A Bit of a Panic

I made a big, big mistake the other night. I watched the last installment in the BBC's Planet Earth series. Normally this would be just my cup of tea: gorgeous footage of our planet, well-reasoned explanations for why we should save it, and a touch of immediacy - "no more time to lose!" - sort of thing.

Preaching to the choir, they were.

However, a little factoid casually mentioned in the midst of other, equally alarming proof-of-environmental-collapse points, was that the polar ice caps will most likely have melted—completely melted—within 50 years.

Ok, so that's in my lifetime, which is a real drag. BUT what's worse is that my children, my amazing, glorious, beautiful children, will only be in their 50's.

I knew this, I'm sure, long ago. But it's back with a new fierceness. I can't even imagine what a world without polar icecaps will be like - hot, certainly, but perhaps even unlivable. And this is something that will directly affect my own children. I'm in a sleepless panic over this.

I'm reminded of how I felt as a teenager when I first discovered the environmental movement and I wanted, with an intense fever, to save the planet. To save us from our selves. But the job was so big. Impossible, really. So I felt a desperate need to do something and a desperate hopelessness at the same time. Yuck.

But here I am again. Twenty years later. An environmentalist through and through. Living the solutions wherever I can. But, despite the fact that I buy local produce and live in a walkable city, we're still hurtling toward environmental collapse.

How will we explain our actions to our children when they won't be able to have the same beautiful lives we have now? When their lives are riddled with once-curable diseases, daily loss of species, an ever more poisoned and poisonous natural world? Will we look back and feel that the excess is worth it? Will we feel justified in stealing our children's future so that we can drive 300 feet to the corner store, fly to Mexico on a whim, and fill our houses with gadgets that we barely use?

See, a bit of a panic. (Sigh.)
But just look at these faces. Wouldn't you feel the same way if you knew that one day you'd have to look into their eyes and explain why the world was such a mess?