It Can’t Happen to Me . . .

A friend and I were recently talking about the coming ecopocalypse.

She, like so many other people, can’t understand how anybody can think this is all going to blow over. How can anybody not be running around screaming with their hair on fire? It sure takes every bit of my willpower not to.

There are probably a whole lotta factors involved here, and I’ll try to enumerate a few off the top of my head–and just for the sake of butt covering, this is totally non-scientific, completely off-the-cuff and no more than a riff on the subject, so don’t be quoting me as some kind of expert, cuz I am so not.

1. Movies about climate emergencies always show very sudden and dramatic eleventh-hour saves where the smart white man has an epiphany, does something complicated that they never explain, and suddenly the smog parts and the sun shines through and plants recover in a matter of time-lapse hours to their full, lush, verdant glory. Some people think this is actually possible. (Spoiler alert: It’s not.)
2. “Getting involved with this would cut into my TV watching time. I might miss an episode. I might miss a deadline at work. I might miss my kids’ soccer game.” Truth be told, there won’t be any TV or jobs or soccer in about 20 years time, according to Bill Nye. Civilization is gonna start falling apart and people are gonna start to die in alarming numbers–from not having any water, mostly, but also because we’re killing all the pollinators with the chemical shit-storm that has become the modern agricultural model so there won’t be any food.
3. “It won’t happen here. This is America, science will save us.” Sweetie, science has been trying desperately to save us, and our own government and the people who own our government, the charming and wonderful 1%ers, won’t let science anywhere near the problem. So people like David Gilmour sell off a bunch of guitars and raise $21.5 million to help, which is, honestly, awesome and he deserves a Nobel or something. But it’s a drop in a very big, very empty bucket. So private enterprise decides, hey, we’re taking this on, and our good old American government decides to put up every possible roadblock, tariff and obstruction to stop them. You’d think they wanted to kill the planet or something. (‘Scuse me while I adjust my tinfoil hat.)
4. “It won’t happen to me.” No? It’ll happen to all your neighbors, your siblings, your distant relations, people you went to high school with, your college chums, your co-workers, your parents, your book club . . . but you’re somehow immune? Grow up.

And that’s the biggie, right there. Grow up–and get ready for it to happen to you. 

We are not immortal, and we’re not immune to misfortune, but somehow, we wander around thinking we’re special and different and ordinary rules don’t apply. Oh, we can be lucky for a while, we can keep stumbling out of trouble and blundering away from certain death, and it may even last for decades. But the one thing that we all have to do at some point in our lives is, you guessed it, die. And it happens to everybody. Whether we die of old age in our sleep, in a tragic accident, of an illness or injury, of murder or war or whatever, we all have to do it, and increasing numbers of people are going to start dying of climate change over the next few years. And we’re too late to turn back the mayhem of the coming decades. We’ve waited too long to take the kind of action that’s needed, and now, our government is further away from action than ever.

There’s no rainbow at the end of the storm here. There is only careful management and shepherding of resources, so maybe we can survive a while longer.

So what do you want to do with the next 20-30 years, before things get really bad? It is possible to live a meaningful life in spite of this. In fact, it’s probably essential that we do. Try to find some way to ease suffering, promote joy, build community, spread love. We can be furiously angry and transcendently grateful at the same time. We can be deeply sad in a righteously loving way. But whatever you do, build sustainability into it from the start. Take advantage of free energies, synchronicities, commonalities, symbiosis. Find your community and become like gears that share the workload to produce exponentially more than anyone could alone.

Do the right things. Recycle, reduce, reuse, repair, reject the consumer mindset. Shrink your carbon footprint as much as you possibly can. Conserve water and energy and reduce the amount of wasted food as much as humanly possible. (I don’t know how to get your kids to eat what you put in front of them short of starving them until they’re desperate, but we have to stop allowing our children to waste enough food to feed another family. Please. Talk to them, tell them what’s at stake. They’re whip-smart, and if you start engaging them in co-creating the solutions to these problems, they will get on board. Eventually.)

It’s an adjustment that might initially feel like a sacrifice, like you’re having to give up so much–and yeah, there are going to be inconveniences, and things you know are not the right things to do that you really want to do anyway . . . Once in a while it won’t matter. But day-t0-day, cumulative decisions and actions that are focused on the greater good, add up to be strangely rewarding. And after a while going back to the old consumer-oriented lifestyle seems dirty and gross. Which, let’s face it, it is.

Eat, drink and be merry, for in a couple of decades, we’re screwed. 

Got a dream? Put that sucker front and center. Bucket list? The foot is in motion; don’t screw around. The time is now, or quite possibly never. You don’t have 10 or 20 years to think it over before you take action. The perfect time, the perfect plan, the perfect whatever, let it go and go with what is. Gather your team, your frienily (friend+family=frienily), build your community, and get on with it. Find people with complementary dreams and start to build together. It’s not merely possible, it’s necessary.

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