A ring called 'irreversible and catastrophic environmental damage'.

(Not just climate change, either -- though that's a big part of it. Also everything from microplastics to overfishing.)

No-one was prepared for the Starlink re-entry events. Humanity had been so busy looking outwards, but had failed to look upwards. From 2035, they had to learn to accept the regular and devastating reentry of this fleet of miniature satellites. Molten fire would rain from the sky, multiple times per day at any time or place. Many cities were destroyed during this period, with too many deaths to count.

The forgotten stove backburner is still on, but we left the house

Stop paying attention so much. Like, don't stick your head in the sand, but take a break from news for a while.

I went on a cruise last year and the news detox was absolutely amazing for my mental health. Someone read a headline about Trump doing something stupid and I was like, who cares? There's literally nothing we can do about it, especially from the middle of the Mediterranean.

And when I got home, I realized it's the same here. I feel like I need to know what's going on in the world, but if I can't make a difference, why would I bring more stress into my life? I just come out feeling worse, for humanity, for my own inaction, for the futility of goodness.

You don't need to know the intricacies of geopolitics, the price of oil, if the Strait is open, or even who the president is to have a positive effect on your community.

Go for a walk and meet your neighbors. Some might be shitheads but you'll be a better person for getting to know them.

Volunteer work can also reignite your pilot light of hope. I worked at a shelter and the other volunteers showed me the goodness in humanity.

There's still a lot of good out there. Don't let the news convince you it's a lost cause.

My profession has already largely disappeared thanks to AI. I’m not alone, either. Thousands of people are getting laid off each week. The surveillance is a fringe benefit compared to the savings that billionaires can achieve by replacing humans with machines.

It should be our savings, btw. Workers built every last bit of tech that is enabling this, billionaires just stole it.

we're gonna let them

1. How many islands do you think there are in the mediterranean?
2. How many of those are uninhabited? (And why?)
3. Do you realise how close you are to bigger nations there? It's not that isolated there.

Except rising sea levels

Yup. If the infinite growth machine can't make a profit fixing climate change, it simply won't be fixed.

No amount of home recycling, power saving, water reduction, etc. you can do will offset the pollution generated by companies in the pursuit of money.

Polycrisis! I CHOOSE YOU!!

Just wait until we hit the ocean acidification tipping point where it becomes chemically impossible for certain tiny creatures at the base of the food chain to form calcium-based hard shells.

The whole ocean won't hit that point all at the same time, but once we get close, it will happen very rapidly, affecting most of the oceans in the world within a few years. Entire ocean ecosystems will rapidly collapse when the bottom of the food chain falls out from under them. Already-strained fisheries will suddenly run completely out of fish, quickly driving the last few populations to extinction. But that's only the tip of the iceberg for our problems. Those tiny organisms have a profound impact on the entire world's climate and weather patterns, as well as being a huge part of the carbon cycle. When the oceans die, the effects felt on land will be extreme. And it will drastically accelerate carbon accumulation and climate change -- those calcium-based hard shells are calcium carbonate, which incorporate carbon and often end up sequestering it on the sea floor when the creature dies, where it could stay locked away for millions to billions of years. Without them removing carbon from circulation, climate change will get far worse and accelerate much faster (which, in turn, makes ocean acidification worse, so there's no going back once we hit that tipping point).

I like those odds!