21 Comments
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Sarah Quinn's avatar

Brilliant, powerful and terrifying. Thank you Mary. This is the wake up call that we all desperately need.

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Jack McGowan's avatar

what she said!

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Waldo Littlefield's avatar

100% Agree. And it is the Billionaire Hedge Funds control 85% of the wealth of the free world. And they fund both political parties. And the politicians kowtow to them. Things won't change until we dump the career politicians in both political parties.

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Dain Bramage's avatar

Mary, your intelligence and eloquence are simply incredible. What a powerful, and terrifying, piece. This should be mandatory reading for Congress. You put together an essay that serves as an emergency klaxon blaring out for anyone with the moral terpitude to actually care about more than just their own wallet. Bravo! Very well done! Thank you!

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Sharon Vollett's avatar

This is so well done and written it needs to go viral. This is clear and succinct. Everyone should see this. Thank you so much.

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Gayle chapin's avatar

Thanks Mary! I totally agree.

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Tom Hale's avatar

Mary, your’s is the first Substack I read each morning. Your posts are smart, succinct, and pithy! This one is excellent and of such critical importance. I probably won’t see the impending ecological collapse. My children might well live it, my grand children will certainly suffer for it. Thank goodness you are able to see and speak to this impending disaster! As Brian Cox has observed, if we destroy intelligent life on earth, it will quite likely end intelligent life in the Milky Way Galaxy if not in the entire universe! We must not let that happen!

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Anne DeLaney MD's avatar

So very true! Thank you! I recommend reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s book “The Ministry for the Future” for a brilliant work of fiction about how all of the might play out, and what we owe to future generations.

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Cheryl Doran Girard's avatar

Well done, Mary. As always, my thoughts are with the frightening future forecast for the generations we’ve sentenced to an unstable, dying planet.

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Jay Wilson's avatar

Great post — it reads like the rough draft of future headlines. It pairs almost too neatly with my MAGA Mars Exodus piece: when you strip the present for parts, you end up with a movement whose big idea is leaving the planet instead of fixing it. Sustainability is a promise to the future; MAGA’s already trying to catch the next shuttle out.

https://jaywilson1.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-maga-exit-strategy?r=10sd39

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John Helbig's avatar

I agree Brilliant, Powerful and Terrifying! You have a huge ability to present in written creativity. I’ve been saying for many years, I’m 86 years old. During my early years in collage I took a class on archaeology. The subject captured me, but I stayed with my course toward an engineering degree. No more for now .. thank you

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James's avatar

The end of paragraph 14 is missing...

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Abigail's avatar

This one was worth the wait! Lucid and forceful.

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Judy Fjell's avatar

Thank you, Mary! This is nothing but TRUTH TRUTH TRUTH. Oh how I wish people would wake up. 😳

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Kelly's avatar

Thank you. They don’t care because they probably won’t be here for the final results. Our kids and their kids and sadly more kids will have to suffer.

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Gary R Simonds's avatar

Wow. Great piece. Another tragic sequela of the trump/GOP/oligarch regime: near total inattention to this catastrophic scenario—not to mention an acceleration into the environmental abyss. We are in big trouble. Cowards, traitors, and greedy opportunists occupy all branches of our government. Don't count on them to even try to nudge in a better direction. And the all-powerful almighty oligarchs believe they can continue to rape the planet to its exhaustion and then hide in their deep chasm lairs until it's over, until we are all gone. But what will be left when their descendants finally return to surface?

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Gordon's avatar

Highly recommended, this is a lovely, rigorously scientific, and achingly humane disquisition regarding our current most, urgent crisis, amply seasoned with poetic wonder, compassion, and hope:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/human-nature-nine-ways-to-feel-about-our-changing-planet-kate-marvel/f6c17e59ad57d715

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