Save the planet? NOT.

Climate chance has been sold as an existential crisis and the "doom" of the planet that we call home. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The changes that we are making to the planet with industrialisation has caused wide spread damage to the earth. Be it pollution in the air, the decimation of forests, mining, and the constant desire for more "stuff" - humanity has in a relatively short period of time done immense damage to the planet.

On the surface, it sounds like OK we need to save the planet. From ourselves.

Except that our little blue planet doesn't actually need us to save it. The planet is not what is truly at risk, we are.

Over COVID and the global lock downs that occurred we learned something amazing. The planet actually thrives when human activity is down, or gone. You see the planet does not need humanity to survive, in fact it does better when we are not around and leave it alone. Humanity on the other hand, needs the planet to survive. It is the only known planet in the universe, that is close enough to us, to sustain the human species. There are other planets that are closer to us, but none of them have the ability to sustain human life without serious environmental engineering happening. They are, uninhabitable - and it will take decades, if not centuries, before we are ready to effectively colonize and terraform other planets.

NO, we do NOT need to save the planet. We need to save humanity.

The fight to stop climate change really has nothing to do with the planet other than the excessive damage that we are doing to it. No, this is about saving the human race and preventing a potential mass extinction event of the majority of life as we currently know it on earth. The planet... will be just fine.

Earth is billions of years old and has survived 5 mass extinction events that we know of. The worst is estimated to have wiped out 99% of all life on earth. That was billions of years ago, and yet here we are - on this miracle planet that can not only sustain, but create, LIFE.

Stopping climate change has nothing to do with saving the planet, it is about saving our species.

If all of humanity suddenly stopped existing, or our modern society collapsed and the majority of humanity dead, the planet would thrive and recover from much of the damage we have done in a matter of decades. Over COVID we saw a global reduction in carbon, and non human life thrived. I will say that again... non HUMAN life THRIVED.

You see the fight to stop climate change is not, nor should it positioned as, saving the planet. The planet has survived far worse that human beings, and it is likely that it will be around long after we are gone. The negative effects from climate change are 100% due to our own behaviours, we are the most self destructive species on earth today. We actively destroy our habitat to make it unlivable in the pursuit of wealth - a human invented concept.

Earth has survived collisions with other planets (how do you think the moon was formed?), asteroids, massive solar storms, volcanic winters, ice ages, and more global calamities than most people can comprehend. Guess what? The planet is still here.

Human are not the most dominant species on earth. That would be insects. They may be small in size but the number in the hundreds of trillions compared to our 8 billion. They have existed on earth for longer than any other species, and they will survive climate change. They will very likely survive every other species on the planet. We however, might not.

Climate change is impacting life on earth, but all of the impacts are directly hurting humanity and our ability to survive. It is like the entire human species is a bunch of masochists who thrive on slowly killing themselves.

The climate is changing and making more places unlivable, new disease is emerging, drought, famine, extreme weather, all of it - they are human conditions caused by ourselves. We are not killing the planet, we are committing species suicide and it would appear we are just too dumb to recognize that.

I say dumb because that is exactly how we describe other humans, or animals, that do things that make no sense. When you just keep doing the same thing, but then complain about the results, that is dumbness at its height.

We know for a FACT that the planet can, and will, survive our species. It was here long before us, and will be here long after we are gone. We have existed for a fraction of the time that the dinosaurs have, and we are already headed down a path of extinction. The difference?

The dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid hitting earth.

We are committing mass suicide.

We don't need to save the earth. We need to save humanity.

*this is an opinion piece and does not represent the views of any party other than the author.