No Dynasty 4 US

asgardian–angels:

beeperbopper:

feministism:

It’s called “environmental amnesia” and it’s an actual issue environmentalists discuss how to combat. The climate crisis makes it more widespread but it’s been something that’s happening for generations. The story of The Lorax describes it beautifully. The idea that what you remember is what you consider normal, but if the changes happen slowly over generations, you don’t see how large they are because you don’t personally remember them being very different, even if you were told stories about it.

It is also called ‘shifting baselines’ (the term used in ecology, I’m not sure about other fields). Ecological disasters like the collapse of the atlantic cod fishery, or the near-extinction of bald eagles easily go under society’s radar because they span multiple human generations, even though on a geologic or evolutionary time scale, it’s a mere blink. It becomes easy to ignore the warning signs of things that have happened before - like for instance, another impending dust bowl due to the poor ways we manage agriculture today - when it didn’t happen in your lifetime, or the effects are not made widely known or felt in your own life. 

Stories of cod so abundant in the gulf of Maine that they leapt into fishermen’s boats seem fantastical when we are used to cod being an expensive delicacy, since their populations are at 1% of former levels, which has wrought havoc on the marine ecosystems they are a keysyone species in. Eventually they may bounce back, by laws put in place by those who remember, or were taught to care, and when cod leap from the sea again, will we remember not to harvest them all? Will we remember to plant cover crops and not let the leached soil turn to dust? Will we remember not to fall prey to our fears by poisoning the Earth?

Our only hope lies in the passing of information, of values, and of compassion, through families, through communities, through time. We must not forget that the world we live in is not the one that existed before us. Do not accept that there’s ‘just no more bug splatters on my windshield’ in the peak of summer, or that storm walls are the only way to stop hurricanes when salt marsh protected the coast for thousands of years. Don’t accept longer and harsher hurricane seasons, or ticks out in winter, or sugar maples disappearing from the northeast.

Memories fade, and sometimes passion isn’t enough to impart a sense of urgency to those who haven’t lived it. So while you are alive, and are living through environmental disasters, fight for change now. Fight for laws and policies to be put in place, fight for protections, so that those in the future who don’t remember to care cannot repeat our mistakes. In 300 years people may complain about laws that seem pointless or overkill. Good. We did our part if those people cannot ruin what we worked hard to salvage. 

(via vermillionquinn)