One of the courses I'm taking this summer is a directed reading seminar on Planetary Health Ethics. It's painful to do the readings each week. Hard hitting academic theses on the causes and consequences of climate degradation and suffering. If you're interested in a flavour of why my mood is impacted intensely every Monday evening, take a gander at this scathing piece. The intention of the course is to prepare future public health professionals to understand the systems that have brought us to this point so that we are better equipped to dismantle them. Most of the time though I can't help feeling despair and overwhelm. This paper is the first place I've seen the word "capitalocene". I like it. Better than "anthropocene." It speaks to the system being the problem as opposed to an inherent evilness of humanity. It tells the truth about the oxymoronic notion of sustainable growth, and the perils of commodifying everything for the purpose of concentrating wealth. The 26 wealthiest men hold as much capital as 3.8 billion other people - half the human population of the planet. And that wealth could not have been accumulated without deliberately oppressing and actively harming the 3.8 billion. I simply can't wrap my head around this, and I don't even know where to begin undoing the mess.
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