First they came for the farmers, and I didn’t say anything… And we know how that ends.
this is probably not the way to save the world and save our own skin and that of our children—for those of us who have selfishly chosen to add to Gaia’s overpopulation by having children.
The model that we seem to have set up now is that every now and then we will pick a sector and pit them against the environmentalists, and all sit back and enjoy the emissions.
Which was probably all very good when things didn’t really matter, or when things were a matter of opinion. But now there seems to be a general agreement on this particular issue that we need to sort it out, like yesterday.
The problem is, as environmental scientist Cara Augustenborg put it after we forged a compromise on agriculture, “The atmosphere doesn’t understand compromise.” The atmosphere in Ireland is also uncompromising.
Last week’s compromise on agriculture made no one happy. Depending on where you stood, it was either an existential attack on farming families or a capitulation to the good old guys in the backseats of rural Ireland.
But the problem is that compromise is all we have. That is all that politics, the art of the possible, has to offer. And if compromise isn’t enough, we’ve destroyed ourselves as a species.
But at least we’ll have descended doing what we like, passionately arguing about why other people are wrong.
Of course the situation is complicated by the fact that while we can argue amongst ourselves until the cows get home, we are in fact just pissing on this one in a very large manure tank.
It’s hard to make sacrifices to be the top boys and girls in the class when we know that in the grand scheme of things we can’t change much.
Because there are much bigger players here who don’t seem to share our conscientious opinion, and unfortunately we share a vibe with all of them.
Nor is it made any easier by the fact that, as one reformed tech exec puts it in the documentary The social dilemma, people like Facebook have created 2.7 billion Truman Shows, where everyone has their own unique version of reality. Billions of realities, yet only one atmosphere.
Some environmentalists have been quick to criticize farmers in recent weeks. And so was the corporate lobby, pointing out that agriculture represents only 1 pc of our national income.
Perhaps it would be better for us to empathize with the farmers, knowing that our time will come. We will all have to change our lives enormously and very quickly.
And change is always painful. In reality, it probably won’t affect most of us as much as it does farmers. But maybe we should be a little more tolerant of their grief because we have to let go of how things used to be, because our time to grieve is quickly running out.
And let’s hope we’re all just grieving because we need to change the way we live and work. Because the alternative is a world of sorrow.