The planet will be just fine.

Dinosaurs are fascinating to children and it is not surprising.

A world where lizards the size of double decker buses, with teeth the size of paving stones, live alongside crocodiles with wings on a planet that explodes with fire and spits lava?

Yes please.

I was reading yet another book about dinosaurs recently, with our 6-year old son.

As always, it was teaching me things about the World that I had either forgotten, or never known.

Impressive and unpronounceable names. Food chains that felt as brutal as they were wonderful. The newly discovered fact that a T-Rex has feathers now.

And the concept of time. Yawning expanses of time. So much time.

Generations of dinosaurs that spanned not hundreds or thousands of years. But hundreds of millions.

A dynasty that last 250-million years of evolution, destruction, and evolution again. And all apparently ending in a collision both literally and metaphorically of a series of cataclysmic events. Volcanoes, meteors, fire and dust and ash and death.

A planet laid to waste by the harshest of the universe’s weaponry, and reduced to an uninhabitable rock in space, amongst other uninhabitable rocks in space. Spinning, waiting, dark, for tens of millions of years.

But the thing is, and in the end, the planet recovered.

Life began again. Slowly, and beginning with the most resilient of species. Life, and nature, found a way to flourish once more. Different, and yet with echoes of the past.

From animals to prokaryotes, the kingdoms rebuilt themselves from the ashes of what was there before and from a cataclysmic event that we can only piece together from fragments and bones.

And here we are again, on the edge of another cataclysmic event.

But this time it is not fire from above, or molten fury from below.

It is instead an event from within.

An attack from one species on all the others, a species intent on breaking delicate ecosystems, plundering and draining of resources that were meant for all.

A metaphorical meteor of plastic and trash, delivering fatal blow after fatal blow. A volcano of overconsumption fuelled by the resources of the planet, clogging the seas and poisoning the air.

A systematic and relentless exploitation of the ground and which we walk, in the pursuit of the creation of nothing but inequality via invented systems of power and wealth.

And yet it is also the same institutions of power and wealth that seem to be leading the rally call: save the planet.

It is starting to feel like misdirection. Because when we say that we are saving the planet, we are not.

It is far worse than that.

Because the planet will be fine. Eventually. The plastic will decompose. Eventually. In fact, considering that the time between the existence of a Stegosaurus and a T-Rex was approximately 80 million years, the relative decomposition time of a plastic bottle is trivial to the planet.

After we have gone, the nappies and the cans and the cigarette butts and the takeaway cartons will eventually disappear, and the planet will begin it’s slow process of rebuilding. Our waste will leave a mark, but a mark that eventually become part of the next thing.

But all the life on the planet right now? That is another matter.

We are not fine. Our fellow creatures are not fine. Our air is not fine. The oceans are not fine. What is left of our forests are not fine.

But it is a convenient thing to talk about the planet, to dehumanise the destruction and divert the attention away from looking in the mirror, or at the person next to us.

It is easier to create a slogan about an inanimate and abstract thing than recognising that we are contributing to something far more intricate and emotional. The slow death of everyone and everything we can see from our windows.

We are ruining the most magical thing that can ever happen to a rock, in space. Our planet finds itself enjoying an almost impossible number of fortunate circumstances to be able to support life. That it is not too hold, or too cold. It holds water. It has air that can sustain life, and that this life can then go on to evolve into other life.

We are selfishly throwing this gift back in the face of the planet, instead of appreciating this every day, and doing all we can to sustain this magical cosmic moment.

We are behaving like a parasite, and somehow pretending we are not.

We hide behind the glass of slogans, and dig ourselves into bunkers of blame.

It is happening right now.

We organise conferences in the type of luxury resort represents the excess in the world that is part of the problem but just happens to apparently be on the right continent to give context to climate impact.

Our politicians and leaders spend their time preening about the fact they chose to attend said conferences, rather than creating real boundaries that might limit damage to our rivers and oceans but also might reduce the flows of money through those very channels.

But of course it is all good, as long as we pay our flight offset and take an electric car to the meeting.

And outside of the Red Sea Resorts, our brands have realised that the planet is good business. Hashtag save the planet has become the rhetoric to persuade us to buy more stuff rather than less. And as consumers we bafflingly and collectively fall for this rather than questioning why the factory didn’t slow down and why no-one talks of less, just different.

We hope that the talk, and the smoke, and the mirrors, will hide the continuing talk of growth in the world of finite resources and the persuasive whispers of more, in a world that just needs us to use less.

Life on Earth will not be saved unless we acknowledge that the accumulation of wealth is directly responsible for bad choices for our World, and that our institutions are so complexly woven into this fabric that they will not make the big choices that we need them to make.

That as profits go up, our resources go down.

But at the same time, it is not only the faceless corporations and government.

Life on Earth will also not be saved by humans battling with humans in the middle of a London street to be the protester with the most followers. If you are trying to be the protagonist in this story, then you are missing the point altogether.

It will not be saved by us buying yogurt on a two-for-one at the supermarket, but then thinking that by washing the pots afterwards we are making a difference. It will not need washing if it was never made. And it will not be made unless we stop demanding it.

Life on Earth can only be saved by us acknowledging our parasitic behaviour. And changing, one by one.

We cannot wait for decisions to made on our behalf. We cannot believe that a part recycled cap on a bottle is enough.

It starts with us. By us making a pledge to use less. By giving ourselves absolute boundaries and drawing immediate lines.

And through that putting the ultimate pressure on our society, the pressure of demand for the right things, the pressure of supporting the right choices, the right opinions, until our little changes start to change big things.

By being ashamed of ourselves, and trying to be better. Because even the act of trying, if enough of us do it, can sometimes be enough.

Because maybe the planet will be fine. Eventually. But at what cost?

Will the next experiment in evolution be as beautiful, as lush, as bountiful as the planet in which we are lucky enough to have been a part of so far?

Eventually, the harshest truth of all is that the planet will rid itself of the parasite of the human race. But the trouble is that the parasite is set on bringing everything else down with it.

The end of life as we know at current rate will not be in hundreds of millions of years as it was for the dinosaurs, but a blink of that.

And instead of sudden fire and fury, it will be a preventable and painful decline, with the worst thing being that it should not be a surprise at all.

Land by land, species by species, until inevitably it will perhaps be humans who take the final look around on a wet Tuesday afternoon and think: what have we done?

It starts with you, and me. And it can start now.