We are the generation that would sell a kidney for the latest iPhone and still can't find an hour to plant a tree for the oxygen that keeps us alive to use it. I say "we", and I mean it literally—I am not writing this from some clean vantage point outside the problem. I have thrown the bottle too, in a hurry, telling myself it was just one bottle, just this once. That phone in your hand is a beautiful piece of glass. It is also, quietly, nothing at all if you can't breathe.
Here is the part that keeps me up some nights: I think we were scammed, and I don't think most of us have noticed yet. Since childhood we were fed the same line—study hard, the system will give you money, and money will buy you a life worth having. It isn't exactly a lie, but it's an incomplete one, and the missing half is the expensive half. The system gave us digits in a bank account and quietly took our peace in exchange, and it did this so gradually that most of us never felt the transaction happen. We were told the government would handle the rest. We were told, in gentler language, that something larger than us—call it fate, call it God, call it the arc of progress—was managing the parts we couldn't see. But when the rivers run thick with what we've put into them, and the air over the city has a taste, no balance in any account and no quiet faith is going to do the breathing for you.
I want to be honest about the part of this that isn't righteous anger, because underneath the anger there's something closer to fear, and fear is quieter and harder to perform. It's the fear of a parent doing the math on the air their child is growing up in. It's the fear that arrives at 2 a.m. and asks, plainly, what exactly we thought we were building toward. Anger is easy to write. Fear is the thing actually keeping me up.
And still—underneath the fear, there's an excuse we all reach for, and I include myself in this indictment: "I'm just one person; what can I possibly do?" It's a strange kind of helplessness, because it only shows up on cue. When it's time to toss a bottle into a river, our hands are plenty strong. When it's time to leave litter behind on a street we'll never have to look at again, we're plenty capable. It's only when responsibility is actually named that we discover, conveniently, how small and powerless we are. I don't think this is stupidity. I think it's a kind of wilful forgetting, and it's one I recognize in myself more often than I'd like to admit.
None of this is really about intelligence, either, however much we'd like it to be. A person with a string of degrees from the best universities can still miss the plainest fact in front of them, and a person who never finished the eighth grade can hold, without any trouble at all, the one piece of common sense that outranks all our credentials: you cannot eat data. We spend so much energy on the vegetarian-versus-non-vegetarian-versus-vegan debate, as though the argument itself were the point, when the deeper and less comfortable truth sits underneath all three positions untouched—everything we eat, everything we are, comes from the same ground and the same water and the same air. Every camp in that argument is still standing on the same poisoned riverbank.
So ask yourself, quietly, without an audience: is the water in your city actually fit to drink? Is the air you're pulling into your lungs right now anything other than a slow, patient poison? Is the food on your plate actually clean, or is "clean" just a word we've agreed to stop examining? If the honest answer to any of these is no, then the number in your bank account is not the achievement we've been telling ourselves it is, and whatever we're calling progress deserves a harder look than we've been willing to give it.
Because here is the thing underneath everything else I've said: we are not separate from nature, watching it from a safe distance, managing it like a resource. We aren't separate from nature—we are nature. Every river we poison is a river running, eventually, through us. Every forest we clear for one more development is oxygen we were counting on breathing later, without ever quite admitting we were counting on it. There is no "environment" out there and "us" in here. There is only one system, and we are inside it, and we have been treating our own bloodstream like a landfill while we wait for someone else's miracle to come clean it up.
So here's the smallest thing I can actually ask of you and of myself: one minute a day, phone face-down, just to remember what you actually are underneath the schedule and the notifications—a biological being that needs clean air, clean water, and clean soil, the same as every other living thing that has ever needed those things. Not helpless. Not innocent either. Just awake, finally, to the fact that the system was never going to save us from this. It was only ever going to let us become another statistic while we scrolled.
I don't have a tidy ending for this, and I don't think one is honest. I just have the question I keep asking myself on the nights the fear shows up instead of the anger: Is the life we're calling luxury actually worth the air we're paying for it with?
Loading comments…