7:05pm October 2, 2013

Can’t afford to be self centered

Thinking about things like climate change and other environmental catastrophes, man-made and otherwise.

And I see so much temptation in so many people to decide it’s so bad we might as well give up because we won’t survive, or not many of us will survive, anyway.

And that doesn’t seem right to me.

Because like…

If I’m personally not going to survive something. Which is universally true. Everyone won’t survive something. We all die.

I still want to leave a better world for whoever or whatever does survive.

And even if I turns into we, and we means the human species, and we don’t survive.

There are still other species. And with the amount we have screwed things up don’t we owe it to them to do everything we can to make the world as good as we can?

But humans could still survive. Possibly. Not all of us. Many of us will die. But if there’s a chance even a tiny number will survive. Don’t we owe them that chance rather than giving up on them and ENSURING it’s hopeless for everyone?

This is what I keep thinking about over and over.

That whether I survive. Whether my family survives. Whether people I know survive. Whether my country survives. Whether my species survives. That’s not how to be thinking. It’s all an extension of me me me me me.

The way to be thinking is ensuring as many survive as possible. Humans, animals, plants, fungi, microbes, whatever. We are all in this together. And we can’t undo everything we’ve done. But we can still make things better. And deciding things are already decided, are already so hopeless that what we do doesn’t matter, that is the most irresponsible thing we could possibly do.

No matter what happens we still have a responsibility.

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