Comment by 01100011
"Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine; the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, The planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat?"
-George Carlin
It's glib and funny but also hilariously wrong.
In 1800 the US population was 5.3 million (give or take). Non-industrialized. In 2025 it was 340 million (give or take a bit more). Fully industrialized.
In 1800 even if you put every able bodied potential logger to work logging you couldn't make that much of a dent in the forests in the short term. Crews had to cut the trees by hand, move them via river or animal power, etc. In 2025 a single person in a machine can exceed the output of entire crews from 1800. A parcel of land that would take a year to log in 1800 can be clear-cut in three days in 2025.
340 million people need far more lumber per year and fully industrialized are capable of cutting down far more trees.
In 2025 if we wanted to do it we could cut down every single tree in the entire USA within a handful of years. That was not even remotely possible in 1800.
Scale matters.
Will life survive? Sure. Will geologic events eventually clean up the land? Yes. But I don't think saying we can only be as bad as one of the great extinction events is the zinger George Carlin thinks it is.
And just to be clear: I think reasoned acceptance of some extinction may be necessary to make humanity a multi-planetary and eventually multi-solar system species. In the long long run every single species on earth is a dead end. The sun will die and all life with it. As the only intelligent life with the capability I consider it our moral duty to make life resilient to such things, taking as many species with us as we can. But what are doing now is basically lighting our inheritance on fire to fuel executive bonuses and nothing more. That's just stupid.