politics

Saving the planet? Again?

Writing in the April 13, 2009 edition of Newsweek, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm falls into the same matriarchal trap so many well-meaning supporters of environmental causes easily journey.

"Our dependence on imported oil," Granholm profoundly declares, "threatens our economic prosperity, our national security and, in a very real sense, the future of the planet."

Despite the baseless rantings of creationists, the earth has been around, by most scientists estimates, 4.55 billion years. Evolutionary scientists generally accept the first presence of homo sapiens around 250,000 years ago.

Framed in Carl Sagan's perspective of the whole of time as a calendar year, man has been on earth only since 10:30 p.m. on December 31. That’s 1 ½ hours out of 2,592 hours in a calendar year or just .059% of earth’s existence.

Humbling to our self-esteem, the earth has survived 99.941% of its existence just dandy without us. Of the 1 ½ geologic “hours” we’ve been on the big blue marble, recorded history occupies a mere 10 seconds.

As Paul and Anne Erlich observed in their book Extinction, 98% of all species that have ever lived have become extinct. “No doubt,” write the famous ecologists, “They didn't imagine such an outcome was possible any more than we do.”

With the sun only about halfway through its expected life existence, the earth will likely survive for another 4 or 5 billion years. The race to human extinction is far more likely to occur than the death of the sun.

So are we saving the planet? No, earth was around for 4.5 plus billion years before humans ever started reshaping her into a more habitable environment and will likely be around another 4.5 billion years before the sun fries.

We are actually preserving our ability to live on the planet in a manner similar to what we do now. We are not saving the planet--we are seeking to delay our extinction.

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posted by dq @ 2:33 PM