Published on 12, July, 2020
Greta Thunberg is really freaking me out. I agree with some of what she says like "Fossil fuels should be banned by 2030" and "Meat and dairy should be banned". But only half of what she says is directly related to global warming; the rest of it is her bullying people, calling people names like "Spastic", "Wimp" and "Weak'o" and saying stuff like "I want you to panic", "I hope your house burns down" and "You must do exactly as I say". She is basically a mean girl with heckloads of power. Millions of kind young people are supporting this nasty girl and her protests are in 2,000 cities in 120 countries. And then she says stuff like "Stop road-building" and "Destroy airports" which makes me angry. Why does it have to be her? Why couldn't it be another, nicer person? Why couldn't you just ditch her and set up your own group when you discovered she was so horrid?
On the other hand... the planet gets polluted and heats up to the point that all (or nearly all) higher life-forms die off - so what?
It's happened before, to the dinosaurs (albeit due to a natural disaster) and that's why we had the rise of the mammals
If the mammals (and other creatures) die off something will rise up to make use of the evolutionary space that frees up
But what about art? music? etc. etc.
Does.not.matter.
Maybe there'll be new art/music/whatever produced by the plant-based life that evolves, or the insects or whatever
Maybe Earth will return to being a sterile rock in space
Who cares? Really?
I take your point. I would hope that parents care. I care, even though I'm near the end of my life, because I am an artist as well as a human being. It pains me immensely to see beauty being destroyed or otherwise compromised in the name of 'economic competitiveness', or whatever other short-term 'imperative' is put before the sustainability of the very thing that sustains us in the first place.
I'm minded of the rightly-famous Cree India proverb:
'Only when the last tree has died
and the last river been poisoned
and the last fish been caught
will we realise
we cannot eat money.'
As Bill Hicks once said: 'Humans. We're a virus on legs'.
The earth would certainly be better off without us. But only if we continue to make that case.