Andrew Meyer ‘12 | Staff Writer

“Save the planet, the planet needs us!” Calm down. The Earth is fine. It isn’t going anywhere. If, after using A-bombs and the presence of nuclear power plants, the Earth is in pretty decent condition, chances are it won’t be “destroyed” any time soon.

Not all types of pollution that you think are “destroying” the planet are as bad or extreme as environmentalists say. People are concerned about the hole in the ozone layer, but that has actually shrunk by about 30 percent in 2006 alone, according to measurements made by the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite. There has not been a dramatic change in how much air pollution there is, either. If a gaping hole in the ozone layer can just naturally shrink, perhaps litter and other forms of pollution are not as damaging as we may think.

The Earth has been around for over four billion years and has endured countless natural disasters in that time, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, solar flares, meteors, and much more. If it can survive four billion years of that, trash and air pollution probably won’t do too much damage any time soon. A candy wrapper probably won’t cause much damage to the planet, or the animals that live on it.

Also, what’s with saving animals that are going extinct? Who do we think we are to decide that? Sure, some animals have died out because of us, but we’re animals too — that’s nature. Animals kill other animals all the time, helping with extinctions of some species, so why does it matter if we do it? Even then, countless animals have died out without any interference by us, before we even existed. Dinosaurs died naturally, and so did many of the animals that lived during the Ice Age. We can’t prevent all species from going extinct; all the animals will die out eventually, why try so hard to stop it?

How are we even going to save the planet anyway? Plant some trees? Nature has that covered already. Oak trees, for instance, drop acorns that fall off the branches and are eventually planted, all by nature. Should we stop hunting animals? Of course not. Like I said earlier, we’re animals, that’s what animals do, they kill other animals. It should make no difference if we kill animals ourselves.

If people insist that we save animals, we might as well only do that for unique and useful creatures. Deer? They do nothing but look pretty. We don’t need them. Spiders, on the other hand, eat pests. Keep them. If an animal does not help in any way, or is a pest, we should not worry if they go extinct. It would make the world a better place.

So, we should not lose sleep and panic that we will destroy the planet. Even if we do destroy the planet, it would probably be a result of a single powerful action, such as nuclear war. Sure, we shouldn’t totally stop caring, maybe just calm down about it instead.