And one reaction to that emotion was to simply close down: heartbroken by the damage we had already done, and anxious about that still to come, some of us resigned ourselves to huddle close, take care of our friends, and live out our lives in the shadow of disaster. Decline became a common enough flavor in Western first-world culture for us to joke about it - like the headline from the satire website Reductress: “Woman Waiting for Evidence that World Will Still Exist in 2050 Before She Starts Working Toward Goals.” If you said that the world was falling apart, you might be met either with denial or with a shrug that masked an unspeakable emotion. Inattentive to the struggles of the past, some felt orphaned in a set of circumstances that seemed unprecedented, surreal, and insurmountable. So much of what happened made no sense except for on a corporate ledger, and the benefactors were fewer and fewer, richer and richer. Housing was used for investment, which meant that an empty house could be worth more than one that sheltered someone. People were rewarded for exploiting other people and the rest of the living world, or for developing abstract financial instruments that produced no real value, while life-sustaining work was paid little or not at all. They made things that no one needed, or products with something called “planned obsolescence,” out of parts that never went away. We watched heads of companies make hundreds of times as much as their employees, who sold their lives for a pittance and barely had time to sleep. Year after year, we watched species disappear, landscapes rendered unrecognisable, seasons happening out of joint, communities poisoned with chemicals. At the time of writing, despite everything we already knew, fossil fuel companies were still opening up new oil and gas fields. That is not how it felt for us, right now, when we had all the information but hadn’t acted radically enough. If things have improved between my lifetime and yours, perhaps you look back and see humanity gradually coming to its senses, correcting our ways. From this view, the future felt less like a distant horizon and more like the oncoming edge of a towering waterfall. I know that doing so has always been a challenge, but in my time, there was a felt certainty about the decline of the human-habitable world that had become especially pervasive. I am writing to you from a moment when it was very hard for some of us to think about the future. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size
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