Threads like this remind me of WALLE.
Our legacy will be massive mountains of waste.
This is a troubling geological-scale nanosecond for this planet and for all the life it could support — humans excluded — which are, for now, still extant and neither extirpated nor extinct… yet.
As for us, our species, there’s rarely a day to go by when I feel as if the ratio between people who race blithely toward that image of a scorched planet (the wealth extraction), as well as being direct forebears of the people portrayed on the Axiom being toted around on their adult bassinet consoles… and people who (for want of a better way to put this) are (and have been) seeing that recovered plant right now as the urgent, vital, precious priority work toward a stewardship over what we still have left (and also factoring that 40-year lag between our waste footprint and when that exacts has a direct, measurable impact on planetary health and climatological conditions), runs 300-to-one on a good day and more like 1,000-to-one on the more grim of days.
I am constantly envisioning ways things could improve and be remediated, if not restored (I spilled a lot of scholarship ink and field work on these topics leading into my trained career path), but the inertia of push-back against that path becomes faceless, cacophonous and even inhumane once panning back to the scale of that 1,000-to-one lopsidedness.
I don’t stop being hopeful — I can’t… it’s not in my nature — but I’m well aware of what’s ahead for the generations already alive right now, all ages, and what slow-walking a profound, necessary, unavoidable course correction portends. Either we do it, or this planet is going to, mercilessly, do it for and to us.
Real talk, tho: hope and optimism are not synonymous. They exist on different axes. I have more of the former and really flagging for the latter. The best I can strive for, in the time I have left, is a pragmatism of not being taken very seriously by the lopsided ratios described above.
Nary a day passes when this doesn’t feel like a whole Sisyphean thing.
Go team WALLE.
Word.