You don\u2019t need me to tell you why the future looks scary and possibly short and we should all be very afraid. (If Christmas blotted it out, the news section is up front.) It seems to me wholly plausible that we\u2019re living in the end times of our species, even though I know it\u2019s seemed wholly plausible to sensible people many times over the millennia and in the event humanity went on to die another day. Just because they were wrong, doesn\u2019t mean we are; one day the end will come and there are good reasons to think it might be soon.<\/p>\n
And yet. My sons have convinced us to stop using plastic containers to store food, and to replace the plastic chopping boards with wood (I refuse to worry too much about the glue in wooden boards; as I\u2019ve said before, we cannot individually buy our way out of systemic trouble, and energy devoted to purifying one\u2019s personal environment achieves no structural change and eventually becomes neurotic).<\/p>\n
I remember, I said to my son, trying to convince my mother to get rid of her insanitary wooden boards and buy plastic that could go in the dishwasher, because I\u2019d read about the germs accumulating in wooden ones. I remember when plastic bags were going to save the trees we were chopping down to make paper. (I remember, for the matter of that, when cotton tote bags were going to save the fossil fuels used to make plastic, rather than exhausting and polluting the water supplies where they\u2019re made.)<\/p>\n
Yes, he said, I expect my kids will be horrified by what I think is normal, I expect that\u2019s how it goes. (I did not mention my small thrill at the implication that he might trust the future enough to consider having children at all.)<\/p>\n
I thought back down the generations, about my grandmother\u2019s wartime habits of making do and mending and the unrecorded life of her grandmother who left the west of Ireland in the 1880s, probably with little material for making do or mending, and the unrecorded lives and labour of women before that. I thought I\u2019d take my dilemmas about the effects of plastic chopping boards over their dilemmas about whether the children would have enough to eat tomorrow, any time. I thought I\u2019d take my fretting about the state of the nation and world over my grandmother\u2019s fretting about whether that bomb was about to land on her house or down the road, any time.<\/p>\n
The thing is, I said to my son, however awful the state of the world, more people are living longer and healthier and probably happier lives now than ever before. The mass industrialisation that\u2019s killing the planet is hard to separate from the availability of clean water and the existence of antibiotics and sterile surgery, not to mention safe and reliable contraception, and none of those goods is fairly distributed but they exist and more people have access to more of them than when they were first available. <\/p>\n
The ideal is that we have the benefits of post-\u2018Enlightenment\u2019 science \u2013 acknowledging that the era of European colonialism and industrialisation brought darkness to very many people in very many places \u2013 and not the current unsustainable costs, but meanwhile the benefits are undeniable.<\/p>\n