There are roughly two possible ways for the earth to heal from the immense damage caused by human exploitation:

One way is for us to immediately engage in a multi decade process of transforming our current ecologically degenerative economic systems into regenerative systems as we find a way to thrive in balance within the carrying capacity of the planet. This will require moving away from the use of fossil fuel and industrial agriculture (especially industrial animal agriculture) as quickly as possible in order to preserve a livable climate and to restore habitats and ecosystems for the recovery of wildlife populations that have been decimated over the past 50 years. It will require transformation of our economic systems, our political systems, our energy systems, our transportation systems, and our food systems.

A second way that earth might heal from the damage caused by humanity is for us to continue our current exploitative, extractive, and ecologically degenerative systems and practices that have created our climate emergency and have led to an extinction rate of species that is so high that we have entered the sixth great extinction on earth. In this second scenario, earth will soon no longer be able to sustain human civilization and there will be a massive economic and ecological collapse involving the suffering and death of billions of people and thousands of species. Eventually, after a catastrophic die off, the earth will begin to heal slowly over time, and it will even likely at some point fully recover its diversity of life, but it will take approximately ten million years for it to do so.

The choice is ours – an intentional path of regeneration in which we as humans and most of the species currently living on Earth will survive, or a path of unsustainable exploitation and ecological degeneration that leads to the end of human civilization and the vast majority of currently existing species, followed by ten million years of evolutionary recovery.

If we as humanity continue down our current path, those most responsible for perpetuating our current ecocidal systems and practices will, like Oppenheimer, have become death, the destroyer of worlds. The choice is clear. We must become life, the restorers of our world.