Skeptigator

There’s an op-ed in Wired Science called, Stop Trying to Save the Planet.

The author tries to make the points that we essentially live in a “used” planet and have for several thousand years. And that our idea of “natural” or the “wild” really means, “hasn’t been touched by humans in awhile.”

He then details three lines of evidence, which boil down to 1) mass extinctions of large fauna that cannot be explained climatologically, 2) the planet is covered almost uniformly with signs of human presence and 3) geological evidence shows a correlation between the rise of human civilizations and greenhouse-gas levels.

His point obviously isn’t that we shouldn’t be recycling or trying to conserve green spaces but that we need to alter our idea of what we’re trying to get “to”. Wherever we think that is probably hasn’t existed nor will it for some time.