Reading climate change articles always reminds me of this monologue from the antagonist in Westworld:
I think humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a God, he would’ve given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, “Why are we here?” You want to know what I think your purpose is? It’s obvious. You’re here along with the rest of us to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We’re maggots eating a corpse
Nobody is claiming or worried that all life will go extinct. What sucks is that we are fucking over all the animals that we know and love. If elephants go extinct, there will never be elephants again. Same with whales and koalas and sloths and bees. They will all be gone forever like dinosaurs and dodo birds and thylacines and trilobites.
It’s our fault we are here, it’s our fault this happened, it’s our fault when we are finally gone.
But life itself will adapt, and overcome this obstacle, just like it has countless times before, and will countless times again.
Personally I believe that our lasting impact will be plastics, which will get compressed by time and become the “rocket fuel” of the next species to gain full sentience, which will allow them to explore the galaxy.
Our? Who is this our you are speaking of? I didn't agree to go fight wars of conquest, to plunder natural resources, to enslave people, to ask to be made accustomed to living a life of grind, grateful to our debtors for the impoverished conditions of the world. You say "Our" because your slavedrivers have so properly brainwashed you into identifying their causes and travesties with what may actually be your own. Your life. There is no Our. There never was. That was the lie.
Eh, I don't know if I would say he was right, or that he wasn't wrong. He had a reasoned hopelessness about his views. But the fact that he and so many of us saw all this coming decades ago is where much of the resignation is sourced. In the fact that it was avoidable, but we allowed ourselves to be driven headfirst by a bunch of old goats into a state of perpetual turmoil and persistent crisis.
The jellyfish, mosquitoes, mold, sea urchins, flies, algae, fungi and cockroaches will probably thrive. That's a good foundation for evolution to start a new ecosystem, isn't it?
This is the kind of hope I am clinging to this year.
"You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure."