Green

"I don't object, of course, to cutting wood for necessity, but why destroy the forests?  The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe.  Millions of trees have perished.  The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated, the rivers are shrinking, many beautiful landscapes are gone forever.  And why?  Because men are too lazy and too stupid to bend down and pick up fuel from the ground...Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished.  The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day...When I pass forests that I have preserved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young plantations set out with my own hands, I feel as if I have had some small share in improving the climate.  If mankind is happy a thousand years from now I will have been a little bit responsible for their happiness."

All this was known in 1898, when Chekhov gave that great speech to Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya.  So why does it have to be re-learned every year?  Or not learned.  The new government of Brazil is determined to destroy the Amazon rain forest, for some reason known only to its mini-Mussolini.  The national parks of the United States have fallen into the hands of one deliriously corrupt Interior secretary after another.  The vortex of plastic trash in the Pacific is larger than some countries.  The Middle East is turning to desert, wildfires alternate with floods, "storms of the century" come every five years, millions of humans will soon be displaced by rising seas, the frogs and the bees are trying to tell us something.  The United States is very good at working itself into a frenzy over nothing, from the witch trials of colonial Massachusetts to the recurring anti-immigrant panics, the Red Scare, the day-care lunacy of the 1980s, and every phobia you can name, but the thought of doing anything about climate change is yawned away.  On days like this I find myself agreeing with Kurt Vonnegut, that humans are an infection and earth's immune system is marshalling against us.  Did Astrov live in vain?