The Future

The march of the fifty-storey towers: 
the third tower at Dundas and Jarvis is just about done. 
Also almost done is the foundation for the next fifty storey tower 
under construction just east of these three.

Over the holidays, one of the readers of this blog asked me, more than once, what I would blog about now that my richest source of material has dried up. 

I'll think about that next week. Right now, I have one last work-place-based story.

Among the last conversations I had at the ministry was with one of the youngsters who looked aghast at me when I mentioned I'd been thinking about climate change since 1984.

He came to my office to ask me pretty good questions about how to stay in the fight, stay positive and cling to hope. He told me his friends had an ongoing earnest discussion about whether they should have children, knowing that their kids would not have as good a standard of living as they themselves enjoy.

I thought, what a weird way to describe the problem. 

Let's be really clear, here. We (those of us in the Americas, Europe, large parts of Asia and even Africa) already enjoy a higher standard of living than we know what to do with.

We throw away a third of our food, have more stuff than we need, outlive our quality of life and bring about immeasurable harm to other Earthlings by our ravening of the planet so our kids can have a better life than us.

It also irritates me when people ask how they're going to explain all this to their grandkids. Do people need to wait two generations before they try to put into words mistakes they are making now?

While Australia burns, Venice floods, and the leader of the free world murders foreigners in order to turn the media away from his serial crimes in progress, we could simply embrace the fact that the good life is killing us. 

Rather than fretting about how we might not be able to make things better, we could just settle in on finding a few ways every day -- in how we shop, what we eat, and what kinds of leaders we elect -- to stop making things worse.

Thanks for reading.

Have a great week!

Karen