Thank you for your courage and honesty, Mary. I resonate entirely with your sentiments about our collective plight, spoiled rotten by unprecedented affluence and in deep, deep denial about the accelerating overheating and collapse of our biological support system, leaving us all stranded, with no place to run or hide. And you raise a vital but painful question: what do we tell our children?
I have no children of my own (fortunately!) but I have lovely nieces and grand-nieces and nephews. I do not have a satisfactory answer yet, but I do have a “go to” slogan to share with others, even if they are in deep denial. The slogan (which I designed for my own bumper sticker) is as follows: Grow Gardens; Grow Community; Grow Awareness. Each of these simple injunctions reinforces the other two, and the collective consequence can be greater local resilience and less dependence on our collapsing, fossil fuel and money- driven, and ecologically destructive global infrastructures. Pass it on.