Forget About Saving The Planet: Let's Be More Selfish

We don’t need to save the earth. Seriously. No matter what humans do, the planet is going to be just fine.

I’m a teenage environmental activist, community organizer, and plaintiff on one of the Youth vs. Government lawsuits where youth are suing our governments over making global warming worse. Needless to say, I’ve been to my fair share of environmental rallies, protests, and events.

At these events, and at school, I keep hearing messaging like, “Save the earth!” “Save the environment!” “Save the Planet!”

And it really disturbs me.

That kind of messaging is not only inaccurate, but it drives people away from the environmental movement and undermines how personal climate change is to every persons’ life.

Messaging like “save the planet” makes it seem like activists, just out of our own good will, are taking time to save something separate from ourselves. When in reality, our planet has been through several mass extinctions, meteor showers, and other chaotic events, and it‘s still here. If we had a nuclear winter, if we keep burning fossil fuels and completely melt the ice caps, if we cut down every single tree on the planet the earth will still be perfectly fine.

You know who won’t be fine? Us. Humans.

As climate change is getting closer to the point of no return, we as humans must understand and fully internalize that it’s not the Earth - a planet with a thin crust circling the sun that needs to be saved.

Instead, what really needs saving is the conditions on the earth that people need to survive. We need to save the resources, the air, the water, the ecosystems that people depend on to survive.

The earth will still be here no matter what people do.

Solving climate change is not so much a matter of saving the environment, as it is a matter of stopping humanity from destroying itself.

Because of our addiction to fossil fuels, we are rapidly destroying the resources we as humans need to survive. Climate Change is unraveling the ecosystems we depend on, and drastically altering the conditions in which we as a species evolved in. We weren’t built to survive in conditions that are too hot, we can’t survive without potable water, and we can’t survive if our bodies are overburdened with toxins.

All in all, we as a species are not hurting our planet- we’re just committing mass suicide. We’re not trashing the earth- we’re simply screwing ourselves over.

Because our planet will survive matter what. The real question is, will humanity make it?