I'm often puzzled by the scare stories of activists. I understand that fear mongering can disrupt thought processes and trigger emotional reactions, and that dark siders use this as leverage to achieve their nefarious objectives, but the stories are so obviously false that it's a wonder that the listeners don't more often just laugh at the silly notions in them.

"We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate."

At least that's how Wallace Stegner, American novelist and environmentalist, puts it. And it certainly seems to be the word on the street in a lot of other places these days. Humans are at fault for everything under the sun - figuratively and maybe literally. I don't disagree we can do better but, for the sake of humanity, someone needs to stick up for us.

Humans are the only species in 4.8 Billion years of planetary existence that has completely gone against the basic theory of evolution. Instead of adapting to our surroundings, we've made the environment adapt to us.

As if blue green algae didn't totally change the atmosphere. As if plants didn't do so as well. As if grazing animals and their favored forages didn't coevolve in a type of grand scale symbiosis that helped them thrive. And there are tons of other examples. The truth is that all life forms change their environments. Humans are not different.

A first step to living well intentionally is to understand life. Humans have a different tool set but they are otherwise no different than any other life form. One way to grasp this is the way living things adapt to changes. A bacteria that switches metabolic pathways depending on the relative abundance of necessary nutrients or a slime mold that responds to the local crisis of food shortage by collective and seemingly conscious efforts to preserve the community behave in a sense just like humans are doing now as they sense a coming need to change tactics.

It isn't certain that humans will persist largely unchanged for a long time. It seems unlikely since they have changed so much in the past and are approaching the point of being able to intentionally alter themselves. What is certain is that the end time narratives of wankers like Stegner are steeped in ignorance and reflect emotional problems that impede intellectual efforts.

The earth is not unchanging. We wouldn't exist if it was. Even if you wallow in some superstitious notion of a need to freeze the earth in its present state to appease the equally superstitious notions of some imagined future society you can't escape the fact that this would be the truly unnatural act of an arrogant as well as ignorant species. Would your efforts preserve something of value or would they prevent something of even greater value?