People Or Planet

Week Four: Sunday 22 – Saturday 28 October

Whoosh! Where did the month go? I knew my time in Falmouth with my wife and daughter would go fast; I didn’t realise it would go this fast. My body still feels like I just emptied a van of belongings into a house, after first loading them into the van and driving the van for ten hours. But that was four weeks ago. Four weeks, just like that.

Time is a relative thing, that’s for sure. I mean all time is a consistent measure: every second lasts the same length of time; sixty seconds always makes a minute and sixty minutes always makes an hour. So time should be constant, but it is anything but. Five minutes spent in the company of a bore can feel like an hour; an hour spent in the company of someone fascinating can seem like five minutes.

Anyway, whatever time is or isn’t, does or doesn’t, this last month feels like it has past very quickly. Maybe I am just getting older, technically middle aged, so all time seems faster because I have less of it to spend. I’ve lived more of my life than I have left to live, so it feels like it is going faster. Just like a cup of tea, a biscuit or a meal appears to get finished more quickly when there is less than half of it left.

Although, it’s questionable just how long any of us have got left on planet earth. These days I constantly see references to ‘saving the planet’ and ‘the destruction of the planet’.

But are they not completely false and misleading statements? Is the reality not that yes the human race is damaging the planet, but once that damage reaches a certain point then the planet will no longer be able to sustain human life?

When that happens humans will start to die in large numbers, possibly even being wiped out completely. At that point the planet will begin to make an immediate, if not full, recovery. So it’s not the planet that is at risk: the human race is destroying it, but only up to the point where it will no longer sustain human life.

I think there is massive confusion about this issue: it needs clarity and people need to understand the reality. The human race is in real danger of extinction; the planet, while battered and bruised by human treatment over the last 250 odd years, is in no real danger of ceasing to exist.

The other statement that got me recently was that, due to our lifestyles, the human race needs three planets to live on. But in just over a hundred years the human population of earth has more or less tripled; so regardless of our lifestyles, it makes sense for us to need three planets because there is three times as many of us than there has ever been before.

It’s the human race then that clearly needs to be saved, not the planet. And the way to save the human race appears to be by reducing our numbers and stopping those of us who do from treating the planet with complete and utter contempt and disrespect.

So no chance then!