Feasting on the Earth

I went to the Fall Feast and enjoyed a delicious meal with my classmates. Although it was not the most socially charged event, it was fun to be with my classmates and friends, and it effectively reminded me that environmentalism is important, and it can be fun. It’s surprisingly easy to forget about global warming on a day to day basis. With my mind occupied by school work and social time, I don’t tend to ruminate on the catastrophic failure that this system called earth might be headed towards.  If we haven’t already passed the point of no return, it must be coming soon. We are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction, and who really knows how rising water levels and increased chances of natural disaster will affect our society or the earth at large.  There is such a present bias in our collective consciousness, that if it isn’t trendy, global warming isn’t really talked about in media or in day to day conversation.

The argument against global warming, that this is all a statical anomaly, is clearly naive and flat out wrong, but that means that Humans had the agency and might to, in the span of a century, alter irrevocably the future of the Earth. I’m very conflicted about this reality because on the one hand it feels wrong for us to alter our environment, but if we have the intelligence and sheer power to completely change Earth, maybe we are above and beyond it.   

At the fall feast, I spent a couple hours goofing around with my friends and eating tasty food, but it (and by extension the great work environmental committee did) managed to make me consider more deeply what’s happening on our planet, and indeed what my role is in its destruction.