Dear Eartha,
Seems like the novel coronavirus has many of us in the grip of pervasive anxiety, what I heard somebody call “ambient sadness.” Has our planet and its people descended to a grief that will never end – people out of work, millions on unemployment, bailouts for airlines but not for citizens without health coverage, and “essential workers” being called heroes while given no pay increase and barely any PPE? Can you offer any hope, Eartha?
– A Generation Z-er Needing Hope
Dear Needing Hope,
Yes, these are the worst of times but, also, as Dickens wrote, the best of times, too! For with our anxiety, sadness, and despair comes the realization that what connects all of us and climate action is organizing with the helpers (Thanks, Mr. Rogers!). According to a recent column by the great environmentalist Bill McKibben, your generation sees no reason to have children because you see no future for the planet. You get the science, unlike many of your grandparents’ generation, despite many of them reading about Zero Population Growth in high school and college. And you are fearful because of this awareness.
But you are also building the legacy of Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement. These organizations are committed to changing the status quo of non-action and are led by youth organizers. They understand that the economics which fuel our values do not inherently benefit the common folk. As Kim Stanley Robinson recently put it in an amazing piece in The New Yorker: “Economics is a system for optimizing resources, and if it were trying to calculate ways to optimize a sustainable civilization in balance with the biosphere, it could be a helpful tool. When it’s used to optimize profit, however, it encourages us to live within a system of destructive falsehoods.”
She suggested we need a new “political economy” to recalculate our values, actions, and outcomes. Putting pressure on political candidates is always a good place to start and this is an election year of great importance.
I know I may sound like a broken record, but it’s the same voice of indigenous peoples, the labor, women’s, and #MeToo movements who also woke up to those “destructive falsehoods”: Get organized and get involved. Think globally and act locally works every single time. Pick your organization and come on out, and - just for now - stay six feet apart. Wearing my mask, my message remains: Don’t agonize, organize!
Compassionately yours,
Eartha
Eartha answers your questions about the Environment.
Dear Eartha is penned by Rita Bullinger.
She is a writer and columnist living in Nashville, TN.
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