We are still in the middle of the anthropocene mass extinction.

originally published April 22, 2020 

We are still in the middle of the anthropocene mass extinction. It will still kill almost everyone you love. Humans are not immune to the breakdown of biological food webs.

We’ve seen that “things come back quickly” during the shutdown: dolphins in the Venice canals, the air quality of Los Angelos becoming, well, blue.
But the sky is not dark with the billions of migrating birds who were shotgunned to extinction, the ocean’s acidified dead zones are not spontaneously growing fish.
Unless we use the leverage of this shutdown to permanently alter our global habit of pouring poison into the earth, into the ocean, and into the air; unless we use this time of reflection to prioritize the survival of literally every other species over our own, we will just as surely kill almost everyone that we love.
Our children will look out on a gray, empty, burned world before they starve or kill or flee to the few places where people have chosen to protect the earth. To pretend that this isn’t happening is to squander the last chance we have for most people to live.
Most won’t, and we all die eventually, but this is our last chance to make good on the old agreements that our species made with the animals, with the gods, and with our earth mother. I’d not go to a grave of ashes when it could be a garden.

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