Max Wilbert
and Will Falk
, to prevent construction of an 18,000 acre lithium mine provides some good information on the situation. However, it is remarkable that the author takes as a given that the US must maintain car culture and continue to use energy at at least current levels moving forward. At the end of the article, the author admits that perhaps the best to hope for harvesting lithium for electric car batteries is to use a mining method that does not pollute as much water as the "brining" method currently planned. This is absolutely NOT the lesson we must be taking from this moment of convergent crises in the Anthropocene. What climate instability, species extirpation, COVID 19, plummeting birdsong and collapsing coral reefs are telling us – indeed, are screaming at us - is NOT that we must identify some Hail Mary technical fix in order to maintain this bewildering system of infinite industrial production to thereby perpetuate our mastication of the natural world. Of course not.
What the Earth - which includes all of us humans physically and psychically pummeled by this state affairs - is HOWLING at us is that NOW is the hour to DE-grow, retreat and come back home after our 500-year long bender of plunder. To sleep it off and wake to the people locally around us of all backgrounds and to the other-than-human world still singing, calling, spinning, running, swimming, diving, blooming, blossoming, whirring, flying, leaping, charging, changing color, changing shape, projecting light, projecting pheromones across space, bouncing sonar through the night and through the endless oceans for balletic navigation.
THIS is the chance to end 500 years of drunken rage and plunder and return to a way of living that served us for hundreds of thousands of years: Living as one verse in a great poem being written by all of the Earth and the heavens every day, every minute, every second. Right now, right now, right now.
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