Dear Friends, Family, Fellow Authors, and Cherished Readers,
Please check out the article published recently by Rebellious Magazine – “13 Rebellious Spring Celebrations.” I encourage you to look through them all, but I especially wanted to point your attention to the “Earth Day” entry, which features an article of mine from a few years ago: “The Case Against Fast Fashion: My Rebel Wardrobe.”
I am honored to be featured in this manner.
I’ve been thinking lately of my legacy. If I am remembered for nothing else, I want to be remembered for my words, particularly those spoken in defense of the voiceless. I cannot speak for them – nor can they – the non-human others with whom we share this world – communicate with us, despite our prodigious mathematical understanding of linguistics, our technological ability to translate large volumes of text into many hundreds of different human languages, and the capacity of our machines to gather and make sense of large volumes of data so vast it would take the human mind several lifetimes to do the same work an AI like IBM Watson does in a single nanosecond.
In a 2011 article, it was estimated “Watson can process 500 gigabytes per second, the equivalent of the content in about a million books.” That was nearly 15 years ago. It’s telling that Big Tech doesn’t want you to know how much an AI like Watson could compute in a second, and I reckon that even applying Moore’s Law to an artificially intelligent, large-language model that has been allowed to evolve would vastly underestimate the computing power such an entity has access to.
I am an advocate for the environment: our one precious planet and all her creatures. Earth is the only world known to harbor life. It is our ark. It is the boat, and as much as billionaires would have you believe that life is better on Mars, there will never be another planet as perfectly suited to your unique psychological, psychological, physical, chemical, nutritional, emotional, and – yes – spiritual – needs. Earth is our home.
As my hero, Carl Sagan, once said, “the Earth is where we make our stand.”
Exactly 12 people have set foot on the surface of another celestial body.
The other eight billion of us down here who will likely never know the hostile vastness of the space beyond Earth’s atmosphere. I used to lament this. I’ve always wanted to see the world from above.
Now, I realize it is a blessing. Earth is a sacred mother to us all. Everyone who ever lived and died, all our parents and grandparents, every species whose evolution diverged from ours at some point, can trace their roots back to a single common ancestor. Life: even in the guise of finite diversity, in finite forms, is valuable beyond measure. You cannot put a price on saving the world: too much is at stake. Is it not worth everything to you that you and your children and your great-great-grandchildren will have a green and verdant land to protect until such time as they can pass the baton? Is it not worth more than money to be good stewards – not just for our children and our grandchildren – not only for our neighbors – but for all of humanity and every one of our descendants, for all the trillions of voiceless creatures, for the biosphere itself?
Please stay tuned for an essay of mine coming out soon in an upcoming anthology, in which I explain to the daughter I might have had why I am choosing not to bring her into this dying world.
Also be on the lookout for another essay in an anthology on the theme of solastalgia, whose publication date was pushed back a bit!
For everyone who has been with me since the beginning and for all of those who will be here until the end – thank you immensely.
My writing has grown and flourished, and I am incredibly grateful for everyone who has ever believed in my work and my words.
As always – may inspiration find you in unexpected places,
Caitlin Cacciatore
