Heat is punishing. Brutal, relentless, suffocating hell.
Over the weekend it was 110° in Los Angeles.
There are a dozen uncontrolled fires ripping through the Californian landscape.
The Bay Area saw its hottest weekend in history.
Heatwaves kill more Americans each year than any other type of weather disaster, by the way. In 2021, the heatwave here in the Pacific Northwest killed 1,200 people.
There are floods, too.
Much of Pakistan is a sea of standing monsoon waters, the landscape now unrecognizable, 1,300 dead, and tens of millions displaced. To call it "catastrophic" is glib, but we run out of words for the unraveling.
I can't tell you how many animals have perished there or here, because no one counts them. We consider their lives and their souls collateral damage.
There is no longer a "when" for climate collapse. The anthropogenic end of the world is here, slow and scratching and cruel beyond imagining.
We have created a protracted extinction event.
We did this. We the species.
We with our greed and our growth and our want and our waste.
It's hard to reconcile our collective human responsibility with our individual pain and powerlessness. When 1% of humanity controls nearly half its wealth, how are we responsible? When 90 companies are to blame for most climate change, and their silk-suited CEOs always have and always will chose profit over people’s lives, how are we responsible?
We are responsible even though capitalism has robbed us of our agency. What a bitter pill that is to swallow—that we must clean up the messes the rich have made.
And yet we as individuals cannot stop it. No amount of paper straws or hybrid cars can halt the process, or even slow it in any meaningful way. Climate legislation is nice, but in the end is just dabbing a tissue on the surface of a gaping wound. And no amount of palliative legislation can compete with the government’s complicity; 5,600 companies in the fossil fuel industry took at least $3 billion in COVID-19 aid from the federal government. Sustainable energy initiatives are wonderful, but they're too late to pull the brake.
We make attempts ranging from laudable to laughable, but it is simply too late.
We are out of time. Not in some hashtag, fired up, campaign speech way, but truly, and without fanfare.
Our civilization—our entire understanding of what it means to be human—must change. Our economic and political systems must collapse. Our reliance on fossil fuels and the companies that make them must end, not incrementally, but instantaneously.
There is no other way. How I wish that were not the case. But we don’t get to decide what age we live in.
And right now, we are in the last age, unless we tear it down. The disintegration will happen anyway, but we get to decide (in one of our few remaining choices) if we want it to happen by our own hands, with the possibility for regrowth—compassionate, sustainable, and based in love—or without our control, violent and cataclysmic, ice and fire.
This is up to us, as traumatic as that prospect is. Because the survival of the planet and of our species is more important than our desire not to die in a revolution.
I cannot say it any more clearly than that.
The needs of the incalculable future many outweigh the comfort, and the fears, and the desperate, keening grief of the present few.
I am not a fan of Vice News (mainly due to its racist founder), however, I forced myself to watch all episodes of "While The Rest Of Us Die..." and can only conclude (and fully agree with you) that we are indeed out of time.
It is something said with reverence as though I'm watching the incoming meteor(s) responsible for the demise of dinosaurs knowing they are doomed and overflowing with fear, but it is truth.