Delving deep

My thesis is on climate change and the deeper I delve into it, the more despair I feel. I didn't realise that humankind had known that we were causing global warming a few decades before I was even born. And the international community has not achieved much in mitigating climate change. I now experience what Naomi Klein described in her book This Changes Everything as "pre-loss":

"At some point about seven years ago, I realized that I had become so convinced that we were headed toward a grim ecological collapse that I was losing my capacity to enjoy my time in nature. The more beautiful and striking the experience, the more I found myself grieving its inevitable loss — like someone unable to fall in love because she can't stop imagining the inevitable heartbreak.


Looking out at an ocean bay on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, a place teeming with life, I would suddenly picture it barren — the eagles, herons, seals, and otters, all gone. I covered the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico; for two years after, I couldn't look at any body of water without imagining it in oil. Sunsets were particularly difficult; the pink glow on the waves looked too much like petroleum sheen.And once, while grilling a beautiful piece of fresh sockeye salmon, I caught myself imagining how, as a wizened old women, I would describe this extraordinary fish — its electric color, its jeweled texture — to a child living in a world where these wild creatures have disappeared.
I called my morbid habit 'pre-loss', a variation on 'pre-crimes' commited in the movie Minority Report."

I read the book a few years ago but it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I experienced pre-loss in full force. During my usual browsing of my Twitter feed, I saw a video of an emaciated polar bear on an iceless land. I did not stop to watch it. I know polar bears are having a hard time due to the retreating ice caused my global warming; I did not need to see it. After that I watched a nature documentary and it showed a mother polar bear and her cubs prowling the vast expanse of the ice land in the Arctic. All of a sudden, tears started to well in my eyes and flowed down my cheeks. A sense of great loss overcame me when I thought of how I would not be able to see the mother polar bear and her cubs roaming an ice covered land. It took me a while to calm down. I do not want this world to lose its current wildlife due to the whims of a minority but powerful group of humans.