With fracking, mountain-top removal, the Athabasca tar sands, millions of acres of burning forests, hundreds of species disappearing each day, oceanic trash vortices, nuclear desasters, the sputtering Gulf stream, both polar ice caps melting at the same time, and sky-rocketing greenhouse gas emissions, what more does it take people not only to see, but to… act? And then again, with so many inescapable avalanches like the clathrate gun triggered, what’s the point of activism, other than making a point of one’s will to change the world? What would be the right way to act, anyway, when it has been for the idea that human activity could improve on creation that everything became so ugly? And if you knew how to act appropriately, how would you stand up to an omnicidal system that – until now, though not for much longer – provides you with everything you need for survival (and therefore makes you complicit in the destruction)?
So many questions with nobody to answer them on TV. We’re not exactly lied to when the talk is about probable human extinction until 2100 in case we don’t curb emissions, are we? Five to ten years from now, no matter what we do, matches quite well with it. The someone who came up with postponing all issues to the next turn of the century was a genius. 2100 is far off into the future. In 2100 none of us will be around anyway. 2100 sounds so much more comfortable than 2030, doesn’t it?
But it is not like we are going to leave our children and grandchildren a mess which they would bitterly complain about. They’ll be extinguished, too. No one there to complain, no one there to take the blame either.
Grief is now with me all the time. Accepting one’s own mortality is quite a different thing from being faced with the probable near-term eradication of all life. Yet as both human society and the community of life are unraveling, each day a little further, a little faster, I function well thanks to having switched to a saner lifestyle some years ago. I can take my time to look at this feeling more closely: This grief is not of the depressing kind. It rather feels like a looking glass with regards to everything I do or think about. I take joy in simple tasks like cleaning the floor. I find meaning in suffering, direction within chaos. All relationships have greatly intensified in the face of impending collapse.
I breathe in. I breathe out. I am alive right now, along with most of the species supposedly dying out somewhen today. I do not deserve another day; yet I receive this gift and I am grateful for having been given premonition; the chance to witness, to understand… this – neither in panic, nor in denial, but consciously.