We Must Love One Another or Die
We’re out of chances.
Here’s something teachers know:
If you want to motivate a slacker, sometimes you have to scare them. You have to tell them they’re failing. You have to show them your grade book, with all the absences and zeroes. You have to lay out the consequences in crystal clear terms they can understand.
You have to tell them, “It’s too late.”
Believe it or not, this is what gets the slackers going. Tell them there’s nothing they can do. Tell them they’ve failed. Not because you’re trying to trick them. Not because you’re angry. Not because you want to. You do it because it’s true. They have failed. They’ve used up all of their chances. That’s the moment they start doing the work.
It’s a tactic of last resort.
It works.
No, not always. It’s not a move you open with. It’s not something you use on someone who’s just struggling. It’s what we do when we run out of all other options. We do it after six, eight, or ten weeks of explaining the assignments and giving deadline extensions.
If you know anything about me, then you probably know I’m a generous teacher. But when a student has failed, I don’t lie to them. I don’t waste their time with false hope. I tell them the truth. I tell them it’s on them to either withdraw, or do something to prove they can pass.
Sometimes, there’s something in the human mind that doesn’t click on until it can truly grasp what hopelessness feels like, until it truly has to reckon with despair. Some people are already there, and they don’t need to see the grade book. Some people need hope and encouragement. Others need to hear the brutal truth. They need to hear our despair.
Ironically, my students aren’t the problem right now. A lot of them understand what’s going on. They’re deeply concerned about our corrupt politics, our incremental approach to climate change, our injustice, our inequality, and our constant wars. They’re not the ones failing right now. It’s the adults. They’re the ones who need drastic intervention.
It doesn’t mean we’re pessimists. It doesn’t mean we want the world to fail. It doesn’t mean we don’t care.
If that were true, we wouldn’t bother telling them.
We’d just let it fail…
You don’t get endless chances.
Right now, we should be pouring every ounce of our attention into saving the planet and learning to live sustainably. Instead, we’re on the doorstep of nuclear war, as if it’s 1962 all over again. This time, it’s worse. The stakes are higher. Also, we should’ve learned our lesson.
It’s disappointing, to say the least.
Virtually every single scientist on the planet has warned us, with increasing urgency, that this is the last decade we have to get our shit together. It’s the last chance we have to shift over to renewable energy and sustainable economics. It’s the last opportunity to reduce our consumption and at least slow down and mitigate environmental collapse.
If we don’t…
The storms will get worse. So will the fires. The floods. The freak weather events. The droughts. The famines.
All of it.
It’s already happening.
People laugh and say, “Humans have been predicting the end of the world for all of civilization. It never happens.”
Wake up, it’s happening.
We’re living through a sixth extinction, the first one that’s arguably preventable, the first one caused by human activity. These aren’t predictions. All you have to do is open your eyes.
You just have to read.
We’re wasting our last chance.
Here’s why this decade is so critical:
We’ve most likely reached peak oil. We’re exhausting nonrenewable energy sources like natural gas. And yet, we haven’t created the renewable energy infrastructure to support our societies.
Let me put it this way:
Right now, we’re relying on fossil fuels to crank out those electric vehicles everyone loves so much. We’re relying on fossil fuels to mine the minerals we need to make them, along with our solar panels and wind mills and geothermal power systems.
That’s not good.
Energy prices are already going through the roof. It’s getting more and more expensive to obtain the resources we need just to function, just to keep stores open and food growing. Speaking of food, our non-sustainable, mono-culture crops are destined to give out soon, too.
Hello, this is why Putin invaded a sovereign country. It’s why he’s going all out. It’s why he’s acting so desperate.
He is desperate.
You can blame his delusional, narcissistic, megalomaniac personality. You can blame his pandemic isolation, or wonder if he’s suffering from dementia. Deep down, I believe he’s thinking with the strange, cruel kind of intelligence that minds like his know too well:
Me first.
Like I’ve said, Putin isn’t that different from the American capitalists you’d expect an ex-KGB officer to loathe. He thinks about his own wealth. He thinks about what’s best for his rich oligarch friends, at least in the short term. He’s not stupid. He understands the consequences of climate change and global warming all too well. He probably even grasps his own culpability. There’s just one problem with that.
He doesn’t care.
Putin’s answer to the collapse of our climate is the same as the CEOs at major energy companies. Don’t try to change. Speed things up. Squeeze the earth for its last few ounces of oil and food.
Pad your bunker.
This is just the beginning.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t a random act of aggression.
It’s probably the start of a new pattern.
Climate scientists have warned us, over and over, that as our resources dwindle it’s going to pressure world leaders to compete over what’s left. We’re talking wars over water and wheat.
Putin’s just getting a head start.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the real nature of this war, and climate looks like the elephant in the room. It’s the truth looming over Ukraine, the thing everyone knows on some level but doesn’t want to say out loud. Sure, it looks like business as usual. It looks like an old school war, with old fashion 20th century geopolitics.
In a lot of ways, it is.
This time, the stakes are higher.
The solutions have to be different.
Ukrainians don’t have much of a choice right now but to defend themselves. The Russian military is killing civilians. They’re bombing children. They’re shelling hospitals and nuclear reactors.
And yet…
We’re not going to beat Russia the way we’ve beaten other aggressors. We’re not going to attack them with tanks and planes. We’re not going to scare them with nuclear weapons, or race them to the moon. We’re not going to outspend them. We’re not going to assassinate them.
I’m not even sure sanctions will work the way we think. If anything, it feels an awful lot like we’re punishing innocent civilians for the actions of a man who stopped caring about consequences a long time ago. We might have no choice but to enact sanctions, but they’re not going to make him roll over or back down. They’ll probably make him more desperate. The facts seem to speak for themselves. Putin thinks he has nothing to lose, and it’s not just about him. The entire world is getting desperate.
Yes, I’m afraid.
We only have one hope now.
Here’s a few predictions I have:
- Putin isn’t going to stop, not on his own.
- Putin isn’t going to be the last world leader to break bad and invade a sovereign nation for its resources.
- Climate change will drive more and more conflicts like this, all around the world, for decades to come.
There’s only one way out of this, and it’s doubling down on renewable energy and sustainable economics. We need to be building solar and wind power plants like there’s no tomorrow. We should be investing everything we’ve got into fusion and other clean, high yield energy.
We’re closer than ever to unlocking unlimited energy sources. In some ways, we’re already there.
Here’s a depressing fact: One of the biggest “threats” to renewable energy is that solar power is “too cheap” now. That’s right. We could have unlimited clean energy. It’s not a technology problem anymore. It’s a motivation problem. It’s a mindset problem.
It’s a greed problem.
That’s not the only thing…
We’ve reached a point where the best way to save your own life is to start preparing for a less convenient one. Start learning how to cook with solar. Start learning how to mend or even make your own clothes. Learn how to get by with less. If you can get off the grid, then do it. Learn how to entertain yourself without going shopping and eating out every weekend. Learn how to wear and use things until they literally fall apart.
Learn practical skills.
Whatever money you have, donate it toward organizations that are trying to protect what’s left of the environment and research clean energy. Start learning how you can be sustainable:
Here’s a basic start.
Learn how to catch and filter your own water. Learn how to grow your own food, however much you can. Stop investing in wishful thinking and superficial solutions that make you feel good, because they’re easy. There’s nothing easy or convenient about saving the world, or surviving the dystopian future that’s looking inevitable. Form sustainable communities. Demand other people start doing the same thing.
I only know one thing.
Sure, you can dismiss me.
You can say I don’t know what I’m talking about, because I’m not a pundit or a political scientist. You can call me a doomsayer, or accuse me of writing for clicks. The truth is, I don’t know how we’re going to end the war in Ukraine. I am convinced that it’s the start of a darker epoch, an age where we fight each other for what’s left of a dying planet. I’m a student of history, and I know we spent most of the last century in nearly constant war. I know that how we deal with this crisis will define the next hundred years.
I know, more than ever, that the biggest obstacle to our problems is the same obstacle some of my students face. They don’t understand the gravity of the situation. I know W.H. Auden was right:
We must love one another or die.
We can’t just love one another, either. We have to love our home, too. We have to stop putting it last on our to-do list. We have to stop acting like we can just go out and get another one. We can’t.
Love each other. Love the planet.
Or die.