Saving the Planet, or Ourselves?
Among the climate-aware crowd, there is a constant plea to save the planet! Protesters around the world show signs advocating for the planet but there appears to be some confusion about this subject -the planet doesn’t need to be saved- it is humans and many species around us that need to be saved!
Our presence on Earth has happened because our planet turned out to be quite habitable for complex life forms. Earth is not just placed in the right location in relation to its star, it also has water, and boasts a dynamic core with a magnetic field that shields our atmosphere from deep space particle radiation and solar wind erosion. All of this means that our planet is alive –in a constant flux that allows parts of the lithosphere (tectonic plates), to move over a viscous layer of the mantle, shifting continents and water bodies.
The confusion about saving the planet is most likely due to a misnomer — what protesters mean is saving the habitability of the planet for complex life like us, and the fauna and flora that sustains us. In the history of Earth, Homo sapiens’ existence is but a blip while our fast overuse of fossil fuels is even too short to mention! It is certain that the planet doesn’t need us –it is we who are completely dependent on it!
Earth was formed about 4 billion years ago and suffered many upheavals that precluded the existence of life until 3.6 billion years ago. The recipe for life involves at its core very few ingredients: water, organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, potassium, iron, and later oxygen. Once the basic foundations of life were available in the right conditions, microorganisms started the evolutionary path that serendipitously led to the arrival of the most complex life ever seen on the planet — humans. The resiliency of life has persisted until now, despite several natural events that have caused great extinctions, without completely ending life -just redirecting its evolutionary path.
The best description of life I have ever heard was given by geneticist and microbiologist Doug Wallace:
“Life is the interplay between structure and energy”.
This interplay, first developed by microbes, uses respiration, a combustion process, to release the energy required for life. Based on Wallace’s definition, extinctions happen because there is a worldwide problem with the interplay of structure and energy, very often caused by a change in atmospheric gas concentrations.
Let’s examine two of the most important extinction events in the Earth’s history. The first one happened eons ago and it changed the direction of life forever. At the beginning of life on Earth, many microorganisms were anaerobic, mostly methanogens that produced the potent greenhouse gas methane. When some of these microorganisms slowly changed their energy production mechanisms to secrete oxygen instead of methane, oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere for the first time in Earth’s history. These organisms, along with other factors like tectonic plate movements that reshaped continents and mountains, gradually increased the oxygen concentrations in what has been called the Great Oxygenation Event (GEO).
Oxygen reacted with methane and reduced its presence in the atmosphere, cooling dramatically the Earth -turning it into a snowball. For us, a species threatened by Earth’s warming, the disappearance of the powerful greenhouse gas, methane, seems like the solution to our problems. For anaerobic life, oxygen was the problem, so its rise caused their extinction!
Some anaerobic organisms survived in certain niches while the oxygen-based form of life became the rule. This caused an explosion of biodiversity in fauna and flora, known as the Cambrian explosion, about 540 million years ago.
The arrival of plants, producers of the oxygen needed by animals, created a symbiotic relationship that led to a stable 21 percent oxygen concentration in the atmosphere. Once this system was established, it worked beautifully most of the time, except when certain physical events like extreme volcanic activity and continental shifts caused an imbalance in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The next memorable extinction also had to do with changes in the atmosphere, this time caused by a wayward meteorite. This extinction destroyed the most complex life at the time –dinosaurs- while sparing a few small mammals, alligators, frogs, and some birds. The meteorite not only affected the direct area of impact, but also geological structures, volcanic activity, and gas concentration in the atmosphere -all of which affected the climate over thousands of years. This series of changes made it very difficult for complex life to survive, while simpler organisms were able to adapt and survive.
The dinosaur extinction was a terrifying upheaval that changed the course of evolution in a way that eventually favored the arrival of Homo sapiens. Who knows what would have happened if the meteorite had not fallen and the dinosaur line had continued its evolution? Could that line have arrived at a complexity similar to ours? We will never know!
What we do know is that there has never been such a complex species as humans on this planet! Unfortunately, we also know that such complexity hasn’t led to much understanding of how our survival is intrinsically linked to our respect for nature. Instead, it has led to a complete divorce from the natural order -we have not only separated ourselves from nature, but we have also arrogantly placed ourselves outside of it, and proudly become the only species with total control of the Earth’s ecosystem.
This attitude should be seen in the context of our closest ancestors, the long line of hominins that preceded us. Some of the later ones, Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelbergensis only had small variabilities in brain size compared to us and were capable of making tools and even art. Of all our ancestors, the winner of the survival prize is Homo erectus, and yet, his brain was probably 70% smaller than ours. Looking at the reconstruction of their faces, some of them don’t even look that different from us!
It is amazing how just adding some brain cells located in the right areas has been enough to convince us of our special status on the planet with absolute rights over nature. This belief has led us to gut the Earth for petroleum, natural gas, copper, gold, radioactive elements, lithium, etc -in short -whatever has served us to increase technological advancement and efficiency, including the implementation of so-called “renewable energy”.
The battle against nature has been very consistent: we have trashed and overfished rivers and seas, cut whole forests to sustain our ever-growing population, and burdened the soil with monocultures that need toxic herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers. Even worse, in a mad race to extinction, we have stockpiled nuclear weapons to parade our might, and even exploded radiation-spreading atomic bombs, while rationalizing these acts as the necessary means to destroy enemies of our same species. Of course, the cherry on the cake comes with our disturbance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in just barely 200 years.
We have not only put ourselves in danger but also many of the species on the planet. The present population decline of our closest living cousins, the hominids, can give a measure of the generalized species extinction we are causing. The Sumatran orangutan’s population has decreased to about 6,600, thanks to the industrial addiction to palm oil; the Asian gibbon has declined by 90% thanks to the reduction of their roaming area by farmland for local and international consumption, and half of the 262 existing species of monkeys are severely threatened, due to the expansion of extensive monocultures of soy, corn, and others -not just to feed the world- but for supposedly ‘clean’ biofuels.
Is there any doubt that our species has been trying its best to ruin the habitability of Earth while calling it progress and technology?
We are acting like the perfect candidates for extinction, an extinction chosen by ourselves! We are the first species to have reached a sophistication that inversely correlates with our respect for the natural order –the more sophisticated we get, the more we trash the planet that sustains us. Is this a desirable form of life complexity? You wonder!
In sum, we seem to get an F in saving the planet, or more precisely, Homo sapiens and many other species. The survivors will have to embark on a long process of adaptation to the new planetary circumstances -whoever can adapt will and the rest will go extinct!
Our well-merited F grade makes me think that maybe the plea to save the planet is a little bit late. The extinction processes, are already in full gear, even if we don’t notice them for now.
Whatever ends up happening, the planet will continue its orbit around the sun, the CO2 will last for a while, and combined with the rising methane, will continue melting the ice and warming the Earth.[1] The sea rise will change the shape of continents and water distributions affecting the planet’s geology, and adding to the complicated matrix of feedback mechanisms of the planet’s climate.
We certainly are the first species to change the planet to our disadvantage while convincing ourselves that more technology is the solution. Let’s hope that the next time evolution reaches the same level of complexity, this new species will not divorce itself from nature and instead of seeing it as a source of violence and underdevelopment, will embrace and respect it.
[1]https://phys.org/news/2022-11-methane-discovery-world-largest-mass.html?s=09
