I’m currently reading a series of books, collectively known as the Iron Druid Chronicles They are tales of, you guessed it, a “druid,” in this case a worshiper of the Earth aka Gaia, set in present-day. This puts the books into the category of Urban Fantasy, an increasingly popular genre that trots out all the beasts of myth (think: magic, wizards, vampires, werewolves, other monsters) and puts them into contemporary America or Europe. The books are very good examples of the genre, and I recommend them to anyone who enjoys adventure fantasy. The books posit that all the gods of history, from Odin to Zeus to Jesus to Gaia, are real (and characters in the stories), that there are faery realms, that vampires and werewolves and other nasties live among us… you get the idea. One story touches tangentially upon the “despoiling” of the Earth by oil drillers, and others show the druid “healing” damage done by careless or malevolent humans and nonhumans. This makes sense for the story, given that the main character, his apprentice, and his teacher all worship and draw their magical power from the Earth. It’s also a reflection of a common mindset in this, the real world, i.e. the anthropomorphizing of the Earth as an entity unto itself. That produces a lot of handwringing about the harm humanity is doing to the Earth.
This is mystical gobbledygook, of course. The Earth is an insignificant rock orbiting an insignificant star in a universe that is vast beyond comprehension. The Earth’s only significance is as a life support system for the human species. I’ve written about this on several occasions in the past, usually in conjunction with some bit of news regarding global warming aka climate change aka climate disruption aka climate catastrophe aka climate chaos, so forgive me for rehashing old material.
Today’s installment of “the Earth doesn’t care” comes from a story that popped up in my news feed this morning, titled 14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines in the USA. Curious, I googled “abandoned wind farms” and found a plethora of photos of nonfunctional and oftentimes damaged or scavenged windmills. While cherry picking such pictures doesn’t tell a full story, it does bring back around the realities of the global warming debate and the demands that humanity switch to “sustainable” energy sources.
In some people’s minds, “green” equates with “no human beings have caused any change here.” The increasing level of atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by emissions associated with human technology offends those people, and a phenomenon observable in household terrariums has been expanded to a global level to explain and predict the purported effects of this increase. This theory’s validity and its predictive usefulness are currently suffering from contact with reality. The observed global temperatures of the past two decades aren’t matching up with the theory’s predictions, and that mismatch has reached a point beyond the acceptable range of error. Still, the theory’s adherents press on with demands that humanity change its ways, and it’s hard not to conclude that some of those adherents are pressing because they view the Earth as a “Gaia” that is being despoiled by the infestation known as humanity.
No matter what druids and other Gaia-ists believe, the Earth doesn’t care that we drill holes, or dig pits, or dig tunnels, or litter the landscape with solar panels or whether birds get chopped up by windmills, or whether we bury radioactive waste, or whether we dump our garbage into big pits. The Earth doesn’t care if we throw trash into the ocean, or dump sewage into rivers, or spray pesticides onto fields, or carve our initials in trees, or eradicate mosquitoes, or tinker with the genetics of food crops. The Earth doesn’t care if we build wind farms, then abandon them when they prove not to be economically viable.
WE, on the other hand, SHOULD care, but we should do so with our own best interests at heart. The Earth’s relevance is as our home, and just as it’s more prudent to have a waste disposal system (toilet, outhouse, septic tank, sewer lines and so forth) in our home than to dump chamber pots out the second story window, it’s more prudent that we not be reckless or stupid with regard to the Earth. This we should do for our sakes, not for the Earth’s sake as something apart from the humans who live on its surface. Fortunately, advancing civilization and the forces of the free market make it both easier to accomplish and a natural outcome. For example, forest cover in the continental United States has grown substantially in the last century, despite the massive growth in population. Energy and food production continue to get more efficient, and in the case of the latter, we are feeding more people with less farmland than ever. Diseases that have killed so many are either held at bay or eliminated entirely. Technology has enabled humans to live in places previously uninhabitable or unable to sustain them. We’ve been doing right by ourselves, even as the number of us continues to grow.
So, if we are to engage in efforts to keep the Earth in good shape, it should be for our benefit. This flies in the face of what’s being proposed to combat global warming. That proposal (making carbon-based energy more expensive and less utilized via taxes, caps and mandates) will harm today’s humans, especially the poorest, tremendously. This outcome is immoral and unjustifiable unless there’s a truly compelling case that today’s harm will be far outweighed by tomorrow’s benefit. That case hasn’t been made. Instead, the harm that will come to today’s humans is dismissed or ignored. Benefit to future humans is asserted, but even that benefit isn’t truly quantified other than in predictions of sea level rise that are increasingly suspect, and generalized predictions of weather mayhem that have yet to materialize.
The “save the planet” angle is, for many believers in action to combat global warming, the end unto itself. Yes, many others who demand we fight global warming are doing so out of cynical self-interest (money, power, fame), but set those folks aside for now, and contemplate the “save the Earth” crowd. Their belief, and, yes, it’s akin to a religious belief, is in a planet that needs saving from the human despoilers. This is, as I noted earlier, mystical gobbledygook. The planet will be here long after humanity has died off or moved on and it will have absolutely no opinion or feeling about what humanity did while on its surface.
There’s an old science fiction movie, produced in the early 1970s, called Silent Running. The movie is about a time in the future when all plant life on Earth has gone extinct, and a spaceship that is preserving what humanity has left of the Earth’s plants in several domed greenhouses. The corporate overlords want to return the spacecraft to economically productive use, so they order the ship’s crew to jettison and destroy the greenhouses. The main character rebels, seeking to keep the little bit of nature alive. He succeeds in saving one, but dies in the process, and the movie’s final scene is of the greenhouse set off to drift away, untouched and unknown by humanity, being tended by a drone. The movie’s obviously meant as a pro-nature message, but the question I have is – what’s the point of rescuing the greenhouse if humanity is no longer involved?
When we consider environmental matters, we should do so from the perspective of benefiting humans, individually and en toto. Despite what Agent Smith thinks, we are not a virus on the Earth. Humans are the only reason the Earth matters.
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Well said