{"id":442,"date":"2024-11-22T03:43:51","date_gmt":"2024-11-22T03:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/?page_id=442"},"modified":"2024-12-06T21:24:55","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T21:24:55","slug":"442-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/442-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Terrible Truth; A Worse Lie: Living at the End of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Corrina Angel<\/span><\/p>\n

Prologue<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was about eight years old the first time I became aware of the reality of death, that horror which creeps up patiently behind each and every one of us. Not so long later, I would grapple with learning about the hole in the ozone layer somehow, the exact memory of how I came by this information has been lost to me. A couple of years after that, around 2010 or 2011, the kids in my neighborhood started talking about how the world was going to end in 2012, as predicted by the Myan calendar. Now, none of us knew the specifics, but some of the kids my age had watched the 2009 movie 2012<\/i> and some of those kids happened to be in my bible club. It all lined up, you see. In both cases, I remember being mostly bummed out that I wasn\u2019t going to get to live the rest of my life as a cool teenager or cooler adult who could do whatever they wanted. On some level, I must have been scared, but it all just seemed so cosmically out of my control that there was nothing I could do, save for sit and wait for the sky to crash down around me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the history of the world, there have been five great mass extinction events. According to the OurWorldInData website, extinctions are a natural part of Earth\u2019s cycle and a catalyst for evolution. A mass extinction though is set apart from normal \u201cbackground extinction\u201d rates, a mass extinction event is something that kills seventy-five percent of all species on earth in a period of less than two million years. That may sound like a lot of time, but the normal rate of extinction is roughly ten percent every million years. Ashley Hamer, a biologist associated with the Discovery Channel, estimates that roughly ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever lived on the planet have gone extinct already. In a strange way, I find myself grieving these billions of lost species. I know that other animals don\u2019t think like we do, but I\u2019ve never seen that as a reason to disregard their lives. In the prologue of his 2015 book, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene<\/i>, legal scholar and Duke University law professor Jedediah Purdy says, \u201c\u2026the familiar divide between people and the natural world is no longer useful or accurate. Because we shape everything, from the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that stands apart from human beings. There is no place or living thing that we haven\u2019t changed.\u201d Given this, how can I ever forget my place on the food chain, forget how humanity has existed for a fraction of a moment and could wipe itself out just as easily if something doesn\u2019t get us first?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sharks have existed on Earth for more than double the time that humans have, about 450 million years according to fossil records, and have survived all five mass extinction events. Sharks are older than the north star. Today, 31.2% of shark species are vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered. How strange it seems that sharks could survive the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and all four extinction events before that, but they may not survive us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The second great mass extinction, the Late Devonian, is something of an outlier among the five mass extinctions because it is as many as seven distinct extinction events over the course of 25 million years while more conservative estimates argue that the timeline was as short as 500,000 years. At any rate, roughly 75% of all species on the planet were gone by the beginning of the Carboniferous period. I cannot help wondering what it must have been like to be born into a dying world of anoxia and rapid global cooling, a world where death was all around and there was nothing that could be done to stop the downward spiral, no way to survive but by rapid adaption via evolutionary luck. I wonder what it must have felt like to be helpless, yet unable to comprehend the exact nature of your helplessness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Alistair Walsh\u2019s 2022 article, What to Expect From the World\u2019s Sixth Mass Extinction<\/i>, relays estimates that in the next few decades alone, at least one million species are in danger of going extinct \u2013 fossil records suggest that the planet\u2019s natural extinction rate used to sit at one species per one million species per year. There are only 8.7 million species on earth. I would say that we are teetering on the edge of another mass extinction event, but depending on where you are in the world, it is already here. It has been here for decades and most people living out the consequences of the Anthropocene were never at the table when the decisions that caused them were made.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing about the other five mass extinctions is that they were caused by meteors, and erupting volcanoes, and exploding stars, and many other things that no animal alive at the time could have hoped to stop \u2013 many things that we couldn\u2019t stop even now. The extinction event we live under now is something different, something that cannot be stopped<\/i> \u2013 not anymore \u2013 but the effects of which can be eased. We can\u2019t bring back what has already been lost, but work can be done to prevent losing even more. There are but two things that stand between us and a better relationship with a changed world, things that we created from nothing but are nevertheless the vehicle that exerts force over everything on earth with or without consent: politics and capitalism \u2013 though at this point in history, they can practically be bundled into one entity. The question of whether or not humans will continue to survive on the planet for the next few hundred years is not a question of cosmic chance, or even one of scientific progress, it is a question of power. All expressions of our self-made doom \u2013 war, climate chaos, pandemic, famines \u2013 can be traced back to this root.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am twenty-three years old. I have grown up watching my generation\u2019s window of opportunity grow ever smaller by no fault of our own. Going forward, some of the authors \u2013 Purdy among them \u2013 that inspired this essay will be writing from 2015 or earlier. Some of the chances for disaster mitigation that they mention \u2013 such as the 2 degrees Celsius warming threshold \u2013 have already become impossible. I have felt like the world has been about to end in one way or another for as long as I have been able to think of a world<\/i>. The difference is that, after so many years of contemplating, agonizing, and researching, I have come to the conclusion that I am no longer interested in waiting for the sky to fall.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We are \u2013 I am \u2013 not dead yet, and that means that change can still be made.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We cannot save everything, but that is a poor reason not to try.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I: Denial<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Purdy\u2019s book puts forth four eras of the United States\u2019 environmental policy philosophies, which have in turn become the force behind changes to the country\u2019s physical landscape as well as \u2013 because of America\u2019s position in global politics \u2013 the landscape of the rest of the world. Purdy calls them the providential, <\/i>the Romantic<\/i>, the utilitarian<\/i>, and the ecological<\/i>. In order, these philosophies brought us land clearing on the grounds of manifest destiny, national parks for people to retreat into a truer wilderness to achieve some kind of emotional enlightenment, the slicing and dicing of rivers and forests for hydroelectric dams and logging operations (all for the betterment of the economy), and finally a push to protect the wilds for their own sake \u2013 supposedly regardless of how \u201cuseful\u201d they may be to humans. Purdy points out that these four schools of thought, as all ideologies do, \u201c\u2026organize the world by simplifying it, highlighting some realities and casting shadow on others.<\/i>\u201d It is the shadows that these ideologies cast that interest me the most. All four approaches are very obviously political, and yet all four have their own ways of rhetorically refusing to identify as a political stance. This isn\u2019t about right wing or left wing, this is just about the <\/i>world<\/i>. But now humans have constructed a world in which there is no escaping politics, only ways of denying the sway it has over you. Purdy refers to this practice as anti-politics<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In her 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate<\/i>, Naomi Klein spends her introduction outlining the cognitive dissonance that has become a staple of modern life \u2013 where crisis after crisis washes over us while nothing is done to protect the next wave. Considering the enormity of the challenges facing humanity in this moment is like looking into the sun. It is bright, it is big, it is terrifying to behold, and it makes your eyes water if you spend too long staring. There are a million ways to look and then look away, or look but tell yourself that there\u2019s nothing that can be done, or look and then say that there\u2019s nothing you<\/i> can do on your own. All of these examples are understandable responses, but none are helpful.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I was younger and unable to grapple fully with the reality of a changing world, I dove headfirst into fiction. I read, watched, and gamed incessantly and it was all I was interested in talking about. I didn\u2019t need to think about the horrors around me when I could be thinking about grand adventures in fantasy worlds instead. Looking back though, as I began to develop an interest in writing, I am struck by how often the world seemed to be crashing down even in my make-believe worlds. I would put my dolls through flood narratives and earthquake survival stories, and when I began to write it almost seemed like I couldn\u2019t stop making my world different versions of a post-apocalyptic Earth. Even in my fantasies, there was no escape from my fear.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Occasionally, the world would crack through my bubble in the form of superstorms or stories about the battles America had been fighting my whole life in places I couldn\u2019t even imagine. I was born in May of 2001, and the United States of America has been at war for my entire life. It is very strange to grow up in a country perpetually at war, but never on its own soil. Armed conflict doesn\u2019t come from foreign powers here in America \u2013 it comes from conflicts within our own system. Yet the knowledge of constant death is inescapable, and the culture that bends backwards to justify so much death is inescapable too. Now, in 2024, with the justifications from politicians and regular people alike that I\u2019ve always heard growing ever more frantic, ever more out of touch with reality, I can even catch myself falling into such rhetoric. I catch it in my family too. My mother told me as I was writing this essay that she never really thinks about the end of the world \u2013 never has, in fact. I cannot imagine not thinking about this, I cannot imagine the things she thinks about instead and we often have disagreements revolving around this concept. As Klein says, \u201c\u2026we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly.<\/i>\u201d I do not think this is limited to the central topic of her book \u2013 climate change \u2013 I think that this can be broadly applied to the way that politicians and regular people alike all engage in some form of denial or another in order to uphold our current way of life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Klein writes that the Right Wing of American politics is already well aware of the facts regarding climate change and global inequality. What they also understand is that widespread awareness of these facts would be grounds for a complete societal overhaul. It would prove definitively that their ideology is an existential threat to life on earth, which would be very bad for their continued existence as a political party. This is why they must work so hard to obfuscate the truth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The cost of this denial is tangible. 2023 was the hottest year on record \u2013 last set in 2016 \u2013 and has been coupled with floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters that have affected millions of people worldwide. Statistically, though, it is not the people who caused the problems we face that are suffering the consequences. According to the World Meteorological Organization, 90% of all deaths from climate disasters occur in developing countries, where 6.82 of the 7.888 billion people that are currently alive live. Put together, lower-middle income and low-income countries were responsible for 17.4% of global carbon emissions in 2021, by Hannah Richtie\u2019s estimations in her article Global inequalities in CO<\/i>2<\/i> emissions<\/i> for OurWorldInData. Meanwhile, the United States alone was responsible for 13.49% of global emissions in the same year, to say nothing of other wealthy countries. The consequences of climate change are not distributed equally, and this gap in ability to prevent and recover from disaster will only grow. Purdy warns of even more pronounced ecological exemption zones<\/i> that may rise up in coming years, places that would be otherwise uninhabitable without human engineering such as Las Vegas or Phoenix. Such exemptions come at a cost, water in those places means no water somewhere else.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a city in a desert that is itself in some ways an ecological exemption zone. Even though severely dry conditions covered the entirety of the state during all of my formative years, I cannot forget that Albuquerque is a paradise when put next to the Navajo Nation\u2019s land three and a half hours northwest, where 170,000 people do not have consistent access to clean, running water. The Colorado River is overtaxed, the Rio Grande\u2019s levels have been falling for years, and it is because of these two facts that our aquifers are in critical danger with some draining at 90 times the recharge rate. Though our agricultural sector is booming, there is genuine concern that the regular people may run out of water within the next century, all as temperatures continue to soar. It is a very grim reminder that even Purdy\u2019s exemption zones will not last forever.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

II: Anger<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

In November 2016, I was a sophomore in high school. Already, being in high school is a terrible time to be emotional, and November 2016 was especially terrible. I remember staying up late watching the news with my mom on the night of Tuesday the eighth for as long as I could stand, eventually going to bed an anxious wreck. I remember waking up at five the next morning to check the results, groaning, and rolling over in my bed as though I could will it all away by going back to sleep. A few short hours after that, I had to go to school like I didn\u2019t feel like the sky was falling again. I\u2019d already decided earlier in the year that, no matter what happened, I would be studying political science in college so that I could enter the political sphere as a senator and actually change the world for the better. Even then I understood that the vast majority people involved in politics had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, but I was convinced that I would be different. I thought that if enough good-hearted, angry people got together and were angry in the right direction \u2013 pushing out the people who were destroying the world \u2013 then positive change would surely follow.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, of course, I know better. It\u2019s not just about who is in control, but the vectors for control as well that are destroying the world. Unchecked global capitalism and imperialist growth have been both the justification for and the root cause of life\u2019s most pressing dangers; climate change, modern war, famine, et cetera.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2020, 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, pulled the country\u2019s support from the Paris Climate Accords. At the time \u2013 and for all of the years prior that he spent bloviating about doing this exact thing \u2013 I was furious and again certain that this would have catastrophic environmental consequences. There were consequences to be sure, both environmentally and for the United States\u2019 reputation in global politics; however, according to the Climate Action Tracker \u2013 which aggregates data from dozens of different sources about different countries\u2019 environmental promises, their delivery on those promises, and the effectiveness of those promises \u2013 the United States has never delivered on the self-set goals made at the climate summits. Even if we had, those goals have never been considered sufficient for slowing planetary warming. It is a bitter thing to learn that even the public figures I used to look up to have always been lying, have never been doing enough. It is a bitter thing that can drive people to dark places.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ecofascism is defined by Elaina Hancock\u2019s article for the University of Connecticut titled A Darker Shade of Green: Understanding Ecofascism<\/i> as \u201c\u2026any environmentalism that advocates or accepts violence and does so in a way that reinforces existing systems of inequality or targets certain people while leaving others untouched<\/i>.\u201d Meaning, a method of viewing the environment in such a way as to reinforce traditional white supremacist ideology. It is an ugly blend of Purdy\u2019s providential<\/i> and utilitarian<\/i> philosophies mixed with junk race science. The myth of overpopulation is a commonly accepted ecofascist talking point because, when they talk about people over-breeding, they never mean the rich white families with fourteen kids and counting that get shows on TLC. It is the philosophy that drives people to saying that humanity is a parasite and that an extinction event is Earth\u2019s way of checking our power. Again, this rhetoric becomes chilling when you spend even a moment thinking about who might have the privilege to survive such events.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Naomi Klein\u2019s 2008 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism<\/i>, outlines how crisis and tragedy can be used to push policy that otherwise wouldn\u2019t be accepted. Since the days of Milton Friedman, an American economist and statistician who was an icon of unfettered capitalism in the 2000s and used the horrors of Hurricane Katrina to decimate the public education system in New Orleans, this has become a pillar of capitalist ideology. As disciples of Friedman\u2019s ideology, economic advisors to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet used the military coup to implement sweeping changes to place formerly publicly funded endeavors such as education in the hands of private corporations. Pinochet called this \u201ceconomic shock therapy<\/i>\u201d, Klein calls it \u201cdisaster capitalism<\/i>\u201d. I believe that Ecofascism and disaster capitalism are deeply intertwined in our modern world, as so much of authoritarian rhetoric in the last half century has been about protecting against the specter of socialism, or anything besides unfettered capitalism. Environmentalism is a movement with many faces, and one of those faces is one that hungers for blood. I think this is an important thing to keep in mind when agitating for change, especially because so many people stumble over the line by accident. Authoritarianism doesn\u2019t come all at once, it is a gradual thing, and it makes itself swallowable most often by playing on people\u2019s rage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And we do have a right to rage. There is so much to be furious with. Ecosystems are collapsing and people are dying en masse every day, but those in power seem to be deaf and blind to all of it, to anything that doesn\u2019t serve their precious economy<\/i>, to anything beyond short term profit. I hold on to one thing from my angry teenage years, and it is that I don\u2019t believe anything will change by making deals with our oppressors and a bitter hatred for those who may try. While I understand the impulse for peace \u2013 and while I wish that it were possible for those people to see the error of their ways and start being useful \u2013 I know that they would sooner see the bodies of the poor and the marginalized piled high in the streets before they would let go of their money and power. For that I have no patience. The Left has tried for decades to be declawed and inoffensive to the Right, trying baby steps and niceties in hopes that we may be able to find some common ground. But there is no common ground to find, at least, none that won\u2019t leave the most desperate out in the cold. \u201cMeet me in the middle, says the unjust man<\/i>,\u201d author A.R. Moxon writes. \u201cYou take a step toward him, he takes a step back. Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

III: Bargaining<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists \u2013 a non-profit media organization comprised of experts across different STEM disciplines \u2013 created the Doomsday Clock<\/i>, a method of communicating to the public how close global actions put us to an apocalypse. As of January 23rd, 2024, we are ninety seconds from midnight \u2013 from the end of the world. This is where we were last year too. This plea and others for people to pay attention to the horrors that loom just on the horizon is unbelievably depressing, more so when you know that they speak the truth, even more so still when you know that hardly anyone is listening.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In their 2005 paper on a caterpillar that eats tortoise shells, M. Deyrup et al. make a similar plea in their final words, a section titled On Being Endangered: An Afterthought.<\/i> \u201cWe should speak up on behalf of this little moth\u2026because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing<\/i>.\u201d Deyrup goes on to describe how the caterpillar\u2019s silk might prove useful as a product to be consumed by humans. This is an understandable tact to take, if a very sad one. Why must a species be materially useful to humans in order to have a right to live? Almost twenty years later, this paper remains one of only two published works about this certainly endangered species (the other comes to us from a chapter of a 2013 collection of articles titled Lepidoptera and Conservation <\/i>edited by T.R. New). It lives only in Florida and Mississippi, if indeed it is still around at all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Moths are not the only things that must be spoken up for, obviously. Around the world, human beings have been pleading for their own life in the face of apocalypse. I think of the Pacific Islanders whose lands are in danger of sinking into the ocean long before any city in North America might. I think the COP28 summit from November of last year, where the organization\u2019s president, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber begs the international delegation to listen to the established science and take the drastic action that is necessary to preserve our world. I think of Gretta Thunberg and her work, the children of Gaza holding their own press conference asking the world to help them. I look at all of this and I ask why it has to be this way.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are ways of bargaining with the apocalypse that don\u2019t include fixing anything, that consist of making everything worse. This is known as accelerationism<\/i> and can exist on both the Right and the Left in different forms. On the Left, this can be pushing late-stage capitalism to its breaking point to induce revolution by force and has its roots in Marxism; Benjamin Noys studies it in his book Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism<\/i>. On the Right, accelerationism is associated with terrorist action in hopes of provoking a \u201crace war\u201d from which a white ethnostate will emerge. Prior to his murder of fifty-one people in the Christchurch Mosque massacre, Brenton Harrison Tarrant released his own manifesto on how to destabilize the \u201cglobalist\u201d and \u201cmulticultural\u201d world order that is a threat to the existence white race. At least two more men would follow in Tarrant\u2019s footsteps in El Paso, Texas and Escondido, California.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I consider the end of the world as an adult, I am increasingly convinced that there will be no single mass extinction event, nor even a handful as took place in the Late Devonian period. Our frog will boil slowly. In This Changes Everything<\/i>, Klein describes how people are asked to make collective sacrifices for an economy that time and time again has failed to improve the lives of regular people. If this could be bent toward making sacrifices for the sake of saving not just ecosystems but other human beings, the world could be changed radically within the decade. And yet, many people across the political spectrum seem unwilling to start taking steps toward a better future. I see this most often when people talk about \u201cbipartisanship\u201d. While there was once a time when Republicans took the threat of climate change seriously \u2013 as late as 2008, Newt Gingrich appeared on TV with Nancy Pelosi pledging to fight climate change together as one body \u2013 that time has passed. While seventy-five percent of Democrats in 2014 believed climate change to be a real and present threat, only twenty percent of Republicans believed the same. In 2023, the numbers have barely changed. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats describe climate change as a major threat, according to the Pew Research Center\u2019s research, while only twenty-three Republicans agreed. Though nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the country should expand development of renewable resources, overall, only thirty-seven percent of Americans believe that climate change should be a major priority for the president and congress. These numbers are depressing, but there is some glimmer of hope. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, Congress has held a total of twenty-three hearings on environmental topics, with the majority being in the Republican controlled house. Faith that the federal government will swoop in to save us all is a kind of bargaining, but it is not an entirely futile thing to push for.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

IV: Depression<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Climate and Mind is not the first to put forth a definition of climate grief<\/i> (also known as eco-grief<\/i>), but it is a succinct and brilliant one. It accurately captures not only sadness, but despair, confusion, and a feeling of helplessness in response to both local ecological destruction and the destruction of places most people can barely imagine. I think all the time about how twenty percent of the Amazon Rainforest \u2013 which contains twenty percent of the globe\u2019s fresh water and which over three million species call home \u2013 is already gone. This is to say nothing of the indigenous communities that have called the space home for thousands of years and are now in danger of having it stripped out from under them by logging and mining corporations. \u201cHow do I help?<\/i> \u201cI think to myself. I am only one person; is there any change I can really make at all or am I just meant to watch this all happen?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The changing climate is not the only global struggle to provoke helpless grief. According to the World Health Organization, one million people died from COVID-19 in 2020 alone. We still do not know the full effects of the chronic condition dubbed Long COVID. I know two people personally who died in 2020 and 2021 respectively. The ripple effects of the pandemic on our society are unimaginable and invade every aspect of living, from the young children starved of socialization due to quarantine to millions of people left too disabled to work as a result of surviving the disease. On March 31st, 2020, video essayist Dan Olsen (also known as Folding Ideas) published I Can\u2019t Stop Watching Contagion<\/i>, a video about how watching the 2011 film on repeat for weeks has been his way of practicing catharsis in regards to being quarantined. He opens with the haunting statement, \u201cThis is not a video essay. It is a raw nerve<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDisease does not have an eye for narrative meaning,<\/i>\u201d he says, \u201cit does not have an eye for poetry, or twists, or closure. The only meaning is in how we choose to respond<\/i>.\u201d I believe strongly that this can be applied outside of the pandemic as well. Our rising oceans are not analogous to a flood narrative; there is no god to tell us that things will be bad but it will never happen again. War, though controlled, caused, and given purpose by humans, will not simply stop when a dramatic climax is reached and then we will have our happy denouement. This truth is horrible \u2013 almost unbearably so, but bear it we must, because there is no other truth to turn to.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The horror of being alive at such a critical point in history cannot be measured. I have spent uncountable hours weeping or otherwise staring into space, paralyzed by terror that nothing will ever change and we as people are simply doomed to suffer forever until we die. It can take over your life. It has been the underlying theme of my life. As my favorite author \u2013 who specializes in the eco-horror genre \u2013 Jeff Vandermeer says in his book Annihilation<\/i>, \u201c\u2026desolation tries to colonize you<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

V: Acceptance<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I cannot offer you, my audience, an easy way out of all of this. It would be disingenuous of me to even try. There is not any one magical solution that will put a stop to the world\u2019s horrors, but rather hundreds of changes that must be fought for at every level if we are to carry on. I believe that humanity is worth saving; I believe that we are capable of saving ourselves. It will be difficult; it is currently difficult. Even so, there are thousands of people out there agitating for change and putting in the work. In the eastern United States, a century of concentrated reforestation efforts has stalled warming in the area by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit during the summer compared to neighboring grasslands and crop fields.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Purdy is correct, humans can no longer consider themselves apart from nature, we are a force in and of ourselves. Just like any power, this can be utilized for unimaginable destruction \u2013 and has been flagrantly for centuries \u2013 but it can also be used for incredible good. Humans have changed the world irrevocably; that is a truth as beautiful as it is horrifying. We will continue to change it in the coming centuries, for as long as we last really. Yes, the planet will continue to survive after we are gone, and geologically all that may be left besides bones is plastic and concrete. Still, we have time enough left to change our course \u2013 maybe not as much time as we had a few decades ago, but time all the same. Through all of my research, in between the grief, and the anger, and the fear, I have seen a world worth loving and infinitely worth knowing<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am still alive, dear reader, and so are you. The Doomsday Clock has been pushed back before \u2013 in 2007, we were at five minutes to midnight and in 2010, we went back to six. I don\u2019t think I could go on living if I didn\u2019t believe that things could change. People have been wrong about the end of the world all the time throughout history. This apocalypse may have more substantial evidence, but it also has many proposed solutions by people with just as much evidence to back them up. Hope is essential these days, even if it is rare, because in order for the world to change, we must first imagine a changed world. In her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, speculative fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin said, \u201cHard times are coming\u2026We\u2019ll need writers who can remember freedom \u2014 poets, visionaries \u2014 realists of a larger reality.<\/i>\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is not impossible to correct the lies that have built the mountain of suffering which currently sits atop our shoulders. Not to say that we can undo it all. Some damage can never be undone, never be forgiven. It may take our would thousands of years to heal from what we have done, but we can cut that time down if only we are willing to try. At the close of the same memorable acceptance speech, LeGuin said, \u201cWe live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable \u2014 but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Change is possible, if only we are willing to accept it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bryant, A. (2019, August 25). \u201cWhat is Climate Grief? Climate & Mind<\/i>\u201d. Retrieved from: http:\/\/www.climateandmind.org\/what-is-climate-grief\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bump, Phillip. \u201cHere\u2019s how much of your life the United States has been at war<\/i>\u201d. The Washington Post, August 22nd 2017.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Climate Action Tracker. \u201cUSA\u201d. November 1st 2023. Retrieved March 18, 2024, from https:\/\/climateactiontracker.org\/countries\/usa\/\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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World Health Organization. \u201cThe true death toll of COVID-19 \u2013 Estimating global excess mortality<\/i>\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Corrina Angel Prologue\u00a0 I was about eight years old the first time I became aware of the reality of death, that horror which creeps up patiently behind each and every one of us. Not so long later, I would grapple with learning about the hole in the ozone layer somehow, the exact memory of Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":32,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-gutenberg.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-442","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":553,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/442\/revisions\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/20-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}