Monday morning thoughts in the middle of a mass extinction.
Monday morning at Tempe station, Sydney Australia.
It is a sunny, cloud free morning. The air is still crispy while I walk to the station from where I pick the train from every morning. To get to the departing platforms I have to walk up and over a passenger bridge.
If I arrive a couple of minutes too early, I stand on top of the stairs of platform 2. From there I can see the train coming in, but until the train arrives, I let my gaze wander. Wander over the big towers of ‘Wooli Creek’ that make up the close horizon. I turn around to my left and let the sun kiss my face. Staring at the horizon or points in the far keeps my eyes and body relaxed and I set my intention for the day.
I turn back towards the platform and let my eyes wander off to the right. I can oversee the stations car park and beyond the car park I'm able to look down the road towards ‘Elwood’.
Cars are rushing over the bridge crossing the cooks river. Out of the Canterbury and Bankstown council, which is in harsh lock down, and off to work. Most, if not all of the cars only with one person in them. Only a driver.
A thought comes up.
“Crisis.”
Right now we talk about climate change, and we talk about the COVID pandemic.
One of those two will certainly extinguish us all and the other ‘only’ kill a small percentage. Yet, we treat one with more urgency than the other.
We talk about making vaccinations mandatory and stay at home to 'stop the spread’.
In the meantime we fail to make low carbon emissions mandatory.
We are all so busy.
Busy driving our car to work instead of taking public transport for example or driving with someone else.
“But we are in a global pandemic (and I might catch COVID).”, people might say or argue.
Yes, you are right.
We are in a global pandemic.
We have been in one for at least the past ten years, yet we have failed to take action.
With that I'm not trying to say that the suffering a lot of people experience during COVID isn't important or made up. But talking about pain and suffering is another topic to discuss.
I start to wonder, standing on top of the stairs at Tempe, why it isn't encouraged in our society to live a carbon low or neutral life?
To save carbon emission we often pay a premium price. Be it for electricity, electric cars or solar panels. And as I'm waiting to take the train to work I realise that we are often also paying with time. Time is an asset in our modern world we're short of anyway. It takes longer to get from A to B and losing that time cost us often money.
Money a made up good. Only existing in our imagination.
It was in that moment that I wondered why we're not redirecting that money towards paying for people’s time taking a train, funding and diminishing the premium prizes? It only exists in our imagination anyway… Would it not be good for the planet, good for us?
Governments say that they in the process of doing something. Well, not good enough and not fast enough. And you can't say ‘we do’, while you spend billions of dollars too fight the wrong wars...
My gaze shifted back to the platform. The train is coming into the station. I press play on my headphones to start the music and begin walking down the stairs to start another day, another week on this blue dot, flying through space in circles around a big star.
“How can we be so ignorant? What could we do different to take this at least as seriously as a global pandemic? Because it is one…”, are my last thoughts before stepping into the train and moving onto different thoughts.