This is a hard and stupid project.

Aw jesus.  I had nearly accomplished some lovely denial.

In her book about the death of her young child, Emily Rapp writes that parents love two things.  They love the child and they love the future of the child.  When they get a terminal diagnosis for their child, even while the child is still present, they suffer the loss of their child’s future.  I have always known that I had a kid for my own enjoyment, but I wasn’t really prepared for Catherine Ingram to be explicit about what ‘no future’ looks like.

Related pieces:

• A profile of the Extinction Rebellion  I love the slogan “Tell the truth and act like it is real.”  It is the ‘acting like it is real’ that I never see done in state government, despite all our “climate leadership”.  I mean, maybe Jerry Brown is building a survival bunker in Colusa, which actually would be ‘acting like it is real’.  But calling small-scale technocratic systems like cap-and-trade a success while not, for example, banning all production of fossil fuels in CA signaled to all of us that climate change isn’t actually urgent.  Until the State is willing to act like it is real,  citizens won’t either.
• Fuck these guys, and these ones too. These guys are fucking themselves, so we don’t have to.

It is really hard to live in two futures, so I will not be able to actually believe in near-term societal collapse and do productive work in Regular Life.  And I myself have been thinking of things that make sense in our current world.  Political pressures, ideas for Water, stuff like that.  I will keep going with Deep Adaptation, but if I myself don’t head for the hills, which is unlikely, I will probably revert to blogging about how Betty Yee should be governor next.  That doesn’t mean I don’t believe.  But I can’t manage to hold both futures in my head and I’m not brave enough to switch over yet.