Ever since I discovered a love of the outdoors, environmental issues have been on my radar. Yet when I became a father last year I can't stop thinking about the long-term sustainability of our planet. It's put me in a really dark place as a result. Climate change has gotten worse, environmental degradation has gotten worse, ecological collapse is a possibility in the next century.
To be clear, it isn't that I think the climate apocalypse is going to occur in my lifetime, I don't imagine myself fighting through a wasteland with my daughter in a shopping cart like we're in the Road or something. Instead, I have to imagine her future in an abused natural world, one that she loves now. She loves animals, and rivers, and trees, and lakes. She loves to be outside. We'll watch these things change for the worse, sometimes go away altogether. While this is an immense privilege compared to what will happen to the rest of the world in the coming years, our environment doesn't just sustain life, it's one major part of what makes it worth living.
So now when I see the real-time destruction of our planet in the name of nothing more than profit, it sickens me like never before. Giant climate change-induced problems across the country and the world are haunting enough, but what's more immediately heartbreaking is the destruction in our own backyard.
Sometimes literally in our backyard; our neighbor recently cut down a perfectly healthy tree because she didn't like raking leaves. Sometimes it's the change taking place in our community; dozens of acres of greenspace being bulldozed to build McMansions that won't even house over half a dozen families.
Most recently I've noticed the beautiful Norwegian pines that border our yard have started to die. These trees have given our yard a private, densely wooded feel. I can look out my bedroom window and see nothing but pine. It makes our yard a great animal crossing to skunks, raccoons, coyotes, and deer (all of which I've seen rest in our pine thicket). They, along with every other exotic pine in our neighborhood, have been struck with a pine wilt disease that seems to be rapidly spreading thru Michigan since 2011. Many studies suggest it's exacerbated by climate change.
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| Some trees in my neighborhood with pine wilt disease |
Some arguments crop up, my own house sits on a plot of land that was once forest; people have to live. I obviously understand this and that we all have to reconcile our need to live and balance our quality of life against preserving our ecosystem. I would certainly be more tolerant of this argument if I felt that the destruction, extraction, and consumption of the natural world was being done with a balance in mind. If I felt humanity was taking seriously alternatives to lifestyles and methods. We are clearly not. It's unfortunate to see a forest get bulldozed to build anything, it's extra frustrating to see it's only for a few massive homes or a strip mall, it's simply unacceptable that many of these homes were for people who had perfectly fine homes to begin with or unnecessary strip malls, it's horrific when these homes and strip malls sit empty for years.
It's hard to say whether things feel extra bad now because they are actually that bad, or because I am now responsible for and profoundly invested in the life of my child the normal things just feel extra bad. Possibly some combination of both. All I can do is engage in the work of making this life more valuable for myself and others, commit to the institutions of change, and spend what time I have left making my daughter's memory of her lived experience an unequivocally positive one.
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