Half a lifetime ago, I had a crappy copyediting job that meant I had to drive for 90 minutes through traffic across the sprawling concrete wasteland of Phoenix. The job itself was boring and soulless, and after spending another 90 minutes getting home in my AC-free beater, I would slam several Miller High Lifes while watching the honeybees gather goodies from the invasive London rocket in my backyard. I liked seeing the fuzzy little pollinators making trips back and forth between those tiny yellow flowers because it made my own problems feel less significant, compared to insects trying to survive on plants that didn’t belong in the desert and were themselves just trying to thrive in our overheated world. If the bees and the weeds were OK, I could be OK too.
Still, for anyone paying even a little attention, this era can feel extra-doomy. It’s not just a byproduct of social media, 24/7 cable news and our shared tendency to drowning in constant updates on the sorrows of the world. War, genocide, fascism and more terrible things seem to be trending upward, while our environment gradually loses the ability to sustain our species. In essence, the threat of global catastrophe has never been higher.
