Because There Are People Who Don't Believe in Life

It's way too late to stop Climate Change, but it need not become an apocalypse

The extermination-level impact of the Climate Change Apocalypse is a decent-sized theme in Spinning Sage’s Gold. The causes and consequences of a warming, energy-laden atmosphere are too vast to contemplate without feeling a sense of sheer despair (as I write in David Attenborough’s best BBC Planet Earth series voice). I say this on day three of a mid-Atlantic US heatwave that has temps approaching 39ºC (with a heat index of 42ºC), with volcanoes exploding, and a world of floods and forest fires.

I wrote about this apocalypse in the past tense, two centuries’ worth of death and destruction.

But in the timeline that is Spinning Sage’s Gold, this particular apocalypse is inevitable. It really doesn’t need to be, though. But if there remains no or limited resistance to oligarchs, autocrats, corporate plutocrats, and ethnonationalist-egocentric-Evangelicals, it will be.

As the British artist Seal once sang in “People Asking Why,” “How will I paint this garden I destroyed, green?” This should be the only question humanity asks itself and dedicates itself to answering, especially the US and the West, with $100 trillion in money and human ingenuity and collective action to back those answers up. Any questioning of the value of human life is not only deadly, it is self-destructive. Just ask anyone oppressed anywhere.