We don't need to save the planet

The planet does not need saving. But the human race does.

Hey folks, this is a special edition in addition to the regular weekly digest published on Mondays. It’s a quick read where I share three things that I think are wrong with the popular narrative of ‘We need to save the planet’.

The planet has survived millennia and will continue to do so. It’s the human race that will not be able to survive if the climate goes beyond a certain equilibrium.

A lot of the narrative around addressing climate change has been based on ‘saving planet Earth’.

There is no dearth of articles on ‘How to save the Earth’ including one by WWF!

However, there are a few challenges with this narrative.

1. It’s wrong.
   The planet has existed for 4.56 billion years. It has survived at least 5 ice ages, supervolcanic explosions and multiple asteroid attacks. In contrast to that, modern humans have evolved less than 200,000 years back. And in these 200,000 years they not seen an ice age, or temperatures going beyond a certain range. So, when people say that the earth will end due to climate change, that assertion is incorrect. What will end is human life of earth, but the earth will most likely survive.

2. Survival instincts trump altruism.
   The ‘save the planet’ narrative is not helping our fight to address climate change. The ‘You need to save the planet’ narrative makes it feel like an altruistic act. We also need to enhance it further, e.g. by personifying the Earth into ‘Mother Earth’ to really appeal to the altruism in people. And even after all this we have not been able to inspire enough action.

   It’s not surprising though. Humans think of altruism and saving someone or something else, if and when they feel secure in the first place. The flight safety announcement, ‘wear your mask before helping others’ has wider application. A lot of the world likely does not yet feel very secure. We still have fundamental problems, such as people living in extreme poverty and hunger, people not having access to energy unsolved, we have just having survived a pandemic, there are wars raging as we speak and a recession looming on our heads. I doubt the human race feels secure enough to think they should be helping someone/ something else.
   But addressing climate change is really like putting on our oxygen masks. And we need to say that. If we want to inspire action, we need to make this about our own survival. Appealing to our survival instinct may work better than calling out to selfless altruism.

3. The underlying belief of human supremacy is dangerous
   Inherent to this narrative is the belief of human supremacy or human exceptionalism (The belief that humans are separate from nature and superior to it). When we say that WE need to save the planet, we are putting ourselves in a superior position and thus furthering the narrative of human supremacy. The human supremacy belief itself is to a large extent responsible for getting us here, because it allows us to treat nature as inferior to us, like a resource to be exploited for human betterment. We need to let go of this dangerous belief and treat all of nature (plants and animals) as equal stakeholders if we are to have any hope of surviving the climate emergency and returning to a more habitable world. Our narrative should be much more of ‘We need to save the human race with a little help from nature’ rather than ‘We, humans need to save the earth’.

So, the ‘We need to save the planet’ narrative needs to change. The reality is we need to save ourselves. Maybe saying it as it is will inspire more action.

If you liked this post please share with someone you think may like it too!

And if you would like to get more posts like these, please subscribe.