The Living Dead

Every Global Change lecture I go through makes me come out a little more distraught about the future of this planet. Every time we are reminded of how little there is that's left and yet so few of us are trying to protect it. How some can't see its worth even when you lay it out to them in 10 digit values with dollar signs of all kinds. How they just gasp when you show them the percentage losses, and then they turn around and let it slip away from their minds...

Today I was told that Singapore's forests are living dead. That even though what's left is being protected, the trees will spill out their fruits but no birds or bees will be here to disperse the life they could bring. The forests will just die, slowly, with no predecessors... I'm not really knowledgeable about this but I wonder if it's really true. That our forests are just living, waiting to die?

And our shores, disappearing, because the losses aren't as obvious as trees being destroyed. Everything is hidden under a blanket of blue, the blankets over our eyes as we go ahead with reclaimation, development... destruction.

The shrinking ecosystems everywhere.. how can we stop it from happening? How can we convince an entire world of what it means to them to keep these beautiful parts of the Earth? How can we convince those who never touched a flower in its crib or never looked at the skies and realise they can't see the stars anymore? That all around them is concrete, plaster, metal rising into the sky and spreading over the land faster than an epidemic.

And as we grow richer, we become sadder. because we're losing something, something we innately love. We love reading about it, seeing pictures of it, going to far away places to experience it. But we don't love having to try to save it. We maintain a strange mindset that it will just be there for us and every extinction that occurs goes unnoticed in our tiny little world surrounded by concrete walls. Not hearing, not seeing, not happening.

But it is happening. And I wish the small things people do make an effort to try to help in were more apparent to those that close their eyes and sleep their way through the rest of their lives on this crumbling, withering world.

I wish there was something I could do.