I've been thinking about all of the people, when faced with evidence of the harm we are doing to the biosphere, say "Well, something will survive, maybe cockroaches." They say this flippantly, as if it can't be helped and hardly matters anyhow. I find this extremely shallow at best and profoundly cynical and disingenuous at worst.
First of all, everything that gives meaning to our lives as humans depends on leaving a legacy in the face of personal death. We can accept our own deaths partly because we know that we have affected the future of those we leave behind, and will be remembered.
We tell the stories of those who have come before, and our lives have a narrative as well. If human extinction comes to pass, the narrative will also be extinguished. All art, all history, all longing, all love. No one will tell our story, or the story of how we failed.
Secondly, it isn't something that is happening TO us. It is something we are DOING. And can stop doing. It is the greatest moral issue of our time.
It is not all 3 billion who are destroying the biosphere and reaping tremendous profit from doing so. It is really very few humans. A couple of million out of almost 8 billion.
They have used the capitalist system to make it almost impossible for the rest of us to stop them or to do anything but work ourselves to death.
And yet, we must stand up against this, using whatever we have. It will not be easy. The destruction of the natural systems upon which all life depends is well underway.
Even if we were to overthrow the corporate oligarchs today there are processes of collapse that would play out.
But we COULD reverse some of it. Maybe most of it.
There are going to be hard times ahead no matter what. Why not make them mean something?
If you are tempted to shrug and blow this off because the measures we need to take would upset your private enjoyment of your current life, understand that this is a moral failure.
And if you are one of the “masters of the universe” who believe the rape of the planet is your God given right and are willing to lie about anything that interferes with your profit--then you are a sad excuse for a human being--just an evil bag of skin with no soul.
The rest of us must rise up against the oligarchs—for the children of all species.
I think one thing we learned from the pandemic is that when we stopped much of our human activity the earth, given a chance, was able to regenerate. To me that is very hopeful. Of course, as we also saw, getting people to stop for very long is not so easy!
Well said. Thank you!