Earth: fragile it is not

Some tough-love from this NY Times Op-Ed piece about our blue planet.

Earth, though an infinitesimal dot in the scope of the universe, yet weighs in as a heavyweight for being a third as old as the big U, and for supporting life for 90% of that time: 3.8 billion years!

"Our civilization may be — is — out of balance with its environment; current human ways of life are frighteningly precarious. But to read the fragility of our way of life onto life itself is foolish."

The writer frames our "civilization's" environmental crisis as something very different from the Earth's:

This greenhouse warming is small beer in any cosmic sense. It poses no threat to the continuation of life on Earth, but it does pose a threat to tens of millions of people, and will do so for generations to come.

It's we who are fragile, not this rock.