Do you want it darker?

The First World’s darkest fantasy: A return to normal.

The vagaries of death

A defence budget measures our devotion to the notion that the solution to violence is more violence. Giving us: “Death by government.” Now, a new and related term: “Death by climate change.”

COP26

From a biological perspective, our needs are modest and few. If we knew enough to share, life would be effulgent, Edenic, easy. But, dang it, we don’t and it isn’t. In Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge likened humans to “pigs in a crowded sty, jostling and shoving to bury their snouts in the trough; until one of them momentarily lifts his snout upwards in the air, in so doing expressing the hope of all enlightenment to come; breaking off from his guzzling to point with his lifted snout to where the angels and archangels gather round God’s throne.”

Crisis

We are at a moment of planetary crisis. The word “crisis” derives from the Greek word for decision. In every crisis there is an opportunity. The greater the crisis, the greater the opportunity.

Word du jour

The last seven months or so have seen a steady uptick in the deployment of a word used to describe the nearly incomprehensible mess we’ve created for ourselves and our children: ecocide.