by Candi | January 9, 2025 | Editorial published in the Rad Mag Winter 2024
Right now, Los Angeles is burning. It almost seems pointless to bring up. The residents and world have gotten very used to fires in our mountains. We prepare, check our emergency supplies every once in a while (got to keep it up to date, could be an earthquake, could be fire, either way, you need some sort of plan), and move on to the next catastrophe. It’s become the most human of things to do. Move on. Keep going. I think about the younger generations, the kind of fight or flight they must have, and I’m thankful the world is finally talking about mental health. I imagine young humans have a really hard time imagining their future.
I got a little testy on the phone with a family member on day three of the fires. It was a total surprise. They were only calling to check on me and talk about how scary everything is but the second climate change came into the conversation I became incredibly protective. Defensive? Apparently, the last thing I was prepared for was that conversation. The ‘is it climate change’ conversation. I had unconsciously curated those few days so carefully; the political portion of the program was not on my eyeballs. I was unprepared for my reaction. I apologized, they apologized, the conversation ended with a real nice understanding that everything is super weird and scary and we love each other.
It doesn’t matter what has happened in the distant past of our planet. What matters most is what we know now. We know the humans are doing things that contribute to making the environment uninhabitable to humans. From poorly maintained infrastructure because mismanagement and greed, to politicians refusing to actually represent their constituents (we literally all want tax money spent on better streets and clean water). Animal agriculture, plastic and petrol pollution, the resistance to eliminating fossil fuels - all of these things are created by us. We are making the air dirty. We are depleting the water sources. We are not using all of our amazing knowledge and advancements to ensure the cities have clean pipes and sustainable garbage disposal or repurposing. This affects the planet.
Everything we do, affects everything around us.
I think it’s going to take remembering that we are nature to make any real change. I don’t know if that’s possible in our colonized world, where we have been entirely removed from all natural processes. We destroyed so many of the people who believed in the earth and our connections to the stars. Those numbers are growing again, as the collective communicates, as we ride the wild data dump of this time and learn about our brains and our bodies and the things that make us. But, I wonder if it is too late to fit back into the ecosystem. To be a part of the cycles of day and night, life and death, giving instead of only taking.
Imagine what it could be like if all of us said together, “We want to make this better”, and then we just did it. If we listened to the data, the stuff the very smart humans spend their lives gathering, and lowered our meat consumption; stopped buying plastic; voted for representatives who want to save the national parks, not drill in them. What if we all said, “Let’s make this better for everything”? It seems easy. So, what is our problem?
I think believing the world was created for us is a huge chunk of why we are here where the ground is on fire and the air makes us sick. Even that only sort of matters. The world and everything in it could have been created solely for us, for human consumption. Or, humans evolved to be the current apex species with the intelligence to comprehend the world around us and our relevance to it. Either way, I’m pretty sure it’s our job to take care of it.
Imagine what it could be like, if we all took care of the world.

Comentarios