275) From a breaking heart

I started studying climate change and biodiversity collapse in earnest in the mid-90s, followed immediately by studying the history of authoritarianism and the military-industrial complex intertwined with global corporatization.  It opened my eyes, so much, to the horrors and cruelty that humanity is capable of.  But I still believed our inherent goodness would win in the end, that appealing to people’s reason and kindness would make the difference.

I’ve watched and read about so many genocides and atrocities at this point, so much corporate malfeasance and corruption, and have steeped myself so deeply in the double-speak and upside-down-ness of the far-right movements that have held up social progress, environmental progress, and peace progress, for all of our lives, that it has taken a toll, a deep, personal toll.

I cannot count anymore the number of times over the past 20 years that I have broken down, and wept, knowing the science that describes so clearly the direction we are blithely heading and the suffering that this will entail for so many beings. Ourselves and our loved ones included.  It absolutely is heart-breaking, and the way most seem to deal with it, is by not learning about it, not thinking about it, or simply not believing it. But ignorance of the truth, doesn’t change the truth.

But while my heart broke over and over again, still I believed in the inherent goodness of humanity, and that it would win in the end.  

This carried through the Bush years and his mass murdering war based on a lie and under the guise of “fighting the War on Terror.”  It carried through the Harper years in Canada, in which the country I live in came closer to an anti-democracy than most people realize.  It carried through the many, many years of abysmal failures of international climate change negotiations (largely because of the United States, although Canada sucked a lot of the time as well). It carried through the back-and-forth progress-and-regress on race issues, gender issues, women’s issues, indigenous issues, and other human rights issues that have plagued us for my whole life, and for generations before me. 

Sometimes things would get better and “seem to be looking up”, and then they would get worse again and I’d wonder why the hell humanity kept choosing greed and power and prejudice, over, you know, working together to make things better for everybody.  Which seems so goddamn simple it boggles the mind how consistently we fail to do this.

But still I believed in the inherent goodness of humanity, and that it would win in the end.  

Around the time of Obama, as ecological indicators approached tipping points of destruction, and I could see how short the time window for action was becoming, I started to get genuinely worried for the future of civilization.  Scientists have known, ever since before I even started studying this 30 years ago, that environmental degradation would lead to authoritarianism and war.  This is well known; it has been for a long time.  But the general public simply doesn’t get it.  And thus we continue down the same paths.  And I got worried.

Then Trump, QAnon, the Russian attacks on Ukraine, our own countries’ complicity in a genocide against the imprisoned-for-generations Palestinians, COVID and the subsequent mass rejection of basic science, and now this outright fucked-up-bullshit era that we’re in now, happened. And instead of pulling together to make things better, we doubled down on ignorance, on prejudice, on not-learning and instead, on blaming, hating, ridiculing, and treating each other with more and more disrespect.

And I don’t know anymore.  I don’t believe what I believed before.  I do still believe in the inherent goodness of humanity.  But I no longer have any confidence it will win in the end.  

I value knowing the truth, as best as I am capable.  But it takes a toll.  I’m glad I paid that price.  But my soul aches.  And I do yearn sometimes for the time before I knew all these things, and especially before the past 10 years when I still had abundant hope and faith in humanity.  

These are dark times.  There are far darker ones ahead.  This isn’t a game.  It isn’t a joke.  It isn’t a movie.  And it won’t, necessarily, “turn out ok in the end”.  In fact, in all probability, it won’t.  If this was a Dungeons and Dragons game, then humanity’s saving throw is approaching “20”.  

Remember all the bugs we used to get on our windshields when driving at night?  Their disappearance is the canary in the mineshaft.  It’s a harbinger of the future.  Our future.

And we will “adapt”, in a sense.  Because we’ll have to.  But unfortunately, humanity, at large scales, adapts to crisis through top-down control — i.e., authoritarianism, violence, fear and hatred of “the other”.  This does not bode well for anything and everyone that we love.

I miss the bugs.  

I miss the feeling of genuine hope in our better nature.

I know I’ll hang on.  What else can you do?  But I wish humanity-at-large had learned something from the past century of human progress that gave us so much potential to genuinely make things better.  For everybody.

But we didn’t.  And as things get worse, I don’t think we will suddenly learn to embrace wisdom.  We will be too busy fighting the forces of greed, war, and destruction.  Heck, we already are.  We’re now literally fighting fascism and the destruction of democracy, and as a result, ignoring the civilization-threatening dangers that are escalating in the biosphere. We’re fighting over trans bathrooms and athletes, listening to influencers online who are masters of lying, and becoming less and less trustful of our fellow humans. Myself included. I trust people far, far less than I did even a few years ago.

It’s sad, what we have lost.  It’s beyond comprehension.  And yet, our losses thus far are nothing, compared to what we will lose as the rest of the biosphere unravels, and the ecological parameters that sustained human civilization for 10,000 years, are broken.

I would like to wish I didn’t know this.  But I’m thankful that I do.  No matter what, keeping your heart open to love, and using your mind to the best of your ability, to understand things, and try to make them better, IS the best one can do. That’s what I believe anyway.

If it’s not enough, then it’s not enough.  But it’s still right.

But oh god, honestly….it hurts.