So, this confessional might not as comfortable as the last one, but it’s interesting. For sure.

I, like lots of young people around the world, wasn’t and aren’t particularly religious. That’s not good or bad, its just a fact. Recently though, I realized that I slipped into another type of worship, and its a weird one. One that no one really mentions. The worship of the environment. It’s not new; we had and have paganism and druidism and Wicca and whatnot. And it’s not necessarily bad just like any other religion, but I realized it is religious. The planet isn’t a person or a mother, its just rocks and plants and trees and oceans. The construct of saving the planet from climate change isn’t really what I thought it was. It doesn’t make me unique or make my research on green energy more important than anyone else’s job. People make things and try to help people and they’re just as valuable as people who are trying to develop more efficient and CO2 free technologies. For some reason there’s something heroic about it but its really just another thing people doing right now.

That’s not to say it isn’t important. Climate change holds vast financial and health risk for millions of people. But framing it as a noble quest can sometimes distort what’s really going on. I honestly thought because I worked on green tech I was invaluable to humanity, genuinely. But its arrogant and not very real. I might not be alone.

The environment is beautiful and complex and amazing, no doubt. I love it a lot. But worshiping it caused me problems. I felt crushed by pollution and CO2 emissions and got so, so depressed. It felt very self-important, as mentioned above. But the Earth is several billions of years old and has had ice ages, earthquakes, meteors, mass extinctions, etc. What we’re doing isn’t as unique as we want it to be.

If you exonerate yourself of environmental worship, there needs to be something that comes after. A new ‘why are we doing this.’ I don’t have an answer, I’m still looking. It’s also definitely ok to worship the environment. Its just something that contains hidden emotion that’s not obvious at first glance. I looked again, I hope if you read this you can look too.