What we seek to save when we seek to save the world

The essay proposes a 2x2 typology of the "worlds" people seek to save, classified by biological scope (how many living beings count as the "we") and temporal scope (how far back and forward a world's historical consciousness extends). Its four quadrants are civilizations with ethnocentrists as saviors, technological modernity with cosmopolitans, stable nations with patriots, and wildernesses with Gaians, named after James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. The author, who says they are a cosmopolitan with Gaian tendencies, concludes that cosmopolitanism's main weakness is its blindness to aspects of nature that economic models do not capture. The piece is based on answers the author gathered from people on Farcaster and Bluesky.