I dislike it so when people say “the planet is dying” as a result of anthropogenic global heating. It’s so navel-gazing and self-involved.
*Humanity* may not survive the current epoch, but “the planet” will. The planet’ll be just fine.
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@adamgreenfield I'm not getting this. Does it matter much that people use "the planet" as a shorthand for "humanity and its comfortable habitats"? Is it salient that this ball of rock will be fine? Is it more navel-gazing than saying "the planet" without specifying which one?
@danstowell Ah, that’s just it: beyond the strictly selfish and the personal, I have no particular commitment to “humanity and its comfortable habitats.”
I get that that’s a hard position for most people to understand – if they give thought to it at all, they tend to confound it with nihilism.
@adamgreenfield This is a Michael Crichton saying. My right-wing oil-industry anti-ecologist father told it to me as a teen. Make of that what you will. :)
@pete Even a broken clock is right twice a day?
@adamgreenfield That last paragraph begs to be read out in a sinister voice and terminated with a maniacal laughter
Humanity, in some form, will survive quite a while — although we're in for some hard times relative to what people are used to. Quite a few other species won't.
@kbal Those may well all be losses-for-us as well as losses-in-themselves, and therefore to be grieved – but I’m bound to affirm their formal emptiness. Both of these things can be true.
The division between "us" and "them" is not so clear-cut. We're all part of the same self-regulating complex system and if you don't like calling it "the planet" or if you don't like calling the transformation it's currently undergoing "dying" that's fair enough and technically you're right, but it's natural that people think of it in those terms.
@kbal Well, it’s not out yet, but the first part of what you’re arguing is treated at some length in my forthcoming book.
The second assertion coiled within the first – that the gorgeously elaborate, self-regulating complex system that is life on this planet somehow has *objective* worth, or somehow “deserves” to be preserved in its present state – is where we begin to part ways.
It’s magnificent. Its beauty makes me weep. Humanity has never done and will never achieve anything capable of improving on it. But it just *is*, and it too will eventually become something else, and its components unbound to become part of some other system of being. That continuous process of change is all I’m able to affirm.
(It is perhaps not coincidental that I most often see such sentiments expressed by people who clearly consider themselves to be “one of the good guys.”)
And in both cases, when I say “people,” I mean “liberals.”
@adamgreenfield homo sapiens thrived in a short band of climate stability. we could have made it last longer, but as everything, it was just a matter of time.
@lzg Yes! And the older I get, the easier it is for me to look on it all and say, “Well, it was nice while it lasted.”
(“Too bad she won’t live – but then again, who does?”)
