“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to
save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales,
save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet.
Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet.
I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of
these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals
who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t
enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos.
Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in
the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean
place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the
future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened
self-interest doesn’t impress me.
The planet has been through a
lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics,
continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the
magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of
bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal
waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And
we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a
difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
We’re going
away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much
of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and
we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another
closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll
shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here
for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself,
it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a
self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth
will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well,
the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the
earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward
plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees
plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason
the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It
wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us.
Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question,
“Why are we here?”
Plastic… asshole.”
