Saving the World Progress Report

Environmentalists are mentally multitasking between preserving scares natural resources for future generations, preserving endangered species, the climate change thing, and postponing World War Three.

In my end-boomer/pre-GenX age group, there's a growing mantra of #we'refucted.

To me, this mentality is realistic. It's like we're in a chess game and we've already lost so many pieces that "resign" is the only move suggested in the playbook.

But who is the real opponent in this chess game? Society? Lobbyists? Corporations? Overpopulation? Ignorance? This blog often focuses on #owngoals, #collateraldamage, #accidentalracism, #bullyboys, and other mistaken moves on our own chess playtable. But who is the actual opponent?

#StandardOfLiving - is that our Queen, our most valuable chess piece that we cannot bear to sacrifice? Or is #StandardOfLiving the opponent of #Sustainability and #survival of the planet?

For me, Evolution dictates that I not resign the game. The only species to ever live today threaded from stubborn ancestors who didn't resign and die., instead insisting on survival strategies, sometimes doubtless for the other species upon whom diversity depends. 

When the chess game is a philosophy, rather than multigenerational survival - like environmentalism, democracy, freedom, liberty, etc - it sometimes goes into deep hibernation. 

There's a bigger point to be made somewhere. But for today, this is a journal entry on keeping faith while extending and practicing a non-sustainable standard of living which is growing ubiquitously for our multiplying species around the planet. We spoke about the impossibility of all the then three billion people of Earth all owning cars and consuming resources at Western standards back in the 1970s, and that was the discussion that set my life in motion to grow and sustain #Recycling. I could have instead gone "Firefox" mode, lived a non-consuming off-grid monkish lifestyle, but that "shiny conscience" strategy seemed ineffective to me, and I can't both set up urban recycling and reuse systems to extend if not sustain #StandardofLiving. But global standard of living increasingly seems like the Opponent we are losing the chess game to.

Sometimes to keep myself going I imagine a multiverse where some facet of my recycling career is successful in "saving" (or contributing to the survival of) the Earth. Then I imagine how many of those multiverses ends with me not trying as hard because I don't believe this day is our only chance of tomorrow.

#Bloggingaboutatweetaboutablogaboutthetweet is a new form of #navelgazing, I guess, but it beats watching TV or TicToc