Yesterday I wanted to do so much writing and I couldn’t. Or I could, but I didn’t persevere enough. That was, ultimately, the issue that I had, and now I’m here, sitting and rushing as I’m about to head out to go spend time with the person I’m seeing. And that’s okay. Or it’s not, and I need to be accountable enough to admit that I have nursed bad habits for a really long time.

But anyway, it’s already warm. Today is going to be a brutal day. Incredibly hot, horrible, etc. And I don’t know if I have the energy to keep hoping we’re going to do better, because we’ve royally fucked everything and, when being asked to do something about it, we decide to dig our heels in. So maybe we have had our time and we’re going to keep digging further and further in until we throw our hands up and say things like “Why didn’t anyone say anything?”.

Yes, we need to hold corporations to task. Yes, we need to keep our elected public servants to task. There are a lot of areas in which we need to ensure people are being responsible. We need to be responsible ourselves, too. Often it is that we behave as though we can live the lives we live without repercussions, and the fact is is that, whilst the biggest polluters out there need to be reigned in massively and there needs to be genuine consequences for their actions (beyond the ever-increasing likelihood that everything will go to absolute shit), there is little, if any chance that, if we want the changes to happen and be effective, we get to keep living with the kind of luxury that we live with.

There are people out there with needs who require things that plenty of us take for granted as a convenience rather than a necessity to improve quality of life and general function. A lot of us are going to have to go without if we keep on polluting and fucking things around because our footprint is small compared to that of a large organisation.

We all live on the same planet and we all have an obligation to treat it as a place we want to live. We all have an obligation to put aside our desires if our desires get in the way of clearing land, or restoring habitat. We don’t choose to be born, but we don’t have to make it worse for others, and we really shouldn’t.

There are so many places I see that could have so many more trees. Yes, trees drop branches. Vegetation can cause issues. If need be, we can create more green corridors. Stick a fucking footpath along them if need be. Get people involved and interested, and get them having a reason to want to protect and restore habitat. What, more insects? Who gives a shit.

I’d rather a healthier environment than a dying one, but that doesn’t happen unless we actually participate in the protection and restoration of it, and whilst there’s a lot in our current society that makes it difficult to take part in the work that needs doing, we still all need to do something.

I don’t want to be letting go of hope. I don’t want to have to be giving up on talking to people about what can be done and what steps are needed to work toward making things better. It’s getting really hard though, because I look at everything. I think back to lockdown and how, for a lot of people it was stressful, it gave some time to think about the world as it was, and what could be done. I think about now and it’s though it never happened. This global crisis and people just went back to how things were, because of course we all did. It’s fucked.

I am angry this morning, sure, but I feel my anger is justified, and it’s also mixed with despair. There’s so much out there I want to see and do and it might not happen because we just keep on consuming and taking things over and we don’t think about our impact. No single drop thinks it is to blame for the flood, and not enough people think about the responsibility they carry on a planet that has diminishing natural resources, and what I mean here is the spread of nature and habitat that we can see, rather than harvest because being able to see things means they are a form of resource. They’re something that provides something to us, but we’re not appreciating what’s around us enough. Not the fucking houses; the natural landscape.

I drive through The Blue Mountains a lot because I love them and I think Sydney is, quite frankly, an ugly place. I drive through and I see the natural landscape, and I see how people don’t appreciate it enough and I get angry about it, because people will treat the natural environment like their personal dumping ground. I still want these spaces to be available to everyone, because for every few disrespectful people, you’ll get one or two who will think about the space and what it means and offers, and of a few of those, you’ll get one or two who then decide to get involved with preservation and reducing their own footprint.

Yes, there are far larger polluters, but we all have an obligation to the planet. We don’t get to live with all the conveniences we have if we want to make things better. It takes a collective effort. It takes a lot of work, but it can be done. We don’t get to rest because we have it good; we then fight for a better tomorrow for everyone. We fight, even if it costs us some luxury, because that is what we have to do. I don’t think enough will, and I’m finding it hard to hope we’ll turn things around.

The time it took to write one thousand words: 17:43:30

Originally I was going to stop sooner, but I felt as though it would be better for me to keep going. I don’t think it helped the writing, however, as I dragged out things that probably didn’t need to be dragged out. Too long. However, with that being said, I think I made my point pretty clear. It’s one that, perhaps, needs to be wielded as though with intent to bludgeon someone, because not enough people seem to get the severity of the situation we’re in, or are incredibly unwilling to understand.

Written at home.