What if we win?
What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?
What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?
What if the rainforest ADVANCES?
What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?
What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?
What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?
What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?
What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?
What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?
What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?
What if we win?
How would you win?
And we've won a lot already, mind you.
The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.
Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.
It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.
We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.
People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.
Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.
Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.
We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.
In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 – more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.
When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.
When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.
When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!
We fixed it.
We CAN fix it and we ARE fixing it and we DID fix it.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
It's still far from our reach.
But it's there.
Believing that things can get better is not blind hope or optimism--it is based on hard data that many things have consistently gotten better over the arc of history.
In addition to all that was mentioned above:
The likelihood of dying in infancy or childhood--or losing a child--has plummeted just in my lifetime. The likelihood of dying in a natural disaster is the lowest in recorded human history. Yes, even with the uptick in natural disaster intensity from climate change!
Humans alive right now are more likely to have access to healthcare, electricity, education, birth control, clean water, and nutritious food than at any other point in human history. There are so many diseases we can treat now that were a death sentence for 90% of human history.
This is not by accident. This is because generations of humans put in work to make life better for their communities.
Some of our solutions had the side effect of creating other problems--better access to electricity that ultimately made people's lives easier and safer led to pollution and climate change, for example--but we are tackling those knock on problems too. Our generation's solutions to our current problems will probably create their own less-bad side effects for the humans after us to deal with.
Is it silly and naive to believe we might actually be able to make things better? Not at all. We have many times before. We are doing it right now.
