Depressing

THE LADY is in her early forties, a divorced mother of three. She is a climate scientist with a plethora of advanced degrees in sundry related sciences from among the world's most prestigious universities. She spends a considerable amount of time scuba diving among coral reefs, taking measurements, analyzing, calculating. She measures the rate at which coral reefs are vanishing, and the percentage already vanished. She measures the amount of plastic in the world's oceans, in fish, and in the human body, and like all climate scientists, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. She can often feel tears running down her cheeks beneath her goggles beneath the waves. Very soon the aggregate weight of the plastic in the ocean will exceed that of fish. Jet fuel has been detected in human breast milk. Each day most people consume an amount of plastic equal to that contained in a credit card, and the credit is long overdrawn. Eighty five percent of the world's coral reefs have died. She has seen it happen, up close and personal noting the slow but inexorable death over the lonely months and years in her twenty years observing the demise with futility and despair. Often, when she finishes her work for the day, when she completes the measuring and the calculating, she goes home exhausted, exhausted and deeply depressed. Her depression impacts her children, and her family and social life, but it cannot be avoided. Lately the depression has worsened considerably, has become a deep and abiding dreadful torment within her. She refuses medication, for she knows the exact cause of her malady, and the cure for it, a cure which she dares not accept, because it would require her abandoning her work, which she deems critical, and her profession, for which she has prepared her entire life. She knows firsthand, almost more than anyone, the awful unthinkable truth: that the world is dying, and that it may already be too late to save it. She knows that species of plants and animals are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate. And she knows that there exists throughout the world a vast lack of concern, a moribund apathy, as if today's living, knowing that their own lives will soon end anyway, have decided that there is nothing they can do to help protect the future generations, which are on their own. She also knows that in many countries there has come power a right wing corporate power structure which cares only about immediate profit, at any expense, at the expense of the environment, and the future of life on earth. She is a voice crying in the wilderness, and she knows it, and she goes home every night, depressed.