Saving the Earth Like We Mean It, Part II

A cow who escaped the slaughterhouse while pregnant licks her newborn calf in a farm sanctuary.

You probably did not guess when you read my “Saving the Earth like we mean it” piece a year ago that it was only part one of an ongoing exhortation. Even worse, this is the agitprop equivalent of a good-cop-bad-cop routine, and last year was the good cop.

A consensus is developing among scientists and theoreticians addressing the climate catastrophe. (I have been called a “catastrophizer” several times over the past year, and have decided to go with it. After toying with the term “climate chaos” for a while, I am going full hysteric and officially renaming the phenomenon the “climate catastrophe.” But I’m not the only one.)

The consensus in-the-making is roughly this:
● Despite all the focus on climate chaos, publication of studies, and formation of pressure groups, we — the global population — have consistently and vastly underestimated both the scope and the speed of global warming and all its chaotic manifestations
● Ditto soil depletion, waste management failures, ocean death, and species extinction
● None of the well-meaning efforts to address the problem have had more than a tiny, as in barely measurable, effect

There should be several more bullet points in that. The next bullet would be an insight, or at least a progress report on gaining…