Shifting Ground

Earth Day happens in a hundred and fifty countries. Mostly it’s people remembering they’re supposed to care, changing their pictures, talking about it for a day. We’re built for gestures like that.

But humans actually do wreck everything. Rainforests gone. Species extinct. We’re redesigning life itself now because we can. There’s a reason people call us a virus.

The slow part is that it’s actually shifting. Not fast. But Greenpeace and organizations like that have bent some things back. Even ordinary people talk about carbon now. The awareness is spreading like a stain, seeping through places where it wasn’t before.

What sits with me is the gap between understanding the problem and actually changing course. I watch people wake up to it and I already know it won’t be enough. Not fast enough. Won’t touch enough people. We’ll maybe get to a place where we live with the planet instead of through it, but that’s a thin hope and it sits in me quietly, not confident, not loud.

I think about the next generation and I want to believe they’ll live in a world where we stopped murdering everything. That we figured out coexistence. But wanting something and it happening are different planets, and I’m not sure we’re on a trajectory to get there. So I sit with the ambivalence. The knowledge that something is shifting and also that most shifts happen too late.