STREETVIEW // Hope Springs Eternal (Until It Doesn’t)
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
The environmental crisis is one of a few known existential threats that could wipe out our species forever. How can we navigate the potential homeostasis that results from thinking that our every action, or lack of action, makes us complicit in the climate carnage that future humans may need to wade through?
Philadelphian Nathaniel Popkin, in his new book To Reach the Spring, writes that “by driving and flying and grilling and logging and buying and showering and shipping and tweeting away, we are Allies and we are the Axis both, in constant blasé warfare that’s leaving us paralyzed at the edge of certain apocalypse.”
Throughout the book, he compiles some of the statistics and stories that many of us know well, and it’s on one particular point, our rigged economic system, that he’s most convincing, which is exactly why the book doesn’t exactly leave one hopeful. The full-out assault on the EPA, for instance, that occurred between 2016 and 2020 may be coming to an end, but lobbyists continue to have more power than the people, no matter who is in the White House, and people are going to keep grilling and showering and shipping—living, in other words.
For full text and images, consider reading RQ in print, on a Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through your window, coffee in hand, and nary a phone alert within sight or in earshot… just fine words, fine design, and the opportunity to make a stitch in time. // Subscribe or buy a single issue today. // Print is dead. Long live print. //