Because there are still butterflies

I think I have finally stopped arguing with the dashboard. For years I kept driving while the warning lights blinked at me. Energy. Climate. Debt. Growth. Another light. Another little red symbol. Another expert telling us not to worry because somebody somewhere was working on a better battery. So we kept driving.

We changed presidents. Changed lightbulbs. Bought reusable grocery bags. Put solar panels on roofs and windmills on ridges and congratulated ourselves for producing electricity without asking nearly enough questions about the enormous industrial civilization required to manufacture all the stuff producing it. Meanwhile, we kept building bigger houses, bigger trucks, bigger data centers, bigger expectations. Eight billion people wanting refrigerators and air conditioning and strawberries in January, and who the hell can blame them?

That’s the part nobody wants to talk about. I don’t blame people for wanting a comfortable life. I like mine. I like flipping a switch and having lights come on. I like hot water. Refrigeration. My car. My phone. Coffee that traveled farther to reach my kitchen than most people travel on vacation. I’m not standing outside civilization throwing rocks at it. I’m sitting inside it with everybody else.

That’s where radical acceptance begins for me. Not with guilt. Not with optimism. Not with another fucking list of ten things I can personally do to save the planet before breakfast. Just this: This is the world we actually built.

It runs on enormous quantities of energy. It requires extraction. It requires growth to keep an economy built around growth from choking on itself. And it exists on a finite planet that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about our economic models. Those things can all be true at once. That’s the dashboard. And radical acceptance means I finally quit putting electrical tape over the warning lights.

I don’t know exactly what happens next. Maybe we’re clever enough to soften the landing. Maybe technology buys us more time. Maybe we learn to live with less because we choose to. Maybe we live with less because eventually there isn’t another choice. Probably some messy combination of all of it.

But I no longer need to believe somebody is coming to fix everything in order to get out of bed in the morning. Strangely, that’s been freeing. Because once I stopped demanding a happy ending, I started noticing the life that is still happening before the ending has even been written.

The monarch on the zinnia. Onions pulled out of Wisconsin dirt. Cows talking somewhere below the ridge before sunrise. A stranger sleeping safely in one of my little cabins. A cold beer. A warm body. A ridiculous conversation. August slipping toward September whether the Dow goes up or down.

None of those things fixes anything. That’s precisely the point.

Maybe radical acceptance at this stage of civilization isn’t crawling into a bunker. Maybe it’s sitting down beside this enormous, beautiful, wounded, energy-hungry world and saying, “Well hell. I guess we’re in this together.”

And then planting the damn flowers anyway. Not because they’ll save the world.

Because there are still butterflies.