“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
— Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
As you’d expect from someone who loves a good quote — see my Twitter feed — the one above is very deliberate. For me, it sums up perfectly my mood and mindset apropos the climate catastrophe that is closing in with alarming rapidity.
In short, it’s already too late.
Too late for what?
To stop the earth warming…and so much more. I mean, if we were serious about abating our emissions we wouldn’t, well, still be using the world as a toilet for the gigatonnes of CO2 that we pump daily into the atmosphere.
Ah, never mind. There’s always Mars for those that can afford it.
I know, it sounds so despairing. Damn right. How else would you like me to be? Hopeful? Of what? That we will wake up from our collective amnesia and suddenly find or come upon some new technology that will dig us out the pile of pooh we’ve made for ourselves.
Yeh, I know, there are generalisations aplenty in the foregoing and you’d be right to dismiss me as another loon on the fringes of society. But I’m not. A loon that is. I am (for my sins) a hardheaded lawyer and I’ve looked at the numbers. And the verdict’s in: we’re all [fill in the blank].
What next?
I’m plotting; I’ve plans; and I know, having read some of the work of the late Hannah Arendt, that I can’t stay quiet any longer for to do so would make me even more complicit and morally bankrupt than I am already.
To be clear, I don’t expect to shift the climate catastrophe needle one iota but if I can invite those that I connect with to ask a more beautiful question than what’s currently front and centre stage in our comfort-seeking world then I’ll die, if not a happy man, one who tried to make an incy-wincy dent on the dumb narrative that says we can have it all at (almost) any cost.
Blessings dear readers.
— Ju