like your habitable planet? read this.

i don't know where my
recycling ends up, but i
try to think the best.




if you have ever stood on the shore of a lake or river or ocean and taken a deep breath and felt a delightful and temperate breeze ruffle the hair on the top of your head and thought to yourself, gee, i think i'd like to do this again someday, perhaps in fifty years or so, and maybe i'll take my grandkids to this very spot so that they can come back with their grandkids

or if you've ever, just, you know, been really thirsty and had some water and thought to yourself, DAMN! water ROCKS!

or whatever, you know, if you like plants and soil and oxygen and, *sigh*

okay. listen. you want to call me a hippie right about now, and that hurts my feelings. i am not a hippie. hippies do power yoga in hundred-dollar leotards on hundred-dollar mats for three hours every day and believe that black beads will protect them from the modern world's negative energies, they go to stadiums to be blessed by the dalai lama and then put the digital picture of them shaking hands with the dalai lama up on their desktop, they'll only eat organic fucking broccoli sprouts but the broccoli sprouts came in a plastic container from a mammoth supermarket, to which they were shipped in a big truck that guzzled up some obscene quantity of fossil fuels on its way

hippie, as far as i'm concerned, is short for hypocrite. they are all talk and no action, and that talk is rarely if ever even a hundredth as well informed as it ought to be. i am not a hippie. i am a scientist, and i love facts. and here, courtesy of elizabeth kolbert and the new yorker, are some of the most terrifying facts i've seen in one place in all the time i've been alive. i subscribe to the magazine and finished the third part of this series of articles this afternoon, and i'm not at all embarrassed to tell you that i wept, right there in the middle of the radiology file room. i love this planet, and i've dedicated a lot of time to finding ways to do right by her. i believe that a lot of people have. what i learned today is that all across this planet, the most intelligent and devoted of those people, the ones with the most information on the subject, are slowly beginning to accept that there may be nothing we can do, or, at least, that nothing will be done. see, this country (the united states, i mean, for those of you who didn't know) absolutely must enact massive shifts in environmental policy for there to be any hope of even stabilizing the planet at its current level of disrepair, and this country doesn't wanna. the people making the decisions will be dead before any of the shit that's gonna go down goes down, so they don't feel compelled to act. the problem is, by the time the people with the power are the people who feel threatened, it will be too late for anything they decide to have an impact.

just read the article. there are some things everyone has a responsibility to know.