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We Need to Stop Pretending — We Already Know the Results of Our Inaction
And there’s still plenty left to fight for
“We can’t predict what will happen,” he told me, before pausing for a long-drawn-out sip of coffee. “So why worry?”
Almost instantly my mind ran through a long list of very concrete justifications for concern.
Why worry?
Because the oceans are swelling to engulf coastal lowlands and forests are flaring to consume mountains and plains left unswallowed by the raging sea. Because waves and winds and floods and droughts are already driving people from the places they call home and the livelihoods they’ve built in relation to the land where they’ve lain root. That’s why we should worry.
But I didn’t know how to say any of that then.
It felt too heavy.
All I could do was echo his question in an air of disbelief. I couldn’t rationalize the certainty of this indifference — not when an irrefutable consensus on the coming consequences of climate change already existed and especially not when the weight of those consequences could be balanced by our actions.
But through time I learned to understand. I renamed the indifference I witnessed as a privilege-afforded state of willful…
