I used to believe in the power of the spark that would be ignited once we learned to love all the things in the world. Society and I would learn together that the way we love our children, our siblings, our kin, is the same way we need to love our dogs, pigs and chickens, all the way to loving cheetahs, polar bears, forests, and existence itself. And that love would translate into action, the righteous path would be taken as we would create windows into how our lives impact the lives of the rest of the world and therein the destructive ways of the world would cease to be because I was sure that it was just a lack of understanding, a miscommunication between the natural world and the way humans would like to live. I lived in off-the-grid cabins, hiked into mountainous agricultural areas, my heart reaching for the lonely moon full of hope. As I hitchhiked across continents and took up jobs and volunteer placements all over the world, I conversed with as disparate perspectives as I could find and tried to learn that this was a global truth. I was serious.
I can trace my evolution of thinking, the hope slowly fading in tandem with the failure on my own part to make meaningful change. I conversed and asked questions and read articles and books but nothing really feels like it's happening. Between spats of dissatisfaction and harmony, of disappointments and break-ups and seasonal affective moods and compromises, I sank into pumping my truck with gas, working to pay a mortgage, going out and spending money on entertainment and restaurants, worrying about the world burning but taking pleasure in little things like yesterday on a beautiful spring day with my beloved dog and nephew and niece and my nephew we took a walk to the park and little Kai asks in that way that makes kids so precious "What is extinction?" out of the blue out of nowhere. His big eyes looking to me for an answer to his innocent question drove a direct line to that lonely heart reaching for the moon that didn't struggle to hope and all I could say was "What do you think extinction is?" while the tears welled up in me, a soup of sadness and inevitability and contradictions, the beauty being destroyed like a punch to the stomach, of how I am no different than the hordes of tourists romping through jungles searching for wild and authentic experiences that I look down upon. What feels worse than the climate change and extinction tragedy is knowing you're complicit.
Kai says he's going to destroy everything bad, all the pollution and people who do bad things. I ask Noa what she thinks about it. She says it makes her sad. We have no answers, 10 years old or 33. Sadness about our planet is a now baked in part of growing up and so is finding happiness therein. As we walk home, the spring melt and the nose of the dog reveals all sorts of dead pigeons and squirrels buried under leaves and it feels apocalyptic and okay at the same time because the weather is beautiful and the birds are chirping and I'm holding Kai's hand and Lua on the leash. This isn't a novel feeling I don't imagine, that a society has felt menaced on an existential level despite feeling like life is good. It sure feels intractable and important and rational defensive logic is strong in us all. You can't tell me my life isn't good and you can't blame me for living it. I will not be judged alone, but as part of the general societal standard and don't you try to tell anyone they need to do more until you have reached carbon footprint nirvana through vegan naked hermit meditation.
Amidst the hundreds of thousands of species going or gone extinct, will resilience of squirrels and pigeons and dogs be enough to prevent us from full-on revolt? Will that become the new normal? Will the question be taken out of our hands? Questions come cheap.
