by Ken Whitehead

Created on: January 11, 2010

Every day as we go about our normal lives we are constantly exhorted to “save the planet” by companies trying to sell us the latest “green” cleaning product or electrical appliance or any one of 1000 other consumer products. Leaving aside the dubious claims of most of these manufacturers and the obvious thought that if you did not buy the product in the first place you would have considerably less environmental impact, do these claims have any validity? Even reputable environmental organisations tell us that if we recycle, use our cars less, insulate our homes, etc. that we are helping to save the planet. So it seems reasonable to ask whether the Earth actually needs saving.

Give or take a few million years, it is now known that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The enormity of this number is impossible for short-lived creatures like us to even begin to comprehend. It is believed that the first extremely primitive life forms appeared only a few hundred million years after the Earth cooled and solidified. The conditions these life forms inhabited would have been close to the biblical view of hell, with extreme temperatures, poisonous gasses, and highly acidic rainfall. For most of the Earth's life span these primitive life forms changed little.

It has only been in the last two billion years that oxygen has been present in the Earth's atmosphere in significant concentrations. The oxygen content of the atmosphere was boosted about a billion years ago by the development of simple plant life in the ocean, and again 500 million years later when plants moved onto land. Prior to the development of plant life, the simple organisms which inhabited the Earth would have found oxygen as poisonous as we would find cyanide. Over the 500 million years or so since plants finally established a hold on the land to the present day, the story of life has been one of steadily increasing complexity, interspersed by at least five mass extinction events when more than 75 percent of all species in the fossil record were obliterated almost overnight.

The point is that life is not tenuously hanging on by a thread as it is often portrayed, but rather extremely resilient. We need not worry about saving the planet. The Earth is far better at looking after itself in the long run than we will ever be. To think we are capable of destroying all life on Earth is simply arrogance on our part. So what is all the fuss about? Why are we becoming increasingly concerned

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