Environmental Terrorist

The world is crying for your help. It wants you to save it. The icebergs are melting and the summer is getting longer and hotter. Everything is going belly up.

It isn’t the only one crying either. Al Gore is crying, about truth and inconvenience and stuff. The bin men are crying too, because you’ve put a bottle top in to recycle when that just isn’t possible. And the government are crying because they think it will get them votes.

Everyone is crying that the world need saving, the world is in danger, the world is getting hotter and will explode into a million, billion pieces tomorrow if you don’t stop driving RIGHT NOW!

But I’m staying dry-eyed. Because I don’t care.

Don’t take this as a lack of ignorance on my part. I’ve researched some things and watched that documentary people keep going on about. A rational part of my mind tells me that recycling is probably a good idea. But an even larger part of it thinks about sandwiches and shiny things, and it is this side that wins. Every damn time.

Part of the reason is that global warming isn’t an immediate threat to me. I can’t see species of butterfly dying in front of me. I’m too far to see the melting icecaps. And when the hot weather rolls out, I’m thinking about laying in the park with an ice cream instead of seeing it as the world-ending threat that it is supposed to be.

Also, I’m young and therefore rebellious. Everyone is crying to save the world, so I’m taking the opposite stance. I don’t save the world! I’m an environmental terrorist.

Whilst this may conjure images of a Captain Planet villain, what it mainly entails is running around with a bag of cans and plastic and putting it in people’s (heaven forbid) green bins. Just to spite them.

This is because I am young and I am right. Even if every other person everywhere else tells me the world needs saving, they are wrong. The only right people are those that agree with me, and they will only stay right as long as they think everything I think. It’s a nice easy way to see the world.

Sure, maybe the world dies a bit, but until I can watch an ice-cube melt in a second simply by holding it outside, I don’t believe the world is in any danger.

The fact that I will eventually inherit this (probably seriously damaged) world doesn’t really occur to me, the same way that when I drunkenly punch a hole in the wall of my house it doesn’t occur that I will inherit it when my parents die. No, instead I just carry on my drunken wreaking spree.

It’ll only be when I’m older and wiser, when I stand at the cracked wall and tut. The whole house will now be structurally unsound because of my actions, and I’ll wish I’d cared way back then. I may even invent a time machine to kill myself, thus stopping myself punching the wall, but also creating a time paradox at the same time.

And in the same way, there I’ll be in the future, living in a boat because 90% of Earth is underwater, wishing that I’d just listened to everyone else and recycled my plastic (but not bottle tops) and my tins and my paper. Then, maybe, the world would be alive and well, and not crying itself to sleep every night.

But until then, I’m young, and there are sandwiches and shiny objects to look forward to.

:P

PS. The following are not true: I don’t put cans into people’s bins, I don’t drunkenly punch holes in walls when drunk, and I would never risk a time paradox to try and kill myself in the past.

PPS. The following IS true: I care more about sandwiches and shiny objects than global warming.