Save the Planet?

I was recently watching a George Carlin sketch based on global warming.  For whatever reason, we don’t think of comedians as intellectuals, but this man was a genius.  He talks about how humans are vain to believe that we need to save the planet when we can’t even take care of ourselves.  “The planet is going to be here,” he says, “for a very long time.”  And it’s true.  Earth will take care of itself.  When we speak about environmentalism, we might as well call it what it is: an attempt to save our own race from our self-destructive habits.

Think about it.  The world as a whole is much more adaptable than any one species.  What cannot adapt dies; what can will live and reproduce, carrying on the new way.  An ecosystem may be hurt by the loss of a species, but it will recover to fill the empty space.  Now, the loss of human beings may cause a very large empty space, depending on how we go out (the video End of Ze World comes to mind).  But the world will recover.  Earth will not stay out of balance for long.

So where does that leave us?  It leaves us making a giant mess which no one will pull us out of.  In our pride, we’re turning our backs on the truth, that we are natural creatures with very little physical differences from the other animals of the world.  We also need to eat, drink, breathe and keep warm.  And yet we are destroying our habitat, reducing our own resources for the future and hurting our own chances for continuance.  We are adapting ourselves away from what worked for thousands of years and finding suddenly that the new way is problematic.

Last year I read an article about a man who had attacked a group of others out of hatred for what humans had done to the Earth.  Obviously he was a lunatic, but some of his words had a chilling truth.  “The humans?” he said.  “The planet does not need the humans.”  And it doesn’t.  But we need the planet.  So who is it that needs saving again?