How to End the End — #Plantist

It just dawned on me. The imminent collapse of what keeps us alive will also end my own future.

I have trouble breathing. I lie down, close my eyes, and think to myself.

Nothing I remember exists in the past.

My memories need a future to keep existing.

If the future ends, the memories end, and when they end the moments in time are not only lost forever.

They are uncreated.

If there is no future, then everything that ever happened in my life actually never did.

It circles in my head.

Every person who ever wanted something assumed without knowing it that the world would continue long enough to matter.

Every thing ever made, ever written, ever built, was made for someone with a future.

Every person who ever suffered through something believed, without quite knowing it, that it would mean something later.

And if there is no later, it didn't.

I feel my heart beating.

Everyone alive right now is living inside an assumption they have never once thought to question.

They are building on a foundation they don't know is already falling apart.

Parents ask their children what they want to be. They are told that if they work hard enough the world will be there for them. The children don't know that the adults in the room are working from a map that no longer exists.

Everyone is saving for a future they won't reach.

Everyone is building a career across decades that won't complete.

Everyone is planting something they believed they would eventually sit beneath.

Hope itself. Which was never anything more than the assumption that there would be a future.

I feel sick.

But then something shifts.

The future isn't gone. Not entirely. Not yet.

I lie still and let that settle.

If the memories need a future to exist, then saving the future saves everything that ever happened.

Every moment ever lived. Every person who ever suffered through something. Every child ever told the world would be there for them.

It can still be true.

I think about what is actually killing it.

Not slowly. Not abstractly. The specific thing, the measurable thing, the thing with a number attached to it.

The land.

The amount of land required to grow food for the animals people eat now occupies an area the size of Africa and India combined.

I already knew this without knowing I knew it.

Everything that keeps us alive needs that land back.

There is no policy that moves in time. No treaty. No technology we could build fast enough.

But then I think about how anything has ever actually changed.

Not through institutions.

Through people. Person to person, until the new thing is simply what people do.

Six hundred million people already don't eat animals.

That number can move.

That number, moving, gives the land back.

The land, returning, gives the future back.

The future, intact, means everything that ever happened still did.

I open my eyes.