A Eulogy for Earth

Imagine a room full of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Hate these men or love them, they’re shaping your future. Get a good look at them. They’re large, larger than life. Maybe they smell like tobacco, or the inside of a limousine, or stacks and stacks of fresh hundred dollar bills. What are they talking about, do you think? Perhaps how to grow more tobacco (or Bitcoin, processed foods, AI, junk bonds, shitty real estate, mergers, spaceships). How to grow more powerful. But what aren’t they talking about?

They’re not talking about the last time they felt a fresh breeze on their face. When they last took a cool dip in a lake. How they recently hiked a winding forest trail with their children and took deep breaths of mountain air. The crystal moonlight filtering through their window. They don’t notice these things. These things don’t give them money, which is their life. They take all their life—their rotten, miserable, shriveled-up life—from their stacks and stacks of fresh hundred dollar bills, stacked up like mountains in their bank vaults, perfuming the air with the scent of get out of jail free, the scent of hop on a spaceship outta here, the scent of not my problem. 

It’s not their problem anymore. It’s ours. Our homes will burn, the insurance companies these men own will cancel our plans, the shelters they’ve never seen the inside of will fill up as our lungs fill with ash. Maybe their homes will burn too, but they have so many of them: just hop to the next, and then the next, little stepping stones always 1,000 miles away from the latest crisis, little building blocks on which to build their eventual exit on a billion dollar carbon-extremely-not-neutral jet plane into the cosmos. We’ll wave to them as they leave. The cardboard boxes from the things they’ve sold us will disintegrate. The underground supercomputers they created to multiply reality will fail. The earth they hate will regenerate, grow lush again with purpose, something they could never do.