today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.
The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."
Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response
what I mean is, there is a persistent fallacy that the present situation of a thing is always worse than the past, even if there have been fluctuations in badness.
This is not true. There is a great wealth of specific cases where ecosystems/species/a specific anthropogenic impact on the environment is CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, better than it has been at any point in the past 100 years
I've been researching the history of conservation in the USA...and I think current doomers would benefit from knowing just how bad things got throughout the 20th century.
The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.
In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.
I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!
We actively tried to exterminate so many species. Bison. Wolves. Mountain lions. The US GOVERNMENT PAID PEOPLE TO KILL CARNIVORES. They're still here. They're reclaiming their old territories. All is not lost
There was a time most American cities almost never saw a blue sky. Brown and yellow smog was the norm and rivers were garbage sludge that are now teeming with fish. People don't know that government environmental regulation actually did succeed, that the EPA really worked as intended. Now it gets eroded because people think it isn't making a big difference, and they think that because they haven't seen what it's still holding back.
In my area of western Maryland, when I was a kid in the 70s, the following animals were locally extirpated:
black bear, coyote, porcupine, mountain lion, wolf, bald eagle, otter, beaver (and probably a few other things I wasn't aware of)
In the 90s, we started seeing some of those animals come back. At this point, everything BUT the wolf and mountain lion are confirmed living here again, and I'm about 95% certain there has been at least one wolf around in the last two years. Nothing else sounds like that; coyotes and dogs sure don't.
In grade school, we had to watch a film called "Silent Spring" (based on a 1962 book of the same name) every year. It was actually horrific; while I understand the school's intent, being repeatedly told that all wildlife would be dead and the earth rendered completely dead within our lifetime was. uh. pretty awful thing to tell 8-yr-olds with no agency to stop it.
It's fifyish year later, and the world definitely still has many problems. But yellow air and burning rivers are not the norm any more . . and I am grateful.
I see bald eagles just about every time I pass a river, now. When I was a child they were so rare here everyone would stop to stare if one was spotted.
I saw one firefly in my neighborhood, and before my daughter is grown we intend to be awash in them. We, as a neighborhood.
Never, in all of human history, have so many people devoted so much effort to one single cause than to combating climate change. From the highest end researcher to the average joe going to a protest to protect and promote clean energy to the elderly man hosting my favorite gardening show. All over the planet, every day.
And giving up is the single biggest betrayal you can offer them.
