I spend as much time as I can gardening in my modest yard or walking the wide mouth of the Kennebec where it becomes one with the Atlantic’s vastness. Doing either enriches life immensely by inviting me to become one with nature and freed for a little while from the distanced preoccupations created by a man-made world so at odds with the fundamentals of environmental sustenance. There’s something about the reality check of having dirt under one’s fingernails and sand in one’s shoes that the sterility of digital worldly interaction just can’t rival. The pleasures of such low-tech total stimulation of one’s senses never fails in its transportive reminder as to what’s really important.

What’s truly essential is to be able to enjoy pure air and water, and the harvest of unpolluted food sources. We are what we breathe, drink and eat. All else follows, healthily or unhealthily.

Walking the shore’s edge, the profound lack of once plentiful seashells is a quiet alarm to the present state of the ocean’s former bountiful habitation. When’s the last time anyone hereabouts found even part of a sea urchin shell? What’s become of the once overpowering scent of salt air? Evidence of rising ocean acidification and lower salinity should be apparent to anyone with memory of our beaches just a few decades past.

In August of 2016 a major environmental conference of governments and NGOs called on all nations to set aside 30 percent of the world’s oceans from permitted harm. Less than 1/3.

Sounds like a fine idea if harm in any degree is somehow thought conscionably acceptable and not environmentally defeatist.

The ocean is home to perhaps as much as 80 percent of all the living things on this unique planetary existence, solitary not just in its diversity of life but in being the only planet known to have life at all.

Earthly life is all about oxygen. One third of the world’s supply is generated by trees and other plants through photosynthesis. The rest is produced by phytoplankton in the world’s oceans, 40 percent of which have perished in the last fifty years because of ocean warming.

Working in the garden one is accompanied by many other life forms going about their own efforts in nurturing botanical interdependence. None more so than the bee.

Here in Maine recent legislation that would have limited the use of bee killing neonicotinoids was withdrawn after the state Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry voted against recommending passage due to testimony of business interests claiming neonicotinoids were less harmful than other chemical alternatives. Less harmful apparently equals OK.

Bees, seashells, less salt in the air. Just three of innumerable small red flags. Despite incessant news of ongoing compromise to planet health, many still buy into: “It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

According to Stephen Hawking, it is. Only a short while ago this renowned go-to-brainiac of science gave Earth’s remaining habitability a scant 1000 years. Now he’s predicting that we have a mere 100 years to find a new planetary home.

So, let’s see, we need choose between species survival vs. continued planetary degradation for short term material gain. Begin saying your farewells now. Mother Earth really doesn’t have a chance without mankind having an immediate now-not-later epiphany that capitalist recklessness has to leave the lifeboat today, right this moment. Saving the planet can’t be amortized over time. Time is rapidly running out while our unprecedented president and his intransigent party double down on their ideological denial.

Unfortunately, denial isn’t the sole purview of the extreme right.

The latest pro-environment escapist compromise is that the marketplace, properly “incentivized,” can produce a viable turnaround in carbon addiction. Its have- your- cake- and- eat- it- too premise is, if nothing else, breathtakingly ostrich-like in its optimism.

In the original “cap and trade” version limits are set on how much carbon polluting a business is allowed, the so-called “cap.” Amounts under that limit can be sold to those who need to exceed their limit. This “trading” eventually disincentives those buyers from exceeding their cap.

In the revised “carbon fee and dividend” version a charge is imposed on energy sources that will increase carbon pollution. That fee is distributed as a consumer dividend to mitigate rising cost of that product while encouraging producers to transition to more sustainable energy production.

The supposed beauty of such proposals is that they’re revenue neutral, employing market forces rather than environmental regulation to address the need to cut greenhouse emissions and promote a changeover to a renewable energy economy. Carbon Fee and Dividend proponents claim it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions 52 percent below 1990 levels within 20 years, while growing the economy. Twenty years.

None of the above will likely make any real difference in averting the catastrophic outcome of capitalism’s destructive refusal to wholeheartedly and immediately green-up. Saving parts of the ocean, some species, and accepting degraded air and water quality is a desperately compromised capitulation to a reckless greed that we must not abide.

We’ve got to stop rationalizing our unending environmental procrastination. As one bumper sticker observes,“There is no Planet B.”

Gary Anderson lives in Bath.