Almost every day we are getting images thrown at us about our world. “Look at this! Your pollution killed this bird!”, “Look at this! The amount of pollution your cars give off!”, “Look at this! All these seals that died and you could’ve stopped it” and the one that seems to be the mother of all of these pictures “YOU’RE DESTROYING THE PLANET!”

We’re destroying our planet. Our home. Look at all the nature around us, how can we not be devastated that soon that will be gone? This slogan really strikes home for a lot of us. Leaving Earth forever or not being able to go back for many generations is a scary concept. We’d be leaving all the memories of our ancestors behind. All the evolutionary history, all the fossils of previous species, all the untouched ruins would all be gone. We’d have a clean new slate, but our children would have a difficult time seeing where they came from, and eventually the identity we had as the human race will be lost. However, these facts are indisputable. This will happen if we keep doing things the way we do now, we’ll have to colonize another planet, because this one is inhabitable for us and most of the creatures we know now.

But destroying the planet? Does that not sound a little arrogant to anyone? Life will go on without us, as hard as it is for us to believe. Yes, it will. We are going to have to leave before everything is destroyed. Humans are not the toughest creatures out there and in times of despair we will not be the last ones standing. Bacteria will most likely still exist after us. Achaeans will exist after us. Bioluminescent creatures will exist after us.

What about Mother Earth? What will she do without us? Mother Earth is a rock floating around a great ball of gas. Mother Earth will not blow up because we’re not thriving on her fertile skin any longer. And she will not crumble because some of her children are choking on our plastic. Mother Earth is the strongest, most constant thing in our lives. Everything else survives on the balance of things, but not her. Dinosaurs died, she made a new species dominant. It took an excruciatingly long time, but she did it. She does not succumb to the whims of her children.

When we die out or leave, there might be a gap between dominant species. There might be a hole where we were supposed to be. Life might not exist as we know it. There may not be any more sloths, seals or mammals at all! The water might be a different pH level, the land could be dry and barren or a swamp filled to the brim with life. Maybe the only life on this earth will be microscopic, and there will be a microscopic competition on the dominant species. There might be a little microscopic species training another microscopic species to do its bidding. The possibilities are limitless. Our earth exists in cycles. At the end of a year comes another one, at the end of the day comes another one and at the end of our time will come a new time. This theory has existed for a very long time in a lot of our cultures, except modern ones. Modern ones tend to be focused on destruction and the end of all things. Maybe this makes us feel special, but we really have very arrogant and negative attitudes about our place in things.

This doesn’t mean we should stop all “Greenpeace” efforts. We have a responsibility to ourselves and other species, to take care of each other, thus the balance of all living things. We are all dependent on each other, and if one of us becomes greedy and starts intentionally or accidently massacring an entire species that balance is off, as it is right now. Then our problems begin. We are killing a lot of species on our planet, all of us as a community. To give us as a race credit we are trying to stop it, but right now it isn’t enough. We need every person to commit themselves to the lives of other things, to not be cruel but loving, to not want death but life, and not just to think of themselves. We are not the only species who fear the end of our species; the end of our own species is an evolutionary fear ingrained inside of our skulls. It is something we have in common with every other living thing on this planet. We are killing ourselves, diminishing all of our resources due to our lack of resourcefulness. If we do not want to live on another planet in our lifetime or our children’s lifetimes we need to change the way we live.

We should start small. Start with ourselves, buy those recyclable bags at the grocery store and use them over and over and over and over and over again! Start with our community, start making the people we touch with our lives aware of these problems! Start with our slogan? Because we definitely need a new one. We are not destroying our planet, or life on this planet. We are destroying ourselves.