Since you decided to make today all about me, I have decided there are a few things I would like to tell you. You humans have inhabited my surface for but a millifraction of my existence, yet you have managed to drastically change me in a very short time. In the last thirty five years alone you have depleted one third of my resources, and I am just wondering how this could happen. I gave you everything—a comfortable climate, plants and trees that provide oxygen to help you breathe, vegetables, fruits, oceans full of fish and forests full of animals for you omnivores to eat. Most importantly, I gave you intelligence and the ability to reason, because I believed in you, and I still do. But I think it’s time you use your powers of creative thinking to figure out how to start thriving without causing more harm to life as you know it.
I am changing, there is no doubt about that, but the thing is I have always been changing and am quite fine with it. Species have come and gone (although the rate of extinction is now thousand of times faster than I ever planned it to be), you humans are just another species and are by no means exempt from this process of natural selection. I was just hoping to have you around a bit longer.
So on this Earth Day, I want to ask you a favor—stop talking about saving the planet, and start saving yourselves. I have been around for billions of years, been treaded on by dinosaurs, hit by meteors and covered with ice, I will be fine. If you do nothing, you won’t.
Jane Alt
April 22, 2009
So beautifully said. We need to change the marketing spin from “saving the planet” to “saving the human race”…
Lukas Volk
April 22, 2009
what a pioneer in the race to save humans. kudos to you johanna!
Rory
April 22, 2009
I’ve felt this very same way for a long time. Earth will be OK no matter what we do to it. There is no good or bad from the Earth’s perspective. We only harming ourselves, the currently beautiful state of the planet, and all the other precious living creatures we share the world with.