The Pall Of Our Unrest

That is all we have, this moment with the world. It will not last, because nothing lasts. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and no matter how much we find along the way, life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees... See more

I don’t think that humans can really move forward into whatever’s coming for us next without facing what we’ve done to our home and each other. Such a reckoning includes the beauty, joy, and community found in crisis, as well as the pain. The sociologist Donna Haraway calls this “staying with the trouble.”

Why don’t we react in unbridled outrage to the devastation of the natural world taking place before our eyes? A major reason is that we don’t realize what we’ve lost.

The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets. For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway. Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world.

Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. Th

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The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces.

But underlying these facts is an assumption that trees are commodities.Underlying these facts is a human view of time.As the forests shift, can we find opportunities to shift our own understanding?As the trees are pulled into the new patterns of a warming planet, can we learn to embark on our own migration—our own pilgrimage—a journey that slows us... See more

As writer Naomi Klein points out in On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, our “culture of the perpetual present” is not equipped to deal with the generations-long nature of the crisis.