on saving the planet

TL;DR: we need to lose the phrase "saving the planet" when it comes to talking about taking actions to protect damage to our environment.  it's a counter-productive phrase, and plays right into the hands of those who believe the eco-system that humans require to survive, is here to serve us today, and cannot be damaged in any way. 

 

the environmental politically left's marketing folks really need to leave this phrase behind.

in their attempt to scream through a megaphone about how important it is to protect our environment, at some point back in the 70s or 80s, some idiot came up with the phrase "we must do what we can to save the planet".

that phrase has done more damage to "the planet" than any before it, or since.

here's where the environmentalists in the american political left fail. turning into chicken little, when politicians like gore, and schumer, and aoc attach dates like "by the turn of the century", or "in a dozen years", or "by next century", intending to secure their next election by inventing some far-fetched edge-case apocalyptic prediction that invariably proves false. well, this actually hands fuel, and ammo, to the ignorant right, who love to claim that nothing humans do, no activity produced by any humans, has ever, will ever, or can ever impact the planet.

and you know what? in a sense, the gop, the republicans, the conservatives, they. are. right.

but, hear me out for a second...

this poor choice of language is exactly where the left fails. attaching a date to N meters of sea level rise, when no one really knows, only fuels faux credibility to the right's purposeful ignorance. it's hilarious to watch, in a way, if it wasn't actually serious.

rather... here is a simple fact that is indisputable:  in the next century, today's right wingers will be gone, and they won't care that future generations will judge them to be the parasites that they were. spending what was sacrificed to provide them, and failing to pass a sustainable ecosystem forward.

65 million years ago:
1. a meteor impact wiped out the dinosaurs. what's left of them today are birds.
2. the mammal survivors, the voles (think small mice), eventually evolved into humans.

in short, the planet is going to be fine in the long run. it always has, it always will be, until the sun exhausts its fuel in about 4 billion years. until then, if we fail our ecosystem, the planet will eat us up, and spit us out, and 20-30 million years from now hand the iron throne over to whatever biology today's cockroaches have evolved into.

no, no no, fucking no.... we are NOT trying to save The Planet. we can't if we tried. what we're REALLY trying to save is the cellophane thin ecosystem of air, nutrients, and tiny window of acceptable climate that allows delicate humans to survive and evolve into something smart enough to colonize other places, just like humans not 1000 years ago stretched their limits to colonize the spherical extent of this world. that thin layer of survivability is what the political right wants to burn for today's profit, next quarter's earnings report, and next congress' election cycle. good luck with that.

see that orange line? we're trying to save the tiny slice of the bottom 1/10th of that thickness... that is what we need. beyond that, please don't you fucking worry about the planet. it'll be fine.

dear liberal tree-huggers: stop giving the ignorant right the upper hand in this fight.