Love is Death

Love miles. I had never considered them before. My friend Chris wrote a great opinion piece about the damaging impacts of flying this week. Flying is bad, we all know it. Actually we don't all know it. And certainly the elites don't care.

But then there are the love miles involved. We all have families scattered around the world. This is the result of Colonialism and its clever rebranding, the Global Economy. So to show our love (and apparent hate of the planet) to our families we travel to Australia, India, US, Canada, Antarctica and anywhere we're holding a family gathering. My family, hundreds of people easily wants to meet every year or so. They even have a clever acronym for it: GOM.

I won't be attending.

There are also our friends who decide to get married in Cuba or the Dominican Republic. How could you not go? Don't you love them? So our relationships and the pressures involved in them are even feeding the destruction of the planet at our tiny hands.

I can't tell them that it's precisely because I love them that I won't be going. I just say I won't be going. We all have choices after all. You don't tell others how to live.

How many of our parents, extremely privileged in their old age, have their to do lists before they die? I know many. The Galapagos Islands, China, Easter Island, New Zealand, South Africa. The list grows every day as does the death toll from climate change.

How do you talk to people about this? Tied to love, death is the other half of the coin of flying, of these international lives. How can we recognize this?

Are humans just assuming the role of the balancing force of life? Death must come with life after all. Is our job to destroy the planet? To turn it back into merely a rock in the cold universe. Or more likely to die trying. Would another species have taken this on if we had chosen to just be.

These thoughts keep me up at night. But I won't be flying anymore. So don't bother to invite me to your wedding in Bermuda please.