Lately, the news seems particularly prone to fearmongering, and needlessly so given, that there are already so many totally frightful aspects to today’s “new normal.” Perhaps fear’s increased exploitation is merely media’s desperate misdirection from the ever more dreaded terror of life’s increasingly overwhelming chaos.
True chaos is difficult to sound bite. Fear is much more marketable, as long as it avoids hopelessness. New news’ challenge is to maintain that balance given that old news’ ever rising bar of sensationalism is an ever harder act to follow. Newness alone, however, does little in providing much necessary optimism.
Now rarely acknowledged, COVID is still a leading cause of death in America. For young people, it’s gun violence ending most lives. That too has become underreported within the larger menace of gun insanity overall. Thankfully, deaths caused by daily meteorological madness are amazingly low given the almost apocalyptic imagery of material destruction nationwide, to habitat man-made or natural.
Though far more impacted, non-human species and their communities get near zero camera time and little represented voice in the matter. Climate change, finally mainstream newsworthy, is still chiefly all about us, our future rather than the planet’s, our fears for survival both as a species and within our species.
Fear is best ameliorated by denial. The carbon footprint in getting to Mars goes without mention. Planetary plane travel retains a routine large slice of the media pie, but not about its environmental disregard, only its alarming inconvenience to mankind’s insatiable energy addicted self-indulgence. The news’ fundamental button-pushing still has its priorities predictively colored by the green of money. Elon Musk’s a household name. Greta Thunberg still elicits: “Who?”
Fully vaccinated, I’ve never owned a gun and have been a tree-hugger ever since Smokey the Bear taught me how to prevent forest fires. I went meatless at 21. I’ve always driven cars way exceeding even today’s fuel efficiency standards and was actually one of the signatories at the Green Party’s formation here in the U.S. I had similar hope for Earth Day.
I still do, even though this year it’s only real milestone was the innumerable number of green organizations still failing to achieve Earth Day’s mission despite its half century of existence. I nevertheless reflexively recycle and organic garden even though knowing that plastic is now within every raindrop and will soon comprise a greater oceanic presence than fish.
It’s definitely difficult to maintain an optimistic outlook, especially when everyone seems to look towards more technology as the solution to what technology has wrought. Humankind needs an intervention not another invention. 3D printed guns aren’t the answer. Neither are bee-sized drones designed to replace a growing loss of natural pollinators. Vaccines are great, but what the world needs is an inoculation against mankind. The very notion of a Metaverse is unconscionably unnatural and horrifically hubristic. No other species believes it should adapt its environment to itself rather than the other way around, alienating from nature rather than becoming one with it.
Man is truly a piece of work, work plainly not progressing all that well. It’s been long asked what’s profited if man gains the whole world but loses his soul. It’s long been mouthed that “Earth Day should be every day.” The trouble is that Earth Day remains a Bill Murray Groundhog Day time loop of environmental inaction and mankind remains more and more convinced that its soul is indeed immaterial, that the ’80s bumper sticker wisdom of “He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins” still applies.
Teetering on an existential tipping point, can-kicking and false optimism must be jettisoned if a corrected course to planetary survival is to be successfully charted. Nature’s all the materialism needed for all other species’ fulfillment, and still abundant enough for sustaining a humanity willing to embrace that fundamental truth and get on board before everyone is fighting for space in a Mars destined lifeboat.
Adios Elon. I’ll stay here with Greta.
Gary Anderson is a Bath resident.
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