One of the main threads through my life has been trying to protect Mother Earth and all of us from the consequences of extracting, transport and burning fossil fuels. Refusing to have a car. Organizing as an Action Lead in the Keystone Pledge of Resistance and against the Dakota Access pipeline. Actions at banks to defund fossil fuel projects. Vigils, marches, prayers.

While almost everyone else is freaking out about gasoline supplies and prices from the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline, I’m thinking, “cool“.

Not that I am advocating for it, but could cyber attacks accomplish what we have not been willing to do? Any argument about the harmful consequences of the abrupt loss of fossil fuel supplies cannot be valid, when the alternative is the annihilation of all life on earth if we stay on the current course.

Those in industrial societies cannot seem to imagine not having readily available and inexpensive supplies of fossil fuels. They will do, have done, pretty much anything to preserve their fossil fuel lifestyles. Including recklessly extracting fossil fuels, destroying water supplies in the process, wantonly burning non-renewable fossil fuels, ignoring treaties and Indigenous rights, contributing to the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous relatives, waging war, criminalizing protest and otherwise destroying our earthly home.

The pandemic has forced us to recognize the fragility of our economic, energy, healthcare, education, social and political systems. It has also provided the time, and opportunity, to re-evaluate our lives. To question things like toiling for hours in unsafe settings to earn poverty level wages.

As the spread of the pandemic begins to come under some kind of control in various parts of the world, people want to return to the pre-pandemic “normal”. They want to return earlier than medically recommended, which will extend the length of time the virus is with us. And if we don’t get everyone around the world vaccinated, we won’t eradicate the virus.

Having seen the fragility of our institutions, will we voluntarily work to build a better way? It seems not, yet, as the public clamors for a return to “normal”. Anxiously awaits the resumption of the flow of oil through the Colonial Pipeline.

Too much damage has been done, continues to be done to our current institutions. We won’t make much of a recovery because the systems we count on will not, can not, completely recover. Now is the time to envision and build better communities. I’ve been learning about and participating in Mutual Aid communities as an alternative.

I’m reminded of a story a friend recently told me. When someone said, “”hey, if no one tells you, I’m very proud of what you do for the community” and I’m like “hold on hold on. Just realize that everything I do is to further the replacing of the state and destroying western civilization and any remnants of it for future generations.” He says “I know and love that. Carry on.”