Anti-Humanism and the Myth of Planetary Doom
Humans Aren’t a Parasite—We’re a Flash in Deep Time
Humans are a parasite on the planet. That’s the view of a shocking number of environments and progressives. It’s at the heart of Extinction Rebelling, the degrowth movement, and the anti-natalist movement. These and other groups argue that, so long as humanity persists, the planet is doomed. As such, we’re morally obligated to not only decrease our impact on the planet, but to draw humanity to a close. We should have fewer children, encourage abortion, celebrate sterilization, and gradually allow the human race to go extinct.
I have many problems with this view. It’s obvious to me that human consciousness is the most valuable thing in the universe. This makes it our moral imperative to increase, rather than decrease, our headcount on the planet. While we’ve gotten used to the status quo where an increasing population equates to increased environmental destruction, this does not have to be the case. We can seek technological solutions to our problems.
But even more fundamentally, I don’t buy the premise that humans are destroying the planet. The reality is that we can’t destroy or even permanently damage the planet. The idea that we can is rooted in our deluded self-importance.
I realize this might sound bizarre. We can’t destroy the planet? Of course we can! We have nuclear weapons, we cause global warming, and…just look at the size of the trash Island in the ocean!
I get all that. But consider that the Anthropocene—the geological epoch defined by the impact humans have made to the planet—only began in the late 18th century at the earliest. We have impacted the planet, but not in a way that will meaningfully imprint on geological records.
I don’t make this observation to set up an anti-climate change argument. It’s an anti-human-hubris argument.
Geological epochs are typically measured in the tens of millions of years. Mountains rise and fall. Oceans freeze over and thaw. To think our impact on the planet will turn out to be anything beyond a rounding error is to fail to appreciate the geological forces at play given millions of years.
In the Atlantic article “The Anthropocene Is a Joke,” author Peter Brennan brings this point home:
Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.
While we think we’re making devastating impacts globally, this is only relative to our own history as a species. If we were to move one step forward on a geological timescale, Brennan writes:
Not only will humanity not be a part of this picture, but virtually no geological record will remain of us whatsoever. Not plastic birthday balloons, not piles of denuded chicken bones, not Charlton Heston shaking his fist at some littoral colossus. It will all be worn away, destroyed, or hidden forever.
If we were to wipe ourselves out with a nuclear winter, the geological record would tell a fascinating story of this event—but only temporarily in terms of geological time. Brennan explains: “The longest-lived radioisotope from radioactive fallout, iodine-129, has a half-life of less than 16 million years. If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it.”
On a human lifespan timescale, it’s perfectly reasonable to worry about slight changes in the global temperature and the growing mountains of trash in the ocean. But we should worry about these impacts because of how they will impact us, our descendants, and the plants and animals we currently share the planet with. We should not worry about the planet itself. The planet does not know human time, only geological time. And geological time will scarcely even register our existence, despite our best efforts to make a lasting impact.
If the word "Anthropocene" had never been coined, imagine how often the people who use it to signal their political affiliations would ever have a reason to say "Holocene," which is the actual name of the current epoch. Nobody gets a reaction at a dinner party by dropping "Holocene" into conversation. It signals nothing about your values, your tribe, or your level of concern for the planet.
"Anthropocene" does almost no technical work but enormous social work. It centers humans as geological agents of destruction, which is exactly the narrative certain communities want to reinforce. The word itself is an argument, which is precisely what a geological label shouldn't be. It is a textbook example of pseudoscience.
Um, your argument makes no sense at all. Because we have only been here for a hot minute our impact is meaningless? How about in a fraction of the time that anything else has happened on this planet humans have done more damage than was thought, well, humanly possible? What about the thousands of species we are mindlessly eradicating? Just because the dinosaurs lasted a really long time doesn't mean we will. We are destroying the planet as we know it. You don't have a problem with that?!! No we should not eradicate ourselves though it does seem like some of us are trying really hard to do that (hello Trump and RFK jr.), but Bonapace's as done as much damage in such a short time as humans have.