“How do you want to celebrate Earth Day?” I was asked on the train this morning.  Already in a sullen and pessimistic mood I reflected upon seeing this legend on a Jeep window some days ago… My Jeep burns the gas your Prius saves.  It is true.  For every little thing you do, someone is doing some much larger thing, and that larger thing will ultimately end the environment as we know it.  The subway heaved, people pressed against one another and I dreamed of the multitude of highways I had seen these past three years of traveling, and all the huge machines driving single passengers to work.  I won’t have to worry about what comes next because life is finite.

“Perhaps you don’t care about the future because you don’t have children” I was reminded.  It is true, people with children may think about the future as an abstract, but with their piles of disposable diapers, plastic toys, SUV running to soccer camp, SAT test prep, CCSS test prep, LSAT test prep, dance class it seems they don’t understand that for every bouncing baby boy/girl, someone somewhere is cutting down a rain forest or digging in mud for rare-earth so Mindy and Jose can all have computers and iSomethings and networks and switches and The Future of Knowledge Economy(sm) and the Digital Ruling Class/es can sell them Birds of Anger, Fruits of Ninja, and Crushes of Candy.
People have and uncanny knack for not understanding that 7 billion people cannot just learn to adapt to a limited space, buy hemp oil, and leave nothing put footprints.  Americans cannot do math… and neither can the teaming uneducated pissing masses of the world leaving more than footprints and taking more than selfies.

The Earth is life and are finite.  The earth is round.  The materialists are proud to exclaim their victory over Mother Church/Temple/Mosque/Stone Carin in decrying the values of the Old Believers and just how round the earth is and how not in the center of the universe it is, and then they act as if the earth grows ever expanding to their needs and that they are at the center of the universe.  They believe in an infinite bounty, endless consumption, limitless growth.  All else or to otherwise believe is heretical.  Pessimistic.  Not a sign of a LEADER or Entrepreneur.

The rational materialists are devout at believing in Man/Human’s potential and ability to solve the warming and acidifying oceans and expanding deserts.  They believe that the earth can contain so many more Cloes and Damiens as it can support the endless supply of Kawanis, Jamilis and Yumis.  It is amazing that the educated among us are so proud of their science and rationalism but cannot see that those particulates of plastic coating the world’s oceans, the radiation humming away in cool green barrels and laying under still heavy water pools, those contrails of DDT, LSD, or spent jet fuel, Roundup, Monsanto seeds, the waste waters and dead zones where even the creatures of Lovecraft would suffocate and die… these gifts to our future, to those children we are all so worried about.. these are all from science, from the halls of rationalism.

Except for the carbon footprint, perhaps we should have burned more Galileos were we to know that Eppur si muove would, by the connections and contacts throughout the ages, one day produce a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and … perhaps somewhere yet to be named in the annals of Mankind since many Great Nations, including the one of my birth, have plenty more where Big and Little Boy came from.
So this is Earth Day.

We celebrate it by thinking about these children running about who will not know forests.  Little ones who will not know that the sky was once blue.  Small greedy children descended from apes and these little monkeys unknowingly contributed to this mess before they are even adults, that their Baby Gap clothes made by wage slaves, their iThingamigiggies made by Chinese prisoners, their Apps made by immigrants from India living in Detroit on a T1 visas unable to work for more than just above minimum wage, their comfort and the warmth from coal, their toys made from oil, natural gas fracked out of the earth cooks their Monsanto “organic.”  Before they are even adults we will give them a world that is not even Mad Max interesting…. It will be less interesting.  Wild areas managed by Disney.  Zoos sponsored by Chase or Bank of America where the remaining species of large mammals are maintained.  A crowded existence plugged up with screens, buzzed and blitzed on clickbait and fed strange foods grown in laboratories.

I am trapped here too.  Burning energy all day as I access “the network.”  Every checked email burning energy.  Every post on the Book of Face contributing to global warming/climate change/carbon taxes.  Another ancient city is blown up in the name of Allah.  Another boat sinks in the name of economic freedom.  Another war is fought for oil.  Another company dumps toxic waste in a lake in the People’s Republic of China to build magnets for Green Energy(tm) in The West.  Another migrant is hacked to death in South Africa.  Another immigrant is jailed in Mexico for fleeing the drug war.  Another thousand acres of rain forest were cut down by people who look at their day’s murder as a happy accomplishment.

In my travels I have seen only two beautiful things.  Those things humans have built for God.  And those things created by God.  I will celebrate, then, those things created by God.  Knowing that all life, mine included, is finite.  And that is the natural order of things, scientific and secular or Holy and Divine, all things will to come one day, to an end whether I reuse my plastic bag, drive a Prius, or take public transportation to work every day.
Somewhere, someone’s Jeep is burning your children’s future.  Maybe it’s even you driving it.