When "Mother Earth Will Survive" Becomes a Dangerous Abdication: Why Geological Permanence Is No Excuse for Ecological Destruction
Common Loon on Turner Lake, Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, British Colombia On Monday, November 3, I posted on my Facebook profile Michael E. Mann's rebuttal to Bill Gates' latest missive regarding the climate crisis facing humanity and the planet. A high school classmate commented, "The earth was here billions of years before humans and it will be here billions of years after we are gone. We are but dust in the wind, so no worries for Mother Earth." I've encountered this particular excuse attempting to justify environmental indifference or outright hostility repeatedly over the decades. As a deep ecologist and pantheist, I, of course, reject it. Yes, Earth will persist as a physical sphere orbiting the sun long after humanity's tenure ends. But this geological truth, wielded as justification for inaction, represents a profound failure of both moral reasoning and ecological understanding. The statement conflates Earth's geological permanence (at least...