Giving up is what corporate American, primarily the petroleum and coal industry, has longed for and it is the worst possible scenario for every generation. Please, please love you kids.

February 16, 2020
By Barry Ruegar

What Will Be Lost (click here) is a series of reported stories and essays exploring the ways climate change is affecting our relationship to one another, to our sense of place and to ourselves.

Last year was when the endless bush fires in Australia convinced me and my wife, Susan, that climate change was unstoppable. It’s also when we realized that we likely will avoid seeing the worst of the climate emergency.

At 64 and 74 years of age, my wife and I believe there’s a good chance that we’ll be gone before coastal cities are flooded, the ice caps have melted, and the planet descends into a “Mad Max” dystopia. We would like to think that this isn’t what the future has in store, but the intransigence of almost all governments to actually slow carbon emissions leaves little doubt that things are unlikely to turn around.

One of the things that age gives you is a sense of history, a feeling that you’ve seen patterns repeat and that you can see where things are heading in the near future. Over and over again, we’ve seen corporations and governments ignore the people they should protect in order to line their own pockets. What has changed now is that they’re sacrificing an entire planet instead of a town or a country. I would like to believe that the younger people marching with Greta Thunberg could change that, but honestly I can’t see it happening....

...What frustrates us is that we’re part of the generation that saw all of this coming. During the ’60s and ’70s, the governments that we elected more or less invented municipal recycling, and in the ’80s many of us began carrying reusable shopping bags. We lived through the introduction of stringent pollution controls and many of us chose to replace our furnaces, water heaters and appliances with newer, more expensive low energy models. Like many people we’ve tried to move to a more plant-based diet, and one that avoids chemical additives and fertilizers, and we’re driving the market for electric cars....

...Whether we are leading by example or just running away from the inevitable can be debated, but this is how we’ll be taking back control of our lives. Meanwhile, as I watch the sea levels rise and Australia burn, I can’t help but remember the words of the old American spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep”: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”...