From Be the Change: Just Another Cop-out:
“Mother Earth will still survive long, long after we have made the one race extinct that deserves it. Ourselves.”
“The good news is that we'll destroy ourselves long before we destroy the Earth's capacity to nurture life.”
These are two responses to recent articles I wrote.
Not to single these two out – it’s a surprisingly common response – mankind deserves to die, ho hum. Earth will be fine once we’ve gone.
Well, no it won’t.
This attitudinal meme is, in fact a cop-out. It denies responsibility by assuming that nothing needs to be done since we’ll be gone in a few years anyway. It gives us permission to carry on going the way that we’ve been going. It ignores the urgent call of action to which each of us need to be responding right now.
- Marisa Robson
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Be the Change: Just Another Cop-out
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I agree that this is a cop-out, along with a bunch of other cop-outs that we use as an excuse to continue living destructively. But I do find it an interesting exercise to change the "save the planet" slogan to "save the humans" - because the earth will survive without us, but we definitely cannot survive without her.
ReplyDeleteThat is true - we're destroying our food, our water and our air. People seem to struggle to understand how that we are part of nature, that we ARE nature. As much as we've tried, we are always in and part of nature, we just can't be 'outside' of the environment... In a book I recently read the author talks about a biotic community that respects all life forms and realizes its interdependence in the web of life. At the moment our system and philosophies are very anthropocentric.
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