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The First World is a Sinking Ship
Climate Change and Covid-19 Beg the Question: Will We Acknowledge the Hard Truths?
In every age and at the end of every civilization, there were people who knew it was ending. Prophets who stood back from the chaos and confusion after saying what they had to say, and merely held space for what occurred. Because after every effort had failed, there was nothing to be done, except hold space.
I am no prophet, but on this, the day when we surpassed 100,000 American deaths from a disease that emerged due to human greed, I feel as if I am looking back at a long and exhausting timeline. It stretches into prehistory, past rise and fall after rise and fall of civilization’s attempts at gaining primacy. The Greeks, the Romans, the Aztecs and Mayans, ancient Egypt and Sumeria, each fell to their own hubris. Ironically, many of them walked the same paths America is walking today: commingling church and state, encouraging inequality between rich and poor, industrializing agriculture, and overreaching their empires. All of them failed much as we are failing now.
None of them dealt with climate change on the scale we see in the 21st century. We find ourselves clinging to a planet that is our only home in all the vastness of the universe, a home we’ve effectively destroyed but still insist upon mining, polluting, and stripping of its forests. Without…
