Not in my backyard

What never changes is the will to never change

Sep 13

There’s microplastics in my brain 
Floodwater on my floor from Thwaites, 
Fire on the roof, but I don’t mind 
If I’m claimed by the rising tide—

There’s money in my bank account,
There’s A/C on my boiling face
My cup is full (the drink is laced)
And Uber brings the food around.

I hope the driver doesn’t drown;
But he’ll go down ere me, no doubt.
I’ll wear my fine white linen suit
I’ll be the last one to exeunt.

It’s better that the world’s cut short
Than not to have done motorsports.

Explanation

I wrote this poem thinking about my life in the north western hemisphere. The world seems really amazing from my perch in Toronto. Living here—with a decent job, friends, leisure time and hope for the future—could convince one to argue, à la Steven Pinker, that we are living in the best time in history. It is easy, also, to just try to enjoy life, be, i.e., carefree.

But doom looms. In the first stanza, the speaker notes that there are microplastics in their brain. Microplastics are tiny bits of plastic, decomposed bits of the plastic items we create and widely use in the West, modern flotsam the sea has returned to the land. They evaporate with water and are rained back down on the earth: microplastics have been found literally everywhere, even on the 8,000 meter peaks of the Himalayas. They enter your body through the water supply and, as you might have guessed, they are not healthy.

The speaker also mentions the Thwaites glacier. It is a piece of the West Antarctic ice sheet. I have heard scientists describe Thwaites as a cork that holds the ice sheet in place. Thwaites, regrettably, is rapidly breaking up. The cork has come off the bottle, and the bottle is voluminous enough to raise sea levels everywhere by some biblical number, perhaps as much as 30 meters.

However, in lines 3 and 4, the speaker begins to show their insouciance,

Fire on the roof, but I don’t mind 
If I’m claimed by the rising tide—

which they justify in stanza 2 with their access to money, AC, and food delivery. They have access to everything they need to ignore inclement climes.

In stanza 3, the speaker expresses a lazy hope the delivery driver does not drown in the aforementioned 30 meters of floodwater, but notes that the driver is likely to go down before them.

I am using these two figures—the delivery driver and the person ordering the food—as metonyms for the global south and north… sort of. Or just class divides, at least. The former, say, an immigrant to the north, family still back home, is more likely to be immediately and negatively affected by rising sea levels.

So, the north is aware that it might die, but it will die… later. Last. ‘Maybe they’ll figure out how to keep us alive before the northern hemisphere dies,’ is the vague hope of the north.

The south though, tough luck. It can’t be helped. We didn’t know better! Maybe the oil companies did. I don’t work for an oil company, though!—that seems to be the speaker’s position.

In the last couplet, the speaker argues that the whole world was a fair price for the invention of F1 cars and jet skis. Let me know in the comments if we’ve got any F1 fans!

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Lesson

The poem is nihilistic, sarcastic; it’s about somebody who believes that there is a problem but does nothing to fix it.

The poem is not about climate change per se. Rather, it is about a disconnect arising between one’s belief and one’s will. The speaker of the poem has contrived a number of copes for what they perceive as an issue that they can’t do anything to fix.

Maybe they think the problem is too hard for them to solve; maybe they simply lack the willpower to act.

A question: is it morally reprehensible for someone to see a problem and do nothing about it, when the problem was not caused by their own actions?

I think that people want to answer “hard yes” to this—if you don’t act, you’re a “bystander.”

But then that leads to a second question: should you try to fix something that you are essentially incapable of fixing, just because it is the right thing to do? Or should you instead A) fix a different, smaller problem that is actually within your power to address or B) just try to enjoy your life, given that there will always be another problem to solve?

Existential threats—climate change, nukey WW3s, pandemics, general AI—affect people asymmetrically, leading to more complicated moral questions, but also moral complacency. If people can properly ignore something, I don’t think it’s outrageous to say that they tend to.

Long term thinking is also rare and difficult: if something isn’t a problem now, why deal with it? Despite that proactivity is far less costly than reactivity. There is something inherently human about reacting to problems instead of planning for them.

I guess the lesson here is just to recognize the multifarious, complicated moral and psychological reactions people have to existential threats. Too big to deal with, too important to not. Science is like an oracle: we have a good idea of how we’re going to die. An omen for everyone has a pretty cursed effect on morality and psychology. It’s enough to turn someone into a pessimistic nihilist… or, a nihilistic pessimist…. Either.

On a personal note, I am very interested in “longtermism”—planning for a long human future. I am interested in it because I think the future of humanity is what gives literature power and meaning. If there are no future readers, what is the point of present writers?