I suspect we’re not going to address the issues of sustainable life on Earth. Even though scientists have narrowed it down to a few different issues that keep us alive, carbon emissions, the water table, plastic, ocean acidification, deforestation, and I don’t remember the last ones, we can’t seem to listen with our whole selves and make changes. I really can’t remember the last ones, but it’s ironic that I can’t, isn’t it?
We just spent a year holed up in our houses, most of us, and the minute our vaccinations became effective, we resumed pushing, moving, consuming, and chattering as if nothing happened.
Remember the small joy we had when the air became cleaner in cities around the world? Remember when animals we thought were extinct roamed the streets freely? Remember when we looked in the mirror for a long hour in the midst of the fear and said we’d do better, we’d reduce our plastic consumption, we’d work more often from home, we’d plant a tree, if this scourge ever ended.
You didn’t?
I’d like to think I did. I mourned that I couldn’t use my own grocery bags. Plastic piled bags piled up in the laundry room. When Amazon delivered, there were ten or more plastic bags that we collected, or for those that sealed over onto themselves, just threw into the trash.
We promised, didn’t we?
At this point, we’re not just trying to save the planet, we need to save ourselves. We’re trying to save all life on this planet.
I sit in a well-lit room with unnecessary candles burning, and the computer is on, to tell you this.
The Keystone XL pipeline has been canceled. Bill McKibben said that if it went through, it could be the tipping point that put us over the edge into the irreversible. Poor Bill McKibben. He’s been shouting at us into the void for decades. I remember when his books were about the joy he found in nature.
Already, we’re in the irreversible in some areas, but scientists think we can science the shit out of it if we start working now.
Now.
We’re not working on it now. The projections I read about are that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions in half by 2030. Isn’t that too late? Does that even come close to what will save some of us?
When I was still watching the death toll rise, I was thinking that at least the Earth was breathing a little easier while we were cloistered, but did any of the companies change their practices to become more sustainable during all that? Did Amazon put 10% of their profits into paying their employees more fairly and another 5% into sustainable practices? Did people vow to work from home a couple days every week when things opened up? Did I choose to eat more locally?
No, I ate whatever Amazon could deliver to me. And if I couldn’t get something, like the dear toilet paper, from them, we ordered it from Walmart or Target, or—gasp—from a furtive trip to Albertsons.
While we watched people lick windows, call the cops on each other, and rage in the streets during the pandemic, we didn’t make any lasting changes to our predicament. There are too many of us and we’re not using Earth’s resources as if they have a limit. But we couldn’t really see or hear any of the warning cries more clearly as we sat on our couches and watched the year unfold.
We are in the middle of a mass extinction event.
Insect numbers are dwindling. Bee populations are collapsing.
Australia, California, and Washington state are burning.
Coral reefs are dying.
Storms are more intense.
Heat waves are killing people.
The polar ice caps are melting and the polar bears swim around and around in circles looking for a place to rest.
And yet, we are myopic.
Why can’t we open our eyes and start demanding that corporations and political leaders and each one of us make changes? Why can’t I make changes?
Seriously!