[0:00]See, I'm not one of these people who's worried about everything. You got people like this around you, country's full of them now. People walking around all day long, every minute of the day, worried about everything.
[0:11]Worried about the air, worried about the water, worried about the soil. Worried about insecticides, pesticides, food additives, carcinogens, worried about radon gas, worried about asbestos,
[0:21]worried about saving endangered species. Let me tell you about endangered species. All right?
[0:28]Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control nature. It's arrogant, meddling. It's what got us in trouble in the first place.
[0:37]Doesn't anybody understand that? Interfering with nature. We're so self-important. So self-important.
[0:43]Everybody's going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those nails.
[0:51]And the greatest arrogance of all, save the planet. What? The planet is doing great.
[0:57]Been here four and a half billion years. Do you ever think about the arithmetic? Planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000?
[1:08]And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion.
[1:15]And we have the conceit to think that somehow we're a threat. That somehow we're going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a floating around the sun.
[1:24]The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us.
[1:31]Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors,
[1:44]worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages. And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
[1:58]The planet, the planet, the planet isn't going anywhere. We are.
[2:10]And we won't leave much of a trace either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam, maybe. Little styrofoam.
[2:17]The planet will be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation, just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac.
[2:26]The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
[2:34]You want to know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing.
[2:47]Want to know if the planet's all right? Ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places, buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week.
[2:59]How about those people at Kilauea, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room?
[3:08]The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself because that's what it does.
[3:20]It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed.
[3:27]And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm, the Earth plus plastic.
[3:37]The Earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth. The Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children.
[3:44]Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it, needed us.
[3:55]Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question, why are we here? Plastic. Assholes.
[4:06]So,
