There was a time when humans were not the dominant species. There will be a time when we will again go lower in the ranks or disappear.
In the arrogance of being higher than all things we forget, we are but a line item in the larger excel sheet of planet earth.
The threat is not to mother earth - worrying about her is above our paygrade. The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine. It will evolve and thrive. What will happen to humans, well, that's another story, we'll have to live with the seeds we sow.
> The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine
This entire school of thinking that has derived from a George Carlin bit never ceases to annoy me.
For starters the "world" as some abstract ideal that we find comforting only exists because our human minds perceive it and imagine it as such. Our planet is just a rock out in spaces with some complex chemical reactions fizzlingly along on the surface. There is no "mother Earth" that will still be around to enjoy the life that reemerges in millions of years.
And there really is no guarantee that it is "going to get by just fine". Are you familiar with the current hypothesis behind the End-Permian extinction? It's believed by some to have been caused by a super volcano that ignited massive coal veins around what is today Siberia. Now the scale of CO2 emitted in the End Permian was much more dramatic than even current worse case scenarios, but we're emitting about 10x faster than lava burning coal was able to do back then. The End Permian nearly did wipe out life on this planet.
We don't fully understand all the possible CO2 feedbacks. We're already in one of the top 6 extinction events on this planet and that has little to do with climate change.... yet. CO2 has played a surprisingly big role in most mass extinctions.
Now it's certainly a low probability scenario, but it is not inconceivable that the end result of our insane release of CO2 in the atmosphere could lead to an unrecoverable extinction event.
At the very least a startling percent of the current species on this planet will go extinct (because a startling number already have). Corals which have survived plenty of extinction events might be replaces with green slime.
Yes, if you use wishy washy terms like "mother earth" then everything can treated as abstract and distant.
I care about humans and want them to survive and prosper. I care about wildlife and don't want species to be killed. And as humans we can use culture to go beyond our in-built programming. Ideas can spread. That does make us different to other species. That is not arrogant, it is just the truth.
Literally thousands of species, from coyotes to whales to crows, teach their young survival behaviors and have "culture". The more we look at our fellow DNA-based creatures on the planet, the less special we are. Personally, I think if you really cared about humans, you'd be interested in understanding and valuing the complex and fragile lifeforms that are being trampled by our current prevailing societal attitude of consumption and perpetual growth and preserving those fragile things for future humans to enjoy, instead of being mindless consumers disconnected from nature. Jeesh, as if no humans in history had fulfilling lives without potato chips, bottled water, and endless online entertainment.
Humans can spread ideas massively better than other species. Our phenotype is distinct among extant species. Just like plants are distinct from animals. I say that as a matter of fact rather that trying to suggest any particular moral implications of that. Our distinctness does not automatically mean we are special. And our lack of genetic specialness does mean that humans are worthless.
I absolutely agree that understanding life is amazing and even essential to our future. That in itself is an idea that couldn't possibly have existed without the distinctive ability to communicate I mentioned above.
> The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine.
We may be turning this planet into a lifeless rock. Other planets like Mars and Venus are "getting by just fine" by that measure. We may not be able to induce a total runaway greenhouse effect but killing off the oceans and making much of the planet inhospitable is still on the table. Really though, environmentalism is more about saving ourselves than our planet.
Our sun won't last forever and eventually the Earth will be totally destroyed. The less we have to struggle with survival due to what we've allowed to be done to the Earth the more we can work towards finding new homes.
In the arrogance of being higher than all things we forget, we are but a line item in the larger excel sheet of planet earth.
The threat is not to mother earth - worrying about her is above our paygrade. The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine. It will evolve and thrive. What will happen to humans, well, that's another story, we'll have to live with the seeds we sow.