I am betrayed throughout the day by a nagging sense that I should be doing something different.

When a person who has been in recovery starts drinking again, and they take up the ‘normal’ activities of going to the bar and ordering drinks, going to the liquor store, waking up hungover and doing it again – the ‘fun’ tends to go out of it. The knowledge they gained in a recovery program screams at them from some part of their being that what they are doing is deadly, and dangerous to themselves and others.

This is how continuing business-as-usual feels in the climate emergency.

Remember how we all got exhausted in the Covid pandemic? How could we not be exhausted by the climate change impacts? The noise of catastrophe in the news. The inaction of government. The voice of deniers and their insipid argumentative rejection of what is obvious. Still, we MUST do SOMETHING, right? Like…what?

It is eating me alive, the reality of working my 8-10 hours, driving my CO2 emitting gasoline engine vehicle to the store, the restaurant, the movie theater, to shop, eat, sit in air conditioned buildings hiding the current most obvious signal that we are failing our planet, while actively perpetuating the problem. While governments argue about unborn life, and constituents look for who to blame the cost of fuel on. (Why shouldn’t gas be $100/gallon?! Maybe THEN something would change.)

What can I do? What can I do!

I talk to people. I join organizations. I keep up on climate news and climate-science latest developments. I tweet.

Somehow this all feels roughly equivalent to doing nothing, and so…

I am betrayed throughout the day by a nagging sense that I should be doing something different.