Year 2, Month 5, Day 7: Sawing Off The Branch We’re Sitting On

A very depressing article in the Sydney Morning Herald about worldwide mass extinctions. Some days this letter-writing thing is no bloody fun at all.

Sent April 28:

As the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change triggers countless extinctions across the globe, it becomes increasingly apparent that our anthropocentric worldview is an essentially destructive one. No living thing on the planet exists in isolation; everywhere we find greater and lesser synergies between different forms of life, each depending on the other for nourishment, for reproduction, for its very survival. Yet in the newly minted Anthropocene Epoch, our species fails to acknowledge the many and varied webs of interdependence that bind us to the rest of creation, as we heedlessly rend the intricate fabric of earthly life. Let us paraphrase John Donne, and recognize that “no living thing is an island, every living thing is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Humanity risks its own survival; unless we change our ways, we will learn too late that the bell tolls for all of us.

Warren Senders