The rest of our lives...

A striking realisation hit me yesterday: For the rest of my life, I will be living in a world that is dying around me.

Everyone agrees that climate change is happening (even the climate sceptics have stopped disputing that). And everyone knows that evolution takes a long time, i.e. millions of years. Life on earth takes a long time to adapt to its surroundings, and when there are sudden changes (over decades, or less), lots of things can't cope with it and die. Indeed, entire ecosystems collapse, having ripple effects all over the place, which upset other ecosystems, causing more systemic failures (i.e. more mass death).

So for the rest of my life, I will be watching life around me struggling (and failing) to adapt to the changing climate. It will be hotter, and it will rain less. There will be drought, and the grass will never again be quite so green, quite so lush. Indeed, soil will dry up and crack up, grass will wither, and green fields will turn brown. The bacteria in the soil, the bacteria that makes the soil fertile and life-giving, will be dehydrated and die. It will stop the break down of other organic matter, stop putting usable nutrition in the soil, and so everything that grows from the soil will suffer.

Trees will produce less leaves, less flowers, less seeds, less fruit. Vegetables will be smaller, the cost of irrigation will increase (as fresh water becomes scarcer), and so the cost of food will increase. My personal projects to grow my own food will become harder to succeed in, and I will see yields decrease.

And of course, I'm not simply worried about the cost of food increasing (although millions of humans will suffer and die because of it). As the world dies around us, we, being part of that dying world, will be dying slowly too. It is well-researched that when people are often around death they are not happy. When everyone is around death a lot, none of us will be happy. Oh, we'll find happiness amongst it all, but we'll be less happy than if we'd been alive in a world that was gaining in life, not losing it.

Depressing? Yes. I sometime have depressing thoughts. But at least we can try to get the message out, try to make things die slower, and try to help as many things as possible survive. In short, we need to try stop the madness that is destroying our world.