Feeling “green guilt?” Don’t be so self-absorbed.
It’s okay to change the climate
Once upon a time — approximately 2.4 billion years ago — when the Earth was young, steamy (with volcano eruptions) and intoxicating (with over 70% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere), there lived a bacteria called cyanobacteria.
She floated in a world ocean surrounded by her merry single-celled cousins, busy transforming water and nitrogen into food through slow, anoxygenic photosynthesis, never wishing for anything else. But she felt she was different. That she could change the world.
According to scientists, cyanobacteria was responsible for the Great Oxidation Event, (dubbed Great Oxidation Catastrophe), which completely changed the Earth's atmosphere, inverted its whole biosphere inside out, and resulted in the first mass extinction.
What made cyanobacteria special was her new, more efficient way to produce energy — using light to transform water and CO2 to sugar and oxygen. With an overwhelming quantity of source material around and hardly any competition, she was sure to reign supreme forever. But the oxygen that she was pumping out uncontrollably had kickstarted the evolution of entirely new, multicellular forms of life — who in mere billions of years evolved into us.
