Every now and then I like to remind myself that, by biomass and diversity, this world really belongs to the beetles. We have but slumbered here, and will fade away again ere long--at least, if the visions in our policies have their way with us.
(Verres sternbergianus, of the family Passalidae, in the beautiful order Coleoptera)
@MLClark: Affirmative. I think along those lines with relative frequency. Insects. Fungi. Plants. Heck, even bacteria. All resilient AF, far and away more than we are, by orders of magnitude. Of course, they don't complicate things for themselves and one another, and they outnumber us on an unimaginable scale.
I don't worry about the planet, really, not in the dire ways many do, because they're not so much worried about the planet as they are, really, about humanity's survival, which is a...
@MLClark: ...reasonable worry, yes. For me, I'd hate to see us do ourselves in by our own hubris and folly, but there's a reason hubris and folly had bad reps since ever in all of our species' tales and adages. We do tend to kinda do it to ourselves despite ourselves. If and when we do, it'll have been a good, if short run, and then at some point a new equilibrium will develop. I'd be way curious to see that, really. It'd be neat, I bet.