Yup. I think about this dread every day. It haunts me at 3 AM, and it even sabotages moments of sheer beauty, like watching a bumblebee ecstatically working a bright California poppy on a gorgeous Spring day, only to remember that insect populations are plummeting all over the planet due to pesticides and global heating, and especially bees—the tiny, industrious beings who pollinate our food and flowers alike, ensuring their proliferation and regeneration. Yet we STILL haven’t banned the neonicotine pesticides that are wiping out bees everywhere. And so forth… Our global market economy has become the cancer of the Earth, and that cancer is now terminal. All I can do is breathe, observe, and let go, knowing that everything is impermanent—even human and other forms of life on Earth, and that my actions are my only true possessions. And so I renew my vow, right here in the present moment, to live with integrity and compassion, to speak truth to power, and—right now—to VOTE for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, in order to restore decency and civility to our dying civilization for a little bit longer..