The anthropic principle

A sense of cosmic specialness is no guarantee of good stewardship. But it does helpfully focus attention on what we are doing to this special planet. You don’t need to invoke some imagined law of the universe — that all civilizations are kamikaze ones—to explain the wreckage. You need look only at the choices we have made, collectively; and, collectively, we are at present choosing to wreck it.

Will we stop? “Thinking like a planet” is so alien to the perspectives of modern life—so far from thinking like a neoliberal subject in a ruthless competitive system—that the phrase sounds at first lifted from kindergarten.