The Earth Will Save Itself

Radical environmentalism may be the dumbest folk religion ever devised. It’s definitely the only one where the sinners are assigned the task of saving God.

Despite its pretense of selflessness and anti-humanism, environmental radicalism is egocentric to the core. It places humans in control of the Earth, which is the precise opposite of reality. It depicts a sick, ailing, victimized planet ruled by vicious humanoid overlords bent on degrading the fair and helpless maiden.

But we aren’t the planet’s caretakers; we are only parasites infesting its lush green hide. We are but fleas on the Earth’s balls. All it has to do is scratch once, and we are gone.

As much as I hate to break the news to you, the trees and the whales don’t give a fuck about you. And you live on a planet that values your precious humanity so much, it kills every human who has ever lived.

The scientific consensus is that the planet has existed about 4.5 billion years. Homo sapiens has been around, at most, 200,000 years. So this planet has existed roughly twenty-two thousand times longer than humans have. We are but a pathetic blip, an impotent wrinkle in time. We’re as delusional as the Flat Earth Society, only our fundamental mistake is that we think the planet revolves around us.

No matter how many Big Mac wrappers we toss along the roadsides, no matter how many used condoms and dried bloody tampons we stuff in our landfills, no matter if our carbon footprint is the size of Godzilla’s, planet Earth will survive much longer than we will. The planet isn’t in crisis—we are. This big blue petri dish is far hardier than the seven billion or so humanoid bacteria that helplessly depend on it for everything.

I say this all as someone who likes mountains and lakes more than I like people. I love the wilderness and wild animals far more than I like big ugly cities where ashen-faced humans are trash-compacted together into matchboxes and stare straight ahead, terrified to make eye contact with one another. I’m merely amused that humans think they call the shots in this scenario.

Perhaps many environmentalists realize this deep down—that the scheme isn’t to save the Earth, it’s to keep it habitable for human life. As a part-time human, I have a vested interest in that scheme. And as a full-time skeptic regarding human nature and how humans act when they have unrestrained power over you, I’m also highly suspicious of any scheme that would necessitate global governance just so we have pretty tulips and all the world’s frogs have the proper number of toes.

For all that humans have supposedly fucked over the planet, their dastardly, self-absorbed technological inventiveness has greatly extended the human lifespan. It seems to be a modern quirk of human psychology, or at least in the West: They’ll do something that undeniably benefits the large mass of humanity, then they’ll decide it’d be rude not to feel guilty about it. I wish I had a giant washcloth which I’d stick in one of humanity’s ears, pull one end out through the other ear, and then vigorously scrub all that religious thinking out of your skulls once and for all.

If the environmentalists were honest enough to admit their goal is selfish—the preservation of humanity and not the planet—maybe I’d be more willing to listen to them. For now, it’s just so much noise; the sound of the Big Bang is more comforting. It’s a fucking lullaby in comparison.

Now excuse me while I go swim in a pond and climb a mountain.