earth.
With COVID, the Earth has created a challenge to humanity. Objectively speaking, it is reducing the population on the planet. For now, it is a feeble reduction, unlikely to make a huge difference for a long time. But that could change.
If you think about it, the Earth must stop the activity of humans at the scale at which we are acting, and so it will. Extreme weather has gotten people’s attention. COVID is a start on population reduction. The problem is that weather can be more extreme, pandemics can be more virulent, and earthquakes can affect larger areas and be more destructive. When it gets so hot that half the people on Earth perish, Earth will rebalance itself, unless it has done so before that time. The Earth’s rebalancing is inevitable; the human toll is still to be determined and can be affected by what we do.
The fight against climate change is not about saving the Earth — it is about human decency that refuses to accept that a large portion of the population (no one knows how many exactly) may need to perish at the Earth’s hands for Earth to rebalance. It is a good, proper, and morally decent effort.
Recasting the struggle this way casts the resistance to climate action in a new light. People who resist action, either by fighting the action or by denial that climate change is real, do so based on a single crucial belief: That they will not be one of the humans the Earth removes.
This core belief sets up a potential thought pattern that is terribly disturbing. Peter Frase outlined the notion in his book Four Futures. One of those futures is driven by a haunting question to be asked by elites: What do we need all these people for? Frase shows how this question becomes an ideology of what he calls exterminism. After the genocides of the 20th Century, it is not difficult to imagine where such an ideology leads.
The debate over climate change facts and policy, formulated as it is today, protects the purveyors of this hideous ideology. Whether they know it or not, these ideas are laying an intellectual foundation for exterminism. We can help prevent that outcome by forcing the deniers to face their hideousness. Every time climate activists talk about “saving the Earth” or “stopping climate change” we give cover to that ideology.
What should we say instead? That we are on a mission to preserve humanity. The effort is to save lives, peoples, and nations. Such a change in rhetoric requires opponents to take the other side and proclaim their immoral position — i.e., that saving people does not matter. Many will wake up when they realize what they are doing. Many more will change. And some will be revealed for who they are.
The Earth is going to rebalance itself, and you can see it happening in all the systems changing. Ecologists and activists say that ecosystems are “breaking down,” and from a certain perspective, they are correct. The problem with such a breakdown, however, isn’t the breakdown itself; it is that the food chain will be depleted. Our current debate leaves one thinking that it is “sad” that the Great Barrier Reef, for example, is “threatened” or that California’s central valley’s drought is “too bad.” Media stories try to personalize these catastrophes by airing local people lamenting their lost way of life. All that is true, but it doesn’t say the truth of what we need to see. Ecosystem breakdown isn’t sad, it is an emergency. Ecosystem breakdown is a famine in the making. It is Earth’s way of rebalancing itself. And Earth will continue to do this until it slows down enough of the activity causing the problems to reverse the problems and begin to rebalance.
If we humans can get over our arrogance and hubris, we can see the inevitable: our way of life on this planet is going to change. It does not matter if you are a climate denier or not. It does not matter if you are an environmentalist or not. It does not matter what part of the world you are in. The Earth is going to do what it needs to do to self-regulate. It will do it in one of two ways. One is to eliminate enough humans to right-size human activity on the planet (thereby reducing the activities that are damaging its ability to provide for the biosphere). The second is to inspire people to figure out how to stop doing what we are doing (thereby creating the same outcome). One way or another, the human activity that is causing all the problems for Earth will be reduced. It is just a matter of whether or not we humans want to participate in how that outcome is achieved.
Anthony Signorelli
Ideas, insights, and imagination to help you live better in a worsening world.
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