gm-reflection

Snowflakes melt and vanish, but we don’t. We are the dippin-dots . We don’t melt. We linger. We bend, but we don’t break. There was a time when “save the owl” was common sense. In 1990, the northern spotted owl was listed as threatened, and logging in huge stretches of the Pacific Northwest simply stopped. Not paused for debate. Stopped. Crews packed up. Contracts froze. The forest stayed standing because a law said the owl mattered. Now, in this season of wanting to dismantle the EPA , letting tailings from open mines run straight into creeks, fiddling like Nero while we jog back toward a future where the Cuyahoga burns again, it earns a smirk. The kind that says, that’s cute, but we’re talking about real things here. Somewhere along the way, the language of care became the language of weakness. It didn’t happen overnight. It crept in over years, while power hungry leaders aligned with big money interests, selling the story that saving an owl or a whale was against business, agai...

  Blog 4 of the “Living in the Thoughtsphere” series (This post follows Blog 3: Quietly Showing Up , where I reflected on small gestures and quiet participation in a time of collapse.) There’s a weird kind of dissonance in scrolling through Amazon while thinking about climate collapse. You know too much. You’ve read the reports. You’ve seen the images. And yet, you’re clicking through pages of things you don’t need. A new flashlight. A better phone stand. Some product you never thought about until just now. And then, without thinking much, you buy it. I’ve done this. Not once or twice — enough that I’ve stopped keeping track. It usually happens when I’m tired, or frustrated, or vaguely uncomfortable in some way I can’t name. The purchase is a pressure valve. It doesn’t solve anything. It just gives me something to do with the discomfort. At one point, I convinced myself I was being responsible. I switched to eco-friendly versions of things. I bought reusable bags, compostabl...