During my childhood, I remember a book circulating around the house called 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth.
It included activities like putting a milk carton underneath a dripping tap to measure the rate at which it was dripping, and leaving elastic bands stretched and exposed outside to supposedly measure air pollution.
Much later, I realized how fucked up the implications of the book and its genre are.
The buried premise is that the Earth needs “saving” — which is horrifying and terrifying. The book takes it for granted that the one life-sustaining planet known in the universe is imperiled by human activity. If something needs saving and doesn’t get it, that means it dies or gets destroyed. The book comes right out and takes for granted that all known life is at risk unless humanity changes its conduct and attitudes and that this won’t happen through the existing political, economic, and legal systems.
The next implication is that the appropriate resolution to this, at least in part, depends on kids. It’s up to kids to save the Earth. Furthermore, they need to do it through some sort of resistance to or reform of the political and economic systems which embody and sustain the ecological crisis.
So not only does the book imply that it is the responsibility of kids to save all the life in the universe, but it goes on to give them a series of trivialities as action items: find a way to avoid wasting a carton of water, check the pH of a local stream… It sets up a colossal threat, then gives some arts-and-crafts activities and low-impact personal lifestyle changes as the solutions available.
Of course, my bitterness about this arises from the decades of utter betrayal toward young people which have characterized my life. Given the choice between perks today and not wrecking the Earth, all our leaders choose the former with lip service to the latter. Young people have grown up in a world where they expect catastrophe, and understand that their leaders prefer that outcome to changing the self-serving status quo.
I was part of that youth movement at least from my experiences with LIFE in the mid-1990s until the fossil fuel divestment movement at universities after 2012, and saw how it was systematically patronized, treated in bad faith, and ignored by those who set policy. Adults told kids that it was up to them to save the world, then knowingly and purposefully undermined those efforts in order to protect their own interests, all while portraying themselves as sage decision-makers moderating the unreasonable requests of radical activists. This process is ongoing.
This dynamic has produced a great deal of apathy and political disengagement, but I think there is also an underlying rage arising from young people understanding that they have been put in lifelong peril by a society which systematically disregards their interests — to say nothing about how the prospects for their potential children have been ravaged. It is hard to guess how that rage will manifest, but it seems very implausible that it will be through the sort of long-sighted planetwide cooperation which provides the only path to curtailing the climate crisis.
Nearly three decades later, in 2019, Reilly rued how the US missed an “incalculably important” opportunity at Rio. “The advantage we might have had if president Bush had committed to seriously undertake the reduction of greenhouse gases is that we might have removed the partisan nature of the dialogue in the United States,” he said. If that prospect, in the era of hyper-partisanship, increasingly absurd natural disasters and the Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental regulation, feels deeply infuriating – well, Cohen argued, that’s the point. “Climate change films, at least in the last 10 years, have been trying to spoon-feed the medicine of the climate crisis, and then have a ‘hope bucket’ at the end, where you can feel OK,” she said. “Our job is to create the rage. We can’t shy away from the rage. And if this film, in all of its irrefutable archival historical glory, can create that rage, then we’ve succeeded.”
The hope, she added, is that “you can feel the rage and you can feel the intolerance for the denial of truth, and that you’ll actually do something about at the ballot box. The hopelessness is when you feel like you can’t do anything. But we have a large electorate in this country – let’s get out there.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/nov/04/the-white-house-effect-netflix-documentary-climate
‘This is unprecedented’: New report card shows Toronto’s mental health is collapsing
https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/article/this-is-unprecedented-new-report-card-shows-torontos-mental-health-is-collapsing/
Toronto’s mental health has deteriorated so rapidly over the past decade that the number of residents who say they are doing well has collapsed from nearly three quarters to barely half, a situation that at least one expert says is “unprecedented” and “crazy.”
A report, released by ThriveTO in partnership with the Canadian Mental Health Association, CAMH, the City of Toronto and other organizations, found the percentage of Torontonians who describe their mental health as “very good” or “excellent” fell from 73 per cent in 2015 to 52 per cent in 2022.
The report is based on a compilation of publicly available data over the years from Stats Canada, CAMH, Ontario Health and The Toronto Mental Health and Addictions Access Point.
“This is unprecedented. This is crazy. We’re going from three quarters of people saying they had good mental health to just about half… That is something that we should be really worried about,” said Dr. Kwame McKenzie, CEO of Wellesley Institute and one of the report’s lead researchers.
Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.
Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.
https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/