I’m sorry, but again I must absolutely disagree.

If the original writer were saying, “Yes, let’s try as hard as he can to prevent or mitigate the problem, and after that point we must learn to be philosophical about it,” sure, I would agree. But they aren’t.

There’s a terrible crime being committed right now, and basically nothing is being done about it. Our mother Earth is being beaten and raped by a gang of thugs, and to say “How sublime it all is” is sickening.

Imagine the indignities that were being inflicted on our biosphere over decades were in fact being inflicted on the body of a child. Just the thought is so awful I hasten to bring it up! If that happened and someone said how sublime it was, they’d be shunned by society.

And yet literally billions of children will be negatively affected by climate change, and a lot of them will simply die in horrible ways. People

And the worst of it is that most of the damage has not yet happened. That’s right — if we stopped producing carbon right now, we’d avoid nearly all the consequences.

But as long as everyone’s resigned to this already happening, we will continue to sink into the abyss.

There appear to be two leading schools of thought:

• “Grinning psychopaths”: Scientists are lying to us, pollution is good, climate change is not a thing, Trump is God-Emperor.
• “The enlightened”: The planet is doomed and we might as well be resigned to it, all is transitory, OM.

Both of these are delusional, death-oriented philosophies.

They are a slap in the face to the youngest of us, to all non-human species, to indigenous peoples everywhere, to the poorest fifty percent of humanity — those who are going to bear the brunt of humanity’s wanton refusal to act.

I myself subscribe to the Greta Thunberg school of thought that we have to refuse to accept these death stories and instead transform society completely from head to toe.

Eric Demore is literally saying that it’s time to send Mother Earth to the hospice — that this is it, no better world is possible and we should learn to accept our doom.

No! A better world is possible. We haven’t even started to fight, and he’s already advocating giving up — sending Boxer to the knackers or slipping Mother an overdose.

And then you write:

There is something gentle and loving about approaching these times in the same way one would a terminally ill person.

No young person would ever say this. Young people hope for the future. They want it to be, if not a better place, at least a place they can live in in some sort of grace and comfort — a hope that they might have children, or ideas, or some continuity of their purpose, some reason to live. Such a belief, that these times are terminal — this belief would rob them of all that.

Who would so blithely give up the hope of a full life for all of our young people — and all the creatures who cannot speak for themselves?

And more — Gaia is not a “terminally ill person” but a healthy body being systematically beaten to death by criminals.

Most of the planet is still basically whole. We could stop now and work at fixing the damage and in a few centuries the worst parts would be like a bad dream. But we aren’t doing it, and the reason is that our leaders and our “captains of industry” are corrupt, short-sighted and in many cases out-and-out psychopaths, not that the Earth is naturally moribund. We could change this.

To treat an ongoing preventable murder as if it were death by natural causes is the very definition of depraved indifference, and in no way “gentle and loving”.