A Valentine to the Future

On Valentine’s Day I am thinking of love, and I’m worried about consumption. Love because it’s the foundation of existence, what drives us to do what we do. Consumption because it will lead to our demise, an addiction that will alter life as we know it. And it is everywhere in the world around us. 

For the past 40 years I’ve worked as a journalist on topics ranging from pesticide poisoning in Mexico to gunrunning in Africa. I’ve revealed pieces of truth lurking in dark corners, and battled the frustrations of dead ends and denial. I have been harassed, fired, accused of exaggeration, and hounded by people who never wanted to see my stories see the light of day. Through the hard times I have sometimes thought about leaving journalism, especially as the modern digital age has devastated and squeezed local reporting to the point that few local voices are heard anymore. The media is being attacked like never before. Why would anyone want to do this? 

But this week, the answers came to me from two young aspiring student journalists who contacted me separately, asking about stories I had worked on decades ago. They want to know how have things changed, and how they could get involved in journalism. Stay true to yourself I said, tell a good story, and get out and meet the people you are reporting on. We may live in the millisecond world of Twitter, a digital diaspora seemingly devoid of context. But journalists will always have a market for stories that tell a good tale, a yarn people can relate to. The youth of the world will inherit our environmental mess, a crisis that’s greater than ever. But they are smarter than I was at their age, and we must help them tell the stories in the future. For all of us. 

Which gets me back to my thoughts of the day. I love what I do because I believe in it. I work on environmental stories because they matter, to my kids, the people I love, for my hound dog who is my faithful companion. Love really is about truth. Though journalists get dinged for getting things wrong, most really are trying their best to get it right. In a time of fake news and political puffery, I believe even more in the mission of the media. We are the message, and we have an obligation to report the facts as they are. 

And consumption? Well that is the driving force of what’s afflicting our future. We live in a nation that consumes a quarter of the world’s resources, with a fraction of the population. At some point in the not-too-distant future, Mother Earth will be unable to sustain it. The science is clear; fisheries are rapidly being depleted, animals and insects are dying off in record amounts, forests are withering, our rivers and groundwater continue to be polluted by chemicals that put us all at risk. 

But it is climate change that will push us all over the edge. We are already seeing what’s in store. As our political leaders feed us false hopes of a consumer-driven future, we face a destructive path if we don’t change. We live in the petri dish called Earth. We should learn from Native Americans who understood that long before Europeans came: respect Mother Nature or suffer the consequences. The increasing droughts, floods, fires, melting glaciers and oceans of plastic are stark reminders they are right. 

Can we change? Absolutely. We have the solutions, the technology to get us out of the carbon-burning hell we are leaving for future generations. But we won’t change without the political will to get there. At some point, we will have no choice. It will be too late for millions of coastal residents and populations who lack the economic resources to weather the impending disaster. 

Call me old school, but the world has proved we were right in our protests of the 60s. Embrace love and consume less on this Valentine’s Day. Find a way to focus on your passions while leaving a lighter footprint on the earth. We owe our kids no less.