Well, that’s not entirely true or altogether accurate. I’m not really the type who goes around hating myself or each and every member of the species homo Sapiens I happen to meet. I just hate what said species is has done (and is still doing) to the planet and I hope that the Earth can survive in spite of us. If She does, it will have been a close call. The life-ways of our species has warmed up the atmosphere in ways unmatched since the last mass extinction. And at a pace unrivaled.

But then, the Earth has made it through at least five other mass extinctions and lived to tell the tale. What’s really going to be sad is how many amazing non-human beings that will end up having to go along with us when we, the out-of-control, evolved-beyond-our-own-good yet ethically-underevolved carnivorous-hominid species, goes.

Being a human being myself, the only way I can live with myself is by not taking part in most of the actions that define people these days:

Number one, I never reproduced. (Making love to a woman for mutual pleasure is not the same as going through the motions and hoping to impregnate someone to bring another human into this critically overcrowded world.)

Secondly, for the past two decades I’ve refused to take part in animal-eating of any kind. No mammal meat nor fish nor fowl—nothing that had a heartbeat. As it turns out, it’s been the best way to live for climate-health as well.

Even while living in the heart of a “sportsman’s paradise” I didn’t fall prey to the lure of murdering Bambi for my dinner.

Years before I’d even heard of global warming or the notion of a climate crisis, I lived in the mountains miles beyond power and basically, learned to live without it. For 20 years, I was never tempted to run a generator and join the “modern world.” I could have done it, but where would it have gotten me. (I still don’t own a cell phone, in part to protest all those cell towers going up everywhere).

No one was even talking about climate change back then so, for those decades at least, I was able to live in my own little world like so many still do today.

Anyway, it helps me to know that my carbon footprint isn’t as gargantuan as it would be if I’d have lived in the “real world” for all those years. It makes me wonder, though, how those bigfoots can live with themselves.