People talk about saving the world, but it doesn’t need saving. The world is a system of systems that humanity has put in place over millennia. It operates as we designed it, powered by humans.
Even if world systems are hurting humanity, as in the case of our fossil-fuel-driven energy system leading to climate change, it is very difficult for us to stop it. If every human (or a critical mass of humans) were to disappear suddenly, many of the world’s systems would grind to a halt. But with plenty of humans around, the systems will keep operating.
We’ve created many systems that we don’t really understand, because we don’t understand ourselves very well. Once we establish the rules, complexity takes over, and we’re not very good at understanding complexity. We have economists struggling to understand the complex interactions of economic systems that we set into motion.
It’s not the world that needs saving, it’s the humans.
If we don’t redesign our world so that it benefits all humanity and stops altering the planet’s natural systems, our human-designed world will churn away until every resource is used up or the climate is so unfriendly to human life that the systems break down.
To borrow a phrase from Buckminster Fuller, we have a choice: utopia or oblivion.
