CINEMATIC EPIC ,

“In a brutally biologically understanding of climate change, the idea that climate change is a problem for the species easily slips into the idea that it’s a problem of the species. Many neo-Malthusians from across the political spectrum hand-wring about overpopulation as the first frontier to solving climate change. We’ve won a pyrrhic evolutionary victory, we’ve become so successful as a species that our destructive inclinations to over-breed, over-produce and over-consume will ultimately destroy our environment, and that of millions of other species besides. It is the solemn task of civilisation to collectively unshackle humanity from its biological destiny – to destroy any ecosystem unfortunate enough to host it. It’s a view popular in ‘deep ecology’, which that all life has value irrespective of its usefulness to human beings. So far, so unobjectionable. But it often comes buoyed with outrage at the arrogance of humanity to plunge us into a mass extinction to satisfy its own monumental cravings. It has the charm of noble self-sacrifice, but little analysis of the emergence of the problem – not from humans generally, but from a particular profit-driven, extractive models of ownership under an economic system which immiserates billions of their number to gild the lives of a chosen few. No, in this vision all humans are equally charged with the original sin of existing, feeding, breeding. In the funhouse mirror of deep ecology, the imperative question of our age – what must be done about climate change? – warps into a much more sinister one: what must be done about humans? In finding an answer, deep ecology reliably finds common cause with the far right, that those (conveniently non-white) people on the frontlines of the crisis should be allowed to die off. Migrant solidarity and aid relief might feel noble, but such indulgences are a dereliction of your deeper duty towards the future of this planet. Why these specific people should be sacrificed is dismissed as morally irrelevant in the face of an existential threat. Over-fecund black and brown bodies are first on the chopping block for the good of a humanity which, despite its apparent universals, suddenly does not include them.”

We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.