When It Comes to “Saving” the Planet, the Good News Is, the Planet Will Be Fine😊

Roughly five years ago, when I first dove into the reality of the climate data and became aware of the sheer scale of the devastation that we, humans, had wrought on the planet’s climate and ecology, I started to get a bit irked by the innocuous and ubiquitous phrase “save the planet.” Now, while the origin of this phrase likely came from a good place, at least a well-meaning one, it’s a phrase that for many years now (and certainly in the last half a decade) has become intertwined with mucho bullshit, with magical thinking that more often harms than helps. The fact that this phrase is still being bandied about by a fair number of mainstream environmentalists and corporate greenwashers alike is symptomatic of why we will never solve the climate and biodiversity crisis. There is no solving it, because WE ARE the crisis.

So during my advocacy work, my work-around on this phrase has been to take a more honest approach — “help save civilization,” “help save humanity” and maybe “lessen the death toll for current flora and fauna,” but none of those have quite the same ring, do they? How can you explain to people that we have built our entire global civilization’s infrastructure to date during a Holocene epoch climate ideally suited for human habitation, an epoch which we have now exited, but also by using up nearly all of the planet’s resources that took millions of years to evolve? That we built our world by polluting the land, seas, oceans and skies to a point where they could no longer absorb more pollution without changing something chemically or by dispersing more heat? That we have created a planetary energy imbalance that will not subside for millenia?

How do you “save the planet” when your entire way of inhabiting it is destructive, because your existence demands constant growth (like bacteria or cancer) that feeds an economic and monetary system based on consumption and debt? This is not some radical, leftist, communist statement — this is just a fact as to how our world, our global civilization operates, in all forms of democratic or non-democratic governments and spanning economic and political designations from communist to capitalist. I’m not declaring for one or the other — all these roads lead to the same Roman ruins under our planetary limits. I guess to be technically correct, I should mention that there are isolated indigenous peoples, making up a miniscule fraction of global population, who do inhabit the planet living in harmony with nature and then again there are whole swaths of “poor” countries in Africa and the Global South that do much less harm (at least until a G20 member-backed industrialist sets up large-scale resource extraction there), but the goal for everyone is to emulate the success of the G7, the BRICS or at least the USA, is it not? Isn’t that why climate and economic migrants alike travel north? So the roads still all lead to the same destination.

And as a consequence of this reality, the pleas of the environmentalists, the UN president or even the activist scientists fall on deaf ears, because how could they not? What’s Al Gore really going to do about that Inconvenient Truth he has so rightfully been shouting about when he still needs a corporate jet to fly around to his pitch meetings and a multi-Billion dollar investment fund in order to get anybody to pay attention to him in the privileged West? It’s not that his facts are wrong, it’s just that his solutions are wholly inadequate. There’s no pivot to a Green World of 8–10 Billion people aspiring to live a “growth-oriented” lifestyle. The renewables that have been deployed through 2023 are not even covering the energy uptick that has been necessitated by economic growth over the same period of time. Translation: we are still burning more fossil fuels than we did before we started adding renewables to the energy mix. In the last few years alone both the Bitcoin revolution and the explosion of AI have become two huge energy sucks that barely registered when the Paris Agreement talks were held nearly a decade ago. Now, Microsoft is bringing the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant back on-line, not to help decarbonize the household energy needs of the tri-state area, but JUST for the energy to support data centers that run its AI.

So it’s okay to accept one truism of our future is that it will comprise three things in varying degrees: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. They all play important roles in the mix, but the less we do of the first two, the more we will do of the last one. And we have done extremely little of those first two. That’s bad news for us. But what about that good news that was promised, you ask? YES! The good news is that no matter how long it takes, be it 10,000 or 100,000 or even 10 million years, the planet we’ve all been concerned with “saving” will absolutely bounce back; it will recover from the sixth mass extinction with perhaps some very different flora and fauna than have existed in the last 3 million years, but it WILL evolve and the oil slicks, the microplastics, the nuclear waste and the garbage, the billions of tons of it (the used syringes, the degraded Mattel dolls, the discarded knick knacks bought on Amazon), will all become part of the earth again. Organic soil. If there were any humans around still, they might be able to grow some pretty healthy food in it.