At twenty-one years old, I am starting to feel a bit like that crazy old guy with the sign that reads: “The end is near”.

    The more I go to the beach, check out the everglades, read the news, and reflect on the rising temperatures, the more I realize that we’ve hit the alarm clock of environmental consciousness and slept right through those crucial moments when we should have woken up. Now we find ourselves snapping into awareness, feeling groggy and a little hung over, and running like hell to catch the bus. We're gazing optimistically down the road towards what we hope is an oncoming opportunity, and resolutely ignoring the fact that, in all probability, it has long since flown by.

    I hate to preach doom and disaster. If you all knew me personally, you’d realize that I’m rather cheery. But I’m really starting to get the feeling that we have passed the point at which our environmental consumption had some sort of controllable momentum, and that we are now tumbling towards a bitter end. Sure, a few of us are doing their fair share, and even fewer of us are trying to pick up the slack on behalf of the unworldly, but I can’t imagine that the efforts of a handful would be enough to remediate the damage done.

    This picture is a great example of what I mean. It is entirely revolting to think that the average large seabird could ingest a half a pound of man-made plastic bits in its lifetime. To think that we can prevent this by happily recycling our plastic bags is totally irrelevant; it’s already too far-gone to consider preventing.

    I mean, it’s important, certainly, to recycle and prevent further contamination, but Earth is so screwed up already that it isn’t going to help a whole lot. There is already a sea of little plastic bits floating around out there, clogging the inner-workings of a billion seabirds. The populations are, beyond a doubt, suffering immense side effects from our utter stupidity. And seabirds are surely not the only creatures affected by this, but merely a simple indicator species of a much deeper, lurking issue. I’m starting to think that it’s already too late for much of the world’s life forms.

    Now, having depressingly said all of that, and feeling pretty thoroughly useless, I’d also like to point out that we could still TRY to fix this mess. Nothing is stopping us from getting out there and scooping up the tons of plastic debris floating around the ocean.

    What we need to do is try to wake people up to the fact that we aren’t slowly degrading the environment, but instead that we have already punched it around for a while, and when it was on its knees, kicked it in its ribs. The world is bleeding out. People need to get this picture. For the sake of her, go tell someone that mother earth is about to have her life support turned off.

    In my own heart, I believe we have put things so far out of natural balance that they will never be close to the way they were, but at least we can, through awareness and endeavor, try not to muck things up any further. Hopefully we go about fixing what we can, as atonement for what we cannot.