EVERYTHING. IS. HOPELESS.

but…

SO. FUCKING. WHAT!!

It’s not difficult at all to find happiness in the fight.

But that’s the key: always be in the fight, and always as a happy warrior.

From a reader:

My favorite description of the most important thing that’s happened over the last 50 years or so comes from coal history, and it is this:

Just 50 years ago, to get anthracite out of the ground, we sent hundreds of men into tiny holes in mountain-sides with lamps on their heads, and tools in their hands. They’d slowly follow seams, pushing coal out in carts that ran on tracks they laid.

Today, we’re literally taking the tops off of mountains, scooping out what we want from their insides with shovels the size of houses, then filling the hole back in and moving on to the next mountain.

Now, thankfully, coal extraction is slowing down in the USA. But this kind of exponential growth in resource extraction wasn’t limited to coal, and it wasn’t limited to the United States. Indeed, as bad as the US ecological footprint has been, it’s orders of magnitude worse in other parts of the world.

So apply the same principle to ocean fishing… or to palm oil production… or to ranching and the deforestation that goes along with it… The next time you fly, look down at the earth and understand that 50 years ago, all that land that’s been transformed by roads and houses and parking lots and farms… Well, 50 years ago, much of it was wild.
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