We Are Letting Our Planet Die Because Of This One Lie About Our World

A couple million years ago, God granted us a lease that may soon be running out. This lease was a very unique one, for it allowed us as a species to live on Planet Earth, a planet that, as far as we know, is the only celestial body in the Universe that is capable of supporting life.

And yet, despite this miracle that gave humanity refuge in the freezing vacuum of space, we have turned our planet into a ticking time bomb.

In the past century and a half, humanity has been seduced into destroying its only home by what I call the “Economic Gods”: Growth, Capitalism, and Free Markets.

These three Gods, to whom we’ve all become unwitting servants, rule the world unquestioned, with hardly a murmur of dissent — it is broadly assumed that Global Capitalism is the only viable model for a sustainable world economy, and that if Capitalism as it stands (which has now entered its volatile Late Stage) entails a new, genocidal era of mass extinction, that “we had better get over it- new jobs and a growing economy are more important anyways.”

The world is being destroyed, and yet few people dare to point out that it was the Economic Gods who were responsible for this destruction in the first place.

Pundits on cable news and politicians running for elections (who are all paid by corporations, the supreme institution of the Gods) will all tell you to act in obedience to said gods, seducing us into the belief that the economy is more important than anything else — including life itself.

The Economic Gods long ago prostituted the language of nature and environmentalism so that any attempts to protect nature would conform to the self-serving narrative of economic expansion.

They taught us to regard forests and wildlands not as not sacred wellsprings of life, allowing us to breathe and provide refuge for the millions of species with whom we share this planet, a truth indigenous people always understood, but as Economic “resources” merely there for human exploitation.

They taught us that being in the wilderness implied being in the “middle of nowhere” — as if nature was not immensely important in and of itself — and that razing natural habitats in the name of cheap economic growth was actually “developing” the land, as if this land was an inherently deformed entity that needed “developing” to begin with.

They inculcated in us the dualist notion that humanity was separate from nature, that the humans constituted “civilization” and that anything else was simply regarded as the “other,” therefore making it acceptable to restrict the “otherness” (i.e., the unimportance) of nature to the geometric confines of pitifully small national parks- just like we once restricted the “otherness” of the Native Americans to the geometric confines of their pitifully small reservations.

The Economic Gods, more than anything else, taught us to erect walls between ourselves and nature.

I remember how as kid obsessed with fishing and the outdoors, I developed an all-consuming love of nature that has remained strong to this day. But I was continually dismayed to see the malicious cancer we have a tendency to call “economic growth” destroying the environment everywhere I went.

Whenever I asked people why we had the constant need to “develop” everything, why we treated nature as an economic “resource,” it infuriated me to always receive the same answer: “That’s economic growth — you’ll never change it. Get over that idea that you ever will change it. Economic growth is what the world needs.”

I do not sincerely believe that these people understood the ramification of what they were saying. They’d been so brainwashed by the Economic Gods, and the language of these Gods, that they were incapable of discerning the obvious: that this charade of “Economic Growth” was eating the Earth alive, and that if we let it continue, all life will be killed off — including ourselves.

They valued these Gods more than they valued life itself.

The current destruction of the planet being wrought by the Economic Gods will not stop anytime soon.

But I know this much: that I will not partake in this charade: none of us should. I will not let the earth die. No matter what happens, I will not go out without a fight.