Paul Kingsnorth

And so another day begins and the world turns and all of us do more or less what we did yesterday and meanwhile the world is ending but this is not really our business and what can we do anyway and if you think I'm going to make any sacrifices for you or for anyone else you don't understand human nature.

And so it goes on, so we go on, living in the most comfortable, the most wonderful, the most physically desirable state any human has ever lived in, pampered, warm, full of chocolate and wine, moving without moving, travelling across oceans in hours and believing it is all quite natural and that it will last forever and not only last forever but keep getting better because we believe it will be so and so it must be.

This morning we read, if we read, that the Amazon rainforest will soon die. More than a two degree rise in global temperature will kill off 85% of the world's greatest repository of life. And more than a two degree rise in temperature is now inevitable, two hundred years of burning fossilised carbon has seen to that. Yesterday we read, if we read, that the chemical composition of the oceans is changing for the same reason and that this will help push us, as if we needed pushing, up beyond the six degree threshold, which is the point beyond which even our all-knowing lab rats have declared all bets to be off, forever.

But we have bigger things to think about than this. We are producing fewer cars, our banks will no longer give us free money, our houses are less expensive, our child protection services are sometimes inadequate and our gods are clashing again and all of these things constitute a grave crisis. We have no time for the world or what we are doing to it because inside the bubble of our civilisation things are creaking and cracking and they must be mended because human things must be mended before all other things, forever. Once we have mended the human things we may choose to turn our attention to the other things, to the forests and the oceans and the great skuas and the high-sided islands and the wide orange deserts, and we may choose to mend them too, but only if it suits us and only if we can afford it.

And it may yet suit us, for our environmentalists, safe too inside the bubble, have convinced themselves, through the use of their rational minds and a judicious explication of the relevant numbers, that they believe that if we can only coat the orange deserts in mirrored panels and the wild mountains in giant white turbines and the coasts with wave machines and the estuaries with concrete barrages and if we can only do this fast enough, so fast that no-one has time to think about it, if we can only do this we can keep the bubble from bursting. We can keep the radiators on and the cars running and the offices full and nothing will really change for the voters or the shoppers or the charitable donors, and the skua and the orang utan and the mahogany and the coral may live a small while longer, at least until we decide they are in the way of a greatly-needed new oil shale deposit or a biofuel plantation or are inhabiting a forest which we may sustainably harvest in order to create sustainable toilet paper for our newly-sustainable lifestyles.

Yet in the back of our minds, those of us who use them, in the back of our minds is something we will not face. It is something which winks at us, ever so quietly. It is something which says it is too late. It is too late, the bubble will burst and you will be faced again with the wild from which you come for the wild is taking you back and all your self-delusions with it. Your windfarms will not save you now for nothing will save you now and for the orang utan and the skua and the coral and the mahogany this is news to gladden the heart. For you stopped understanding what you are and where you came from and what you had the right to do and you believed, all of you, even those who thought that you did not believe it, that all things human came before all things other, and you were wrong and now you will pay and maybe, perhaps, maybe you will even learn something.


For a Coming Extinction
W. S. Merwin

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important