Destroying the Planet or Ourselves?

Myth Busting:

Last week we talked about the “Good Life” and how we should keep exploring our lives. This week we are going to take a slightly different tack and talk about something close to my heart. Are we destroying the planet or ourselves?

Our planet is going to be fine, it’s ourselves that are going to suffer in the future.

In the Earth Science community, this is something we have known for a long time but I think we have failed to communicate this well to the rest of humanity. Our planet is going to be fine, it’s ourselves that are going to suffer in the future.

Up until recently, the mass media have often messaged the impact of humanity’s industrial revolution and development as the destruction of the planet. With names such as global warming, climate change, and now the climate crisis. People who are driving to create change are labelled as environmentalists or “green”. Campaigners are trying to “save the planet”. In 2011 the UK Chancellor in a speech claimed to take on those who would "save the planet by putting our country out of business"[i].

Highlighting the economy is more important than the planet. Labelling the issue as one of protecting the environment and not of humanity. In my research of the newspaper archives, I struggled to find an adequate article that linked our environmental impacts to the damage to ourselves. For example, this article[ii] refers to the anthropogenic impact on artic ice and ocean temperatures but fails to highlight the knock on impact to ourselves. The result is, people miss the real impact of our actions.

I believe that this mislabelling of the issues causes people to see them as too far into the future, and too difficult to imagine

I believe that this mislabelling of the issues causes people to see them as too far into the future, and too difficult to imagine. As I have told myself many times: “somebody else will deal with it”, “we will engineer our way out”, and “it won’t affect me in my lifetime”. This leads people to focus on the other more immediate issues they have such as paying the bills, getting food on the table, being happy, enjoying life, etc.

What if we changed the labelling to a humanitarian crisis

However, what if we changed the labelling to a humanitarian crisis? Reframe the issue to, what we are doing is damaging humanity’s future and impacting our lives today. Do you think people would take more note? I believe so. I also believe that it isn’t all doom and gloom. We can live the “good life” now, solve our everyday issues and be in harmony with nature.

We can live the “good life” now, solve our everyday issues and be in harmony with nature.

Let me explain. Firstly, are we destroying the planet? No. The Earth has been around for roughly 4.5 billion years. From 4.5 billion years ago to 540 million years ago, the Earth was developing. It had molten rock covering the whole surface, it survived a collision with another planet and as a result, formed the moon and the early atmosphere was formed from volcanic activity. The oceans were formed by condensed water vapour. All that took 3.7 billion years. That’s a heck of a long time! There is a theory/hypothesis that during this time, at one point the earth was completely ice, known as “Snow Ball Earth”[iii].

Ice-free earth 94 million years ago with warm tropical seas, 200m higher than today. Source: http://www.scotese.com/cretaceo.htm

During the Cretaceous (65 million years ago), and Triassic (200 million years ago) the earth’s atmosphere was much warmer than it is today and the planet was completely ice-free. In the Cretaceous sea levels were much higher, 200 m higher than today[iv]. Our planet has been fully molten, totally covered in ice, much warmer, much colder in the Ice Ages, and had higher and lower sea levels. Life has developed along these cycles and thrived. So, whatever happens in the future of this planet will still be here until it is engulfed by the Sun many billions of years from now.

Therefore, the planet will be fine.

During the history of the planet, several mass extinction events have occurred (five)[v]. The famous one is the fifth mass extinction, the one that killed the dinosaurs. These extinctions are caused by rapidly changing climatic and environmental conditions to which lots of species on earth cannot adapt. In all of them, the apex species (top species) of its time died out paving the way for new species to thrive in the aftermath. I have always been interested in the “Big One”: the 3rd Mass Extinction, also known as the Permian Mass Extinction, which happened 250 million years ago where over 90% of life on Earth was lost. How do we know this? Through the fossil record of the sediments deposited on either side of this event. This event was caused by huge eruptions in Siberia that went on for over 600,000 years. These eruptions put so much CO2 and Sulphur into the atmosphere that caused catastrophic global warming. Sounds familiar?

The volcanic eruptions in Siberia released more than 18,000 gigatonnes (GT), that’s 18,000,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon in those 600,000 years[vi]. So, that’s roughly 0.03 GT per year. At the moment, humans are putting 7 GT of carbon into the atmosphere each year, 200 times more than the volcanic eruptions in Siberia which killed 90% of the species on Earth. That’s a stark warning, remembering no apex species have survived a mass extinction in the past.

You may think we can survive a mass extinction through our intellect. I believe some of us may, but likely not all 8 billion. Just have to look at the IPCC predictions on climate migration, famine, water shortages and war as a result. We depend more on the planet than our arrogance lets us believe. The current consensus is our intellect and technology will see us through this challenge. We can control everything, and therefore prosper.

I wonder if this is true and whether we already have the answer in front of us.

The good news is, many great people are pushing this message. Extinction Rebellion (it has extinction in its title) is campaigning to avoid the worst of a future 6th Mass Extinction. Countless books and scientific publications, one of which I recommend is Planetary Boundaries[vii], referred to in David Attenborough’s recent documentary, describe the boundaries we need to stay within to avoid our demise.

If we accept that we aren’t destroying the planet, but instead changing its environment and consequently putting ourselves at risk.

We may observe that we are already hurting ourselves with our technology without the impact of climate change. For example, infertility rates are rapidly increasing. Humanity is starting to fail to make babies. “Over the past 40 years, sperm counts worldwide have halved and sperm quality has declined alarmingly with 1 in 20 men currently facing reduced fertility”[viii]. This has been linked to factors such as; air pollution, chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals and heat exposure.[ix] We also have seen rising levels of auto-immune diseases, cancer, obesity and mental health in the developed and developing world. On these topics, I recommend some great podcasts,

1. How to deal with chronic inflammation in the gentle way[x]

2. How stress makes you physically sick[xi]

3. How central gut health is to overall health [xii]

I believe all the modern diseases and ailments above are linked, they are all linked to us falling out of harmony with nature.

If we develop our minds and attitudes such that we don’t suffer these conditions, we will also be helping humanity face rapid climate change and possible extinction events.

We have seen when faced with a global public health crisis, Covid-19, collectively we can stop the world. What if we change our view on climate change from saving our environment, a nice to have, to a global public health crisis?

For example, let’s say humanity has an addiction, it’s addicted to fossil fuels, and this addiction is causing humanity all kinds of issues. If your friend had a smoking addiction, you could help treat the addiction with nicotine patches, but that is only temporary or transitionary. For permanent change and resolution, your friend would need to uncover the deep causes of the addiction, accept those reasons and work with them. Thereby realising he/she does not need to smoke to escape those causes. It is the same with humanity, we need to go beyond the nicotine patch, i.e., tree planting and carbon capture and storage. We need to investigate the deep causes of our addiction and work with them.

In my mind, this analogy holds. Lots of the issues that we all face in life are represented on a grander scale in humanity.

I believe that If we look deep inside ourselves and care about finding true happiness and living the good life, we will by consequence, bring humanity back in harmony with nature. In doing so, we can survive future climate and environmental change.

Well done for making it this far. This week’s post was a long one with lots of material. I hope you take away that climate change is only about ourselves impacting ourselves. If we grow such that we do not suffer the ailments of the modern world, and live the “Good Life” (described in my previous post), we will save humanity. In future posts, I will share some wisdom from others on how to live the “Good Life” and show how that will help humanity survive climate change.

Have a great week!

[i] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/03/environmental-politics-green-shoots [ii] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/17/climate-change-arctic-melts-editorial [iii] https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Geological_history_of_Earth [iv] https://www2.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringgeology/climate-change/climate-through-time/map.html?_ga=2.262643845.844481203.1674916786-131871339.1674916786 [v] https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions [vi] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225378751_The_Siberian_Traps_and_the_End-Permian_mass_extinction_A_critical_review [vii] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1259855 [viii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6877781/ [ix] https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-021-00585-w [x] https://open.spotify.com/episode/2HAI2V3PADR7N6PJeJwlvV?si=7ba85d76d61444ae [xi] https://open.spotify.com/episode/3biV1Ici02hsgGgy7vv8qO?si=uOyEgRg1TdyTWinSP1ZwwA [xii] https://open.spotify.com/episode/3ZgbK4ibcD2CrBzZEzuhmE?si=zoNPvXhYSMKARkSugQ_zsA