There is Greek mythology’s titan Atlas, with the planet — our planet, our home — heaved onto his back. His face is twisted into a grimace, a mask of, yes, pain, but also of determination, responsibility and power. The fate of the world — our world, our home — literally rests on his shoulders, after all. It is his to defend — or destroy.

We are Atlas.

Or, we think we are. Like all others before it, this Earth Week is fraught with Atlantean urgency, and one can see why. The task we have charged ourselves with is an enormous — titanic even — undertaking: Nothing less than the salvation of Earth and everything living on it. On campus this week, we’ve walked past our fellow students bicycling and face-painting their way to a sustainable future. Perhaps you joined them, hoping that your one small action will be the one small action that makes all the difference.

If there is anything demanding a wider consensus than there already is, this is it. Yet, obdurate holdouts remain: Climate change “skeptics” who pop up on occasion to cry alarmism or conspiracy and sound almost pro-pollution. It is a little frustrating when you’re on a burning ship and there are passengers who deny the flames. They engage in a supreme leap of faith that everything will work out just fine.

While one side trusts the planet to extinguish the fires we have started, the other prefers to assign that gig to us, confident that we all have what it takes to be in the savior business. This notion humankind has a grave duty to tend to Earth, as though we were garden caretakers, is solipsistic nonsense, the stuff of vainglorious delusion.

No wonder, then, that it all comes straight out of the Book of Genesis.

According to Biblical mandate, humans have an obligation to both “replenish” and “subdue” the Earth and to “have dominion … over every living thing” on it. This divine instruction is at the core of, appropriately, dominionist theology, which places the human species (well, the Christian ones) atop a very large pyramid of animal species living on this planet, which itself is also ours to do with it whatever we want. The only difference between this kind of thinking and the worldview animating many “green” activists is merely emphasis. So, some people are more interested in the subduing part of humanity’s God-given mission; others concern themselves with the replenishing. Both sides draw from the same supremacist illusion: Human beings have an almost godlike capacity to reshape the world in our image.

We are not gods. We are not Atlas. But due to progress in technology and the sciences, we are confused, and we mistake that progress for an ability to transcend human limitations. In order to suitably deal with our problems, especially climate change, we must abandon our humanistic hubris. Let us not kid ourselves: We will not be able to save the planet. This isn’t any cause for anguish, however. The planet does not need to be saved.