What For?

Last night, I was surrounded by a lot of people who want to make the world a better place. And they're all great people, a lot of fun - and this criticism isn't leveled at them by any stretch - I don't know some of them well enough to compliment, much less insult¹. I like the people I met. But they got me thinking about something I have had on a shelf within the kitchen cupboard of my mind. An old discussion.

"We want to save the world!"
"What for?"

There's a context to 'saving'. It seems to me that popular media, social or traditional, talks a lot about changing the world or saving the world but not really explaining the goal of the whole thing. And we need to explain that goal if we are to guide our own behaviors to assure the world we wish.

So what would we save the world for? One thought is for the children - the most interesting sexually transmitted disease of mankind where the parasite becomes a host for another parasite. Because of the nature of procreation², we manufacture these parasites at a fairly high rate: At the beginning of the 20th century, there were a little over 1 billion people. 100 years later, we're at 6.2 billion. So we're saving the world for the children. And the children get increasingly small (or decreasingly large) parts of the world in a perfectly fair world. This approach doesn't make sense because even if we save the world, our sheer numbers will work against it³ - unless we can decrease the carbon footprint per person at a rate greater than inversely proportional to global population increase. So we'll have to kick the kids out to other planets if we keep doing what's so fun⁴.

We won't even talk about the wonders of medicine that created the market for Viagra.

OK. Saving the planet. Why? Because it's home and because we want it to be home for as long as possible. This is plausible, though not necessarily possible even if people can't keep crotched⁵ clothing on their nether regions. Still, it's a nice idea. Living in balance with nature, singing songs around a campfire - but that, too, is a myth and has been since the Iron Age. The Iron Age lead to the culture of deforestation to start agriculture. We traded balancing carbon dioxide and oxygen of the world for food to sustain our happily procreating and mutating DNA.

And you wonder why elephants love us so much.

So why, really, are we trying to save the world? What are we actually trying to change it into? That answer - the future we actually want - should really be at the forefront of the discussions on so many things. But no one shares their vision of the future (unless it's corporate or includes personal gain). Everyone says that we have to save the environment... but wouldn't it be nice to understand why they do?

Wouldn't it be nice to understand why you do?

Speaking for myself, I don't know. It's not an excuse not to attempt to improve things... but it is approaching the problem of the environment in a healthy project management style. We need to define what we want before we can move toward it reasonably.

¹ Despite conventional wisdom (the oxymoron), it takes knowing someone very well to insult them properly. And if you're not going to insult someone properly, don't bother. :-)
² If you had to read a footnote that says 'sex is a lot of fun', you need to get out more. Turn your computer off now.
³ sing: 1 little, 2 little, 3 little carbon footprints...
⁴ I've just made the case for the Catholic Church to fund space colonization in lieu of prophylactics. And there's an interesting tangent here as well: the human life cycle is a ponzi scheme with no clear perpetrator.
⁵ If you had to read a footnote about 'crotched' being the opposite of 'crotchless', please consider getting new friends.