…The people who might most benefit from this book (The Last Resort)—those who have bought into the myth of paradise with an ocean view, deleterious impact be damned, and have the means to regularly experience a version of it—don't want their illusions destroyed. If they were to receive The Last Resort as, say, a (passive-aggressive) birthday gift, they might well immediately fling it into the giveaway bin.
I don't say this to condemn those who hesitate to listen to the climate Cassandras among us, or who at any rate fail to act on warnings to desist from this or that treasured activity. I also choose to ignore many inconvenient truths, and the sacrifices that they should inspire but that would dampen my own pleasure in living: Forswearing fancy beach resorts just happens to be no skin off my sun-blistered back. If I can't help feeling that Stodola tries to have it both ways, which I read as a kind of hypocrisy, the reason I find it hard to swallow is that I so often do the same.
Or, rather, we all share in the hypocrisy, save for those few Earth angels who live off the grid and use no plastics. If we all paid attention to what is happening to the planet in the Anthropocene, we'd be running around with our heads on fire. Instead, we churn on in our lives, ordering stuff for next-day delivery when we could shop locally, driving to the grocery store only half a mile away instead of biking, and flipping the radio dial when another instance of extreme weather strikes, because we just can't bear what another fire or hurricane portends. All the while, we're nagged by conscience, which slowly drags our spirits down. Perhaps we need a nice beach vacation to recover! And so we go on, with our tidal cycles of unbearable guilt and panicked complicity, in and out, just like the ocean, where we sit and watch the sunset in our near-nakedness, drinking mai tais, in order to forget all the ways we are failing the Earth, in our vicious circularity, in our infinite regress.
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