Why Care about Saving the Earth?

Communism against Earth

Let's tease that out a bit and expand on it.

> My number one goal is averting doomsday. If that means we have to end up with 10000 years of Mikael Wiehe lyrics then I can live with that if we saved the planet. Anyone pulling the breaks on averting the crisis from either side of the proverbial aisle, whether they’re Exxon or Bakunin, needs to sober up and start living their life right. When a stick destroys the Earth, we’re not much happier if it’s called the people’s stick.

There are large numbers of unacceptable "solution"s in the ecological space. Suppose the only solution to an eco-catastrophe were a mass die-off, with the remnant of humanity consisting of peasants and lords who hunt peasant for sport a la Game of Thrones. Lord Jeffrey VIII, descendant of Jeff Bezos, tells me it goes great with chardonnay. If that is the alternative, then let her burn-baby-burn.

There are also a lot of anti-immigration, anti-humanist types with an ecological cut to their jib. Right here in my own home state, one of them ran in this season's democratic primary for a US Senate seat.[1] I'm glad to have voted against him. He was defeated in the primary. Edward Abbey was a well-known expositor of this flavor of environmentalism.

So the question is, why does saving the planet matter? What differentiates it from the billions or trillions of other balls of rock orbiting stars like our own? One thing and one thing alone: as far as we know, it is the only place in the universe where life -- and specifically, intelligent life -- exists. I would be very shocked if the universe were not teeming with planets full of life, intelligent or otherwise. However, as of 2022, this is the only one we know of.

To me, the one and only justification for saving the Earth is to keep it livable for those who come after us. I am a socialist because I am a humanist, and for me, environmentalism -- like socialism -- is just another tool in the humanist's toolkit. If saving the Earth means sentencing our descendants to indefinite misery, I'm not on board.

Brent Thompson, Reactionary Chucklehead for Senate