Last week was Earth Day. What exactly this is and when and how it is celebrated is not the topic of this post. You can learn more about this holiday here, here and here. What I want to talk about here is one of the misconceptions we get about the green movement.

Although it might look that I am against being green, I am not. I care about earth because this is where I live here. It provides the water I drink, the air I breathe and the food I eat (the small things I try to do about live in harmony with earth is the topic of a future post). But these days all the talk about the footprint we are leaving behind is blown out of proportion. Let me try to explain why I believe this.

Life is an amazing thing. I am always mesmerized by how life springs everywhere after a long and cold winter when everything seemed to be dead. Plants spring out of the ground. Insects reappear everywhere and flowers bloom in an exquisite array of colors, aromas and shapes.

This is only a small example of how life always finds a way to come back. The best part is that this has happened for millions of years in our planet. From a single organism life sprung and evolved to the great variety that exists today. However, that was not an easy process. Most forms of life have gone extinct during this period of millions of years. All the life that we see today in our beautiful planet is only a small portion of the life that has existed here before.

When people say that we are destroying life in our planet that to me is an overstatement. I strongly believe this because life will find a way to spring back even if we destroy ourselves. It will find new and fascinating ways to adapt to the new conditions. Life was here before us and it will be here long after we are gone.

What I am saying is that the green movement is not a movement to save life on earth. It is a movement to save the human race from itself. Like I said, even if we wipe off every single living creature on the planet, life will evolve, find its way back and continue to exist in new and fascinating ways, but, unfortunately, we won’t be here to witness it.

So let’s be straight. We are fighting a battle to save us from ourselves. Everything we do to our planet affects us directly. For a long time we’ve thought we are over the natural process of earth. We believe to be holy, sacred, an offspring of god (insert here your favorite god), but the problem we are facing now is teaching us that we need to get down to earth (where we are from and where we live). We need to learn to live in harmony with our planet. We need to realize that this is the only home we have, where we live, love and die. We are not over the natural world, but are part of it.

Once we realized this, things will start to change. My only hope is that we do it before it’s too late.