I grew up with the idea that I'm going to save the world. That will be my job as an audult. No one told me, from what I can remember, that it’s my destiny to do so, I clearly chose it to be my path. There’s several issues with that statement. The first thing is that the world doesn’t need to be saved. And this doesn’t come from someone who doesn’t believe in climate change, rather the opposite, this comes from someone who separates scientific facts with morality and actions. What I mean is that “the world” includes a lot of things and all of it doesn't need to be saved. Rather we could wish that some of it would be better off. By taking climate change as an example, it’s clear that it would be beneficial for humankind to do everything we can to stop the realise of greenhouse gases and invest in carbon offset innovations, technologies and environmental practices such as planting trees. So who needs to be saved? Humans of course. Some might argue the thousands of species being extinct due to climate change also needs to be saved, but why would humans care? The obvious answer is that we like the idea of tigers in the djungel, elephants on the savannah and bees in our garden but the most rational answer would be; for our own survival. It’s cheaper and less risky to let ecosystem serve humanity as it has during the last 10 000 of years then inventing technologies that will replace them (even though I doubt humanity has enough knowledge to create such advanced systems). If climate change needs to be dealt with, and thousands of species, and not to mentioned all the social and economic issues, why can’t we say that the world needs to be saved? For something to be saved it needs to be saved from something. If you look at it, this means humans. We are the creators of all these issues so what what really needs to be saved from what? My conclusion is that humans should then save themselves from themselves. And you still believe you want to be that person that saves humanity from themselves? So how to do that? The obvious answer is saving yourself. What you really say is that you want to save yourself - and from what? From yourself of course. If you have reached that conclusion but still wondering - what about climate change? Well, you’re being a part of it every single day and you participate in the system creating this huge error in beneficial development for humankind. Some of you might say that you don’t care about humans, all you care are about is animals, then have a second look at the hierarchy among species and see who’s in charge. You might acknowledge this and still want to save the animals from humans, then you probably have a better chance of helping animals by helping humans.
So before you go on your mission to save the world. Acknowledge that the world doesn’t need to be saved, it needs to be changed (if you have ideas of what to be good otherwise I would say that even the word “need” is not really valid) and change is happening rather if we consciously participate or not. So you can chose to do your best to contribute to a change that you might find beneficial for animals, humans, both or nature (regardless if you view humans as a part of nature or not). How to create a better world then?
Well that’s for another post.