This Is the Beginning of the Age of...Extinction [View all]

[Brenda]

I really like umair's writings.

https://medium.com/eudaimonia-co/this-is-the-beginning-of-the-age-of-extinction-7cb0e0185121

All this is just what it appears to be. Hello, the sky is orange. You can smell Canada burning from Fifth Avenue…from Washington DC. Of course your gut is screaming out in alarm. That’s the only part left of most people that works anymore. What do you do when a fire so big its effect stretch across half a continent is on your doorstep? Shrug. Or run, like the devil himself was on your tail? The gut versus the brain. What’s a brain worth, anymore, anyways? Does the average person even have one? If they do, how come…nobody cares…about….

~snip~

History is going to look back on the 2010s and 2020s as the Beginning of the Age of Extinction. Every year, things get more…sinister. That orange sky. It’s happened in Australia, over and over again, where they had a “Black Summer,” when the continent…burned. In San Francisco. Now in Manhattan. Meanwhile, over the last few years, the mega-scale impacts of climate change have arrived. A third of Pakistan — that’s a country of hundreds of millions of people — flooded, thanks to a mega-monsoon. Europe’s rivers are running dry, and every summer, its hotter parts burn. Let me simplify all that, because, well, you probably already know it. But do you really understand what’s happening here? Does anyone?

~snip~

We might notice that having altered their politics to meet this moment — this immensely historic moment, stretching across the sands of deep time — human beings were transforming their economies. They were phasing out fossil fuels, and beginning to learn how to make the basic things they depended on — from food to household goods to transport to buildings — in harm-free ways. Or at least ways that had a minimal cost on planetary functioning. Instead? LOL, like I said, we’re nowhere near any of that. Not only is phasing out fossil fuel not even on our planetary agenda, it isn’t because we still have literally no idea how to make any of the following without fossil fuels — food, water, glass, steel, cement, crops, everything that’s made from them, which is everything, period, from houses to offices to medicine to clothes.

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