Earth will be fine. It’s us who won’t.

When people talk about “saving the planet,” what they really mean is saving ourselves. Earth has endured asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes, shifting continents, ice ages, and mass extinctions. Each time, life bounced back – often in stranger, more resilient forms.

Take the Permian-Triassic extinction, 252 million years ago. It wiped out over 90% of species, the closest life on Earth has ever come to total annihilation. But the planet itself didn’t collapse. Within millions of years, ecosystems stabilized and new creatures, like the ancestors of dinosaurs, began to dominate.

Or consider the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. For the dinosaurs, it was apocalyptic. For Earth? It was just another chapter. Mammals, once small and marginal, flourished in the aftermath – eventually giving rise to us.

That’s the pattern: Earth reshapes, recovers, and moves on. Species vanish, climates swing, oceans rise and fall – but the planet keeps going. What’s fragile isn’t Earth. It’s the thin margin of stability we depend on.

Humans evolved during a remarkably stable stretch of climate, the last 10,000 years, when temperatures, rainfall, and coastlines stayed within a narrow band. This is the window in which agriculture, cities, and civilizations flourished. Push the system too far – with rising temperatures, acidifying oceans, or collapsing ecosystems – and it’s not Earth that’s at risk. It’s us, and the complex web of society that depends on this stability.

Geologically speaking, Earth doesn’t need saving. What needs saving is the delicate balance that allows eight billion people to thrive on its surface.

So when we say we must “save the planet,” what we really mean is protecting the only conditions that make it possible for us to survive here.