Substrate

The momentum can’t build if it’s constantly derailed at the start. The climate crisis […] can essentially be what brings us all together to work towards a common and greater goal.

I spent last week relatively offline in Mexico, which became an interesting experiment in how the internet shapes perception: During the vacation, alarm about coronavirus in the United States escalated, but I didn’t really know because nothing in my offline environment reflected that sentiment. Since returning to the US and resuming my normal internet intake, it feels like my panic instinct missed a formative period in its development. As of now, I’m still less concerned about coronavirus than others seem to be, and while I feel a vague need, if not a civic duty, to step my worry up, I’m mainly just thankful to care less about something than I’m supposed to, for once. Regardless of how I feel, though, the coronavirus discourse is providing an interesting lesson in how these two different layers of reality can handle certain information so differently, and either amplify or suppress it: Usually the internet seems to overamplify things, but right now it seems to be properly amplifying something (although there’s nothing to check that against).

That is why we need to stop discussing “the environment” and “nature” as if it was outside the world inhabited by humanity. ​ If we are animals, evolving within the complex dynamic of our ecosystem, then our fate is about how well we function within that ecosystem, not about escaping to other planets after trashing this one. ​ Today the global industrial economy is destroying ecosystems, leveling mountains, and spewing hydrocarbons and toxic chemicals into the air and water, and it is not doing all these things to magnanimously create “jobs” or to improve the lives of humans in general. It is doing these things to make profit for financial investors. This is not about civilizational “progress”, it is about justifying continuing inequality and ecocide.