Hey y'all!
It's Earth Day, and I started to ask "what's our role in the health of the planet?"; but "Health" smuggles in a telos the planet doesn't have; not to mention assumptions about us, the planet, morality, etc. The Great Oxygenation Event was a mass extinction from the perspective of everything then alive, and the best thing that ever happened from the perspective of us now. Five more mass extinctions since. There is no view from nowhere on what's good for Earth.
So a question I find more provocative and meaningful: Who decides what's good for the planet? eg:
- Is environmentalism helping, or making things worse (and according to whom, measured against what baseline)?
- Should we engineer the climate? Who holds the thermostat?
- Is having children an environmental harm, a necessity (for solutions, or for their own sake), neither, both?
- Does individual action matter, or is it a corporate distraction?
- Who pays for climate adaptation? eg: carbon caps can lock Haitians out of development; "loss and damage" can lock Western voters out of their economies. Whose development, whose sacrifice?
Every answer presupposes an answerer. That's a part we usually skip, but here let's name it and let our differences make us wiser.
Lots of love, and see (some of) you at 2p central.
Jordan
(UpTrust CEO)