Our Generation’s Shameful Environmental Legacy: We Let It Happen

We humans tend to be very concerned with our legacy. What will they say about us when we’re gone? How will we live on in future generations? What will we leave behind?

When it comes to this generation, by which I mean everyone alive today and pretty much every generation born after 1900, that answer is clear: we will be remembered as the ones who came to this beautiful campground we call Earth and trashed the place, leaving all of our shit and garbage literally everywhere — on the land, in the water, and, somehow even, in the air — for future generations to clean up. That’s it. That will have been our sole and complete legacy. Not all our technological progress, not our medical breakthroughs, no, not even the internet.

You see, those things won’t matter to people who are going to have to deal with all the slag heaps, the toxic spills, the buried radioactive waste, and islands of plastic refuse — not to mention the undrinkable water and unbreathable air — that will be — mark my words — the sole and complete legacy of the Extraction Age.

Just this year, we’ve dumped another 10,000 gallons of life-killing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, which was only beginning to show signs of possibly surviving after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe of 2010. We’ve split the tops off mountains and spilled the waste recklessly, causing untold damage. There have been smog emergencies in several major cities around the globe, caused by automobile fumes. And now, far too many of us are eager to elect a man to the highest office in the land who thinks that we have too many environmental regulations, and who doesn’t believe in global climate change (or NATO or the restorative powers of sleep either).

But of course, even if you choose not to believe in climate change (although you should, and you’re a fool if you don’t), there remains the very real and very horrifying undisputed effects of pollution: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and asthma are all known to be either caused or seriously exacerbated by air pollution.

Pollution — the fetid, festering shit from our expensive toys, in other words — kills an estimated 7 million people worldwide a year, and we don’t care enough to change the way we live. That’s a Holocaust per annum, and the main victims are children, the elderly, and the poor. Not all die, of course, many millions more live for years in terminal agony. This is the true cost of our lifestyle, and we just don’t give a fuck.

We are, in other words, being the biggest assholes the planet has ever known. Just in the last 60 years — a blip on the screen of human existence — we’ve not only poisoned our planet with our toxic waste, we’ve invented weapons that can destroy life for us in no time at all. In fact, it’s what we in America pay the majority of our tax money for, whether we know it or not. The American military, in addition to being able to single-handedly de-populate half the globe with the flick of a switch, is also the biggest pollution-generating organization in the world. This doesn’t get talked about much because no one can fully measure the pollution our military creates (and you can bet they sure don’t either), but it’s safe to say it’s an insane and unconscionable amount.

And while the primary villains in this story are industry (specifically, but by no means limited to, industries that extract material from the planet) and the military, we are — all of us — fully complicit.

We, the so-called enlightened generation, who smugly think about people who lived in pre-Civil War America and earnestly wonder, “How could they have actually believed, as most people clearly did, that owning another human being and treating them like property was justifiable?” Easy. The same way we think it’s okay to consume at a ridiculously obscene rate without sparing a thought for who will clean up all the toxic garbage we leave behind. The same way we drive our cars every day without thinking of the thousands of children who will die as a result of the poison that we willingly and unnecessarily spew into the air. The same way we use our smartphones to tweet about Bernie Sanders while conveniently ignoring all the human lives that are every day ruined mining precious metals or working for slave wages to make sure we can afford our precious hand-held computers.

And we certainly don’t give a flying fuck about what happens to all our old electronics when they fail to dazzle us with their novelty and ease of operation, but everyone who comes after us will have no choice but to think about it; the toxic waste from our old laptops and cell phones will be among the reasons (along with our inability to live without cars, plastic, TV, or anything else powered by fuel, made with oil, or built using rare elements) they can’t swim in the rivers or drink the water or breathe without an inhaler.

And it’s a problem that’s only going to get worse as the population continues to multiply, demanding ever more resources and creating ever more toxic waste; this is why the first signs of the coming ecological apocalypse are already happening in densely populated places like China, India, and Europe (although China produces the largest amount of pollution, we in the U.S. produce the most per capita). And yet, we still think we need to drive SUVs instead of electric cars (not to mention riding bikes, walking, or using public transportation) and we still refuse to recycle (let alone reduce or reuse) on a meaningful level.

Why? Because we don’t want to. Because that’s just the kind of assholes we are.

And that’s how we’ll be remembered, all of us: the ones who didn’t give a fuck. The ones who shit all over the floors, the walls, the ceiling, and the windows and left it for their children to clean up. All while imagining ourselves to be ever so much more morally superior to previous generations. What a bunch of dicks.