"One of the defining characteristics of the Anthropocene is how, in the community of life, we now create the conditions that increasingly define who lives and who dies." This sentence is mind jarring in its moral implications. Who lives (for now)? White people in the North, Black and Brown people in the South? As you note, it was only a few hundred years ago that we created the conditions that are destroying the teeming, beautiful ecosystems that gave us the Anthropocene in the first place. What do we have to blame? The technology: steam engines and factories and cars? The enlightenment? Christianity's blessings on colonialism and saving pagans (otherwise known as stealing their land)?
I was amazed at the optimism of the news media on the topic of reaching 8 billion this week. And horrified that people still seem to believe that growth--any kind of growth!-- is good. Your writing helps with those talking points, but it is still depressing to think about how far people are from understanding these realities, much less acting on them. Thank you, once again, for being a voice in the wilderness.
8 billion. I feel like wearing a black armband in mourning the loss of biodiversity, the increase in carbon, the ever shrinking ratio of cropland to people, the baked in warming that now we have to live with. The anthropocene, the pyrocene, the notion that we must run ever faster to keep up. The age of the Red Queen.
Way too many. It is like a slow motion train wreck, a Greek tragedy, a spreading flood, a calamity, an inevitability, a stupidity. Three billion was too many. I'm not hesitant to say that the world would be far better off without us.
"One of the defining characteristics of the Anthropocene is how, in the community of life, we now create the conditions that increasingly define who lives and who dies." This sentence is mind jarring in its moral implications. Who lives (for now)? White people in the North, Black and Brown people in the South? As you note, it was only a few hundred years ago that we created the conditions that are destroying the teeming, beautiful ecosystems that gave us the Anthropocene in the first place. What do we have to blame? The technology: steam engines and factories and cars? The enlightenment? Christianity's blessings on colonialism and saving pagans (otherwise known as stealing their land)?
I was amazed at the optimism of the news media on the topic of reaching 8 billion this week. And horrified that people still seem to believe that growth--any kind of growth!-- is good. Your writing helps with those talking points, but it is still depressing to think about how far people are from understanding these realities, much less acting on them. Thank you, once again, for being a voice in the wilderness.
8 billion. I feel like wearing a black armband in mourning the loss of biodiversity, the increase in carbon, the ever shrinking ratio of cropland to people, the baked in warming that now we have to live with. The anthropocene, the pyrocene, the notion that we must run ever faster to keep up. The age of the Red Queen.
Way too many. It is like a slow motion train wreck, a Greek tragedy, a spreading flood, a calamity, an inevitability, a stupidity. Three billion was too many. I'm not hesitant to say that the world would be far better off without us.