A resource bank to communicate complex sustainability concepts in an interactive, immersive and practical way through active essays.
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What is that?
Only the crippling sense of debilitatory despair, helplessness, and frustration when regarding the climate emergency… Compounded by how so few seem to want to acknowledge it at all. Walk — to the heartland’s wet markets, to the business district, and under the skyline of renown. See — the unperturbed masses — business as usual.
… the building burns down, the ship floods. Some will not and do not listen when called to act.
I am told I catastrophize. Things are not that bad. The danger is not real. Bedtime lies for children who know better. The monsters are there, only look.
But when belching flame and angry bilge are out of sight they are out of mind. It is hard to convince otherwise.
No matter: the air-conditioning still runs, the roof continues trading sunlight for florescence, the ticker machines roll on and the dollars trade hands. Why act: if unseen, it might not even be? Frustrating.
Not for lack of effort. No way this can go far. Words fall unheard around the disbelieving. Keep the corridors clear. Secure hatches. Store inflammable materials properly. Take drills seriously. Report safety violations.
Futility.
The building crumbles, the ship sinks. The lower strata give first. Holds flood and the lower floors are flame-licked; the disadvantaged classes go first.
First, because safety — delusional and real — is inaccessible. There is no higher ground. The subalterns perish first when waters rise and sparks fly in leaky bulkheads and uninsulated hallways.
They are there because the cards are unfairly dealt, the game rigged. So the house triumphs, meting impossible odds along with the slimmest, fool’s chance at the lottery.
Poison and antidote, all together. Unequal laws for a savage race. But opposition obscures the truth of the zero-sum game. Only they who have the untold misfortune to be seated at the dirtiest table: they will be eaten alive. Consolation false: better them than me.
But smoke rises. Waters lap. I am coming. I am here. Except: the air-conditioning filters out grey plumes climbing skyward past the windows. Frolicking in deck chairs on the topside pool, the angry seafoam is mistaken for the artifice of jacuzzi jets. Then the brine swamps over the soot swoops in to choke. I am coming.
So I sit, and I watch. Alone, apparently, in my paralysis with the few who see the same. And we despair. And we wonder if the world has gone mad, or have we?
Mirages. Grand towers built on ideals-turned-catchphrases: globalization (Greater connectivity! Greater efficiency! Greater camaraderie!); and neoliberalism (The free market! the Free market! the free Market! Power consolidated is tyranny! Allow the pursuit of dreams!).
Only this time Babel is ivory: the prideful exaltation of exploitation masked as sacrifice. The manipulation of the unwilling led by the unqualified to kill the unfortunate and die for the ungrateful. That deceit, set apart and made noble… for? The hallucinatory possibility that there is enough to makes kings of everyone?
So the Babylon of bones — a towering exemplar of a world of consumption endless — glows and implodes. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and the end of capital’s infinite spectre. Reality or God or truth sets things in place.
Better abandoned are the towers and ships lest they sink too soon.
Better abandoned are the systems of predation.
The promise — of every person being one day sovereign over a little piece of heaven — is built on a lie. These heavens are carved from other hells — of stealing from those in need, of abjection released elsewhere so long it is not here. Out of sight out of mind. But every house is the same: there are “other” houses only because this is “mine”. Observe: The primal frenzy at the grisly cornucopia of carceral dreams where every claim laid to every fruit, drink, and meat is a simultaneous denial. In short, difference constructed and competition driven in the chant...
me.
me.
me.
me.
me.
me.
The ever-bigger typhoons and ever-melting glaciers have the swollen rivers and lakes bursting their banks. Perhaps that is when her parents fled. Maybe they say that is no way to die. Little is known in-between.
Here words fail.
A boy about seven walks alone at dawn to a school nearby. His mother has to be on time at a job that pays barely. He carries a sandwich: margarine and some sugar. He is seen eating it at high noon.
Same perspective but boy eat sandwich while all his other classmates eating better food.
Meanwhile there is talk: she goes to work hungry. She pays for rent and eczema medication (the rental is dusty). There is always talk: now they say this is no way to live. She does the work no one wants to do anyway.
She puts up with the comments thrown her way: these foreigners are taking all the jobs. There is shame and then there is no time for shame.
Mother's POV: Crowd shaming mother.
Crowd's POV of mother: Mother expression looking apologetic.
She tells herself better this than a grave at the murky bottom of a valley, in a town which now exists only in name and memory. She knows her place is not to gripe: not if she wants to live, not if she wants to hold on to her job. She knows no spite, counting her miserable blessings.
Here words fail.
They who live with little know how little it takes to live. Leftovers; pre-loved — merely an infinitely delayed future co-opting the laggards. It comes eventually. Weary eyes betray the years of weighing costs at every turn.
This cost three months’ worth of groceries. This, a month’s wages. Grandmother wanders off now and then. It is the kindness of passers-by which guides her back. A nursing home is unimaginable. Perchance secretly, guiltily, he hopes one day she never returns.
And for a period, his boy comes home upset. Something about toys and thingamajigs. But how soon innocence dies. Silent, their gaunt eyes are the unspeaking same. When father and son venture out there is an intangible gulf.
Boy throwing tantrum
One may be forgiven for thinking the former wishes the latter more dissimilar: that the boy may one day know plenty and have a shot at the golden ladder. I am here because I did not work hard enough, so, boy, work harder than your papa.
But the future that is yet to be has to wait for the future that already is. Today he is let go. Melting ice halfway the world away and a loose bug means there are no floors to clean. He has to put what food he can on the table again soon.
Even this is too much. None of the above is true.
I do not see suffering when it passes. It is all a well-rehearsed act. The “accidental” lines tossed when someone stumbles are scripted so: if they work hard they will not be here; some people only live off others. Meanwhile the show goes on, consuming, and consuming, and consuming, tossing out scraps to be scrounged while emissions and plastics and disparities choke the machinery and the loosening cogs fall past safety nets. Fortune is not simply won: some just have the dumb luck of being at the right table for the right hands, but so long as the difference is constructed and the false game played by its own rules, all is well though everything is burning and when all is finally right nothing will ever be left.
How can we live with ourselves?
