We're Fu@%ed. I'm single. Carry on.

This I didn't expect.

After months of meandering down lonely emotional passages, bumping into walls and making frequent u-turns, I finally inched up on certainty. Things with HCB weren't working. They hadn't for a long time. We both knew it. We talked about it. We couldn't fix it.

We had the hard conversations.
And then I left town.

It was supposed to be a father-daughter pilgrimage to my birthplace in South America, a relaxing beach vacation with some sweet familial significance. I relished the chance to set aside months/years/a lifetime of relentless analysis in favor of ripest mangoes, 80 degree weather and my thighs getting reacquainted with sunshine. I needed some time to just feel.

It was everything I hoped. But it was also a total slap in the face.

This is what I saw. This is what I know: we are fucked.

No amount of local organic kumquats or making our own oatmeal scrub or tracing our denim purchases or abstaining from free printers is going to stem the tide of developing nations. There are BILLIONS of people out there who can finally afford their Starbucks, and no one - particularly not our collective fat ass - is going to tell them they can't have it. I saw just a tiny piece. Lima has 8.5 million people (30% of Peru's population), the average age of whom is 25. They have endured years of political corruption, turmoil and terrorism. Their city is finally, blissfully, emerging as a hub of culture and industry. Their economy is strong. The cars are shiny and new. The grocery stores cover a city block and stock everything imaginable. Hip restaurants (some of them chains) teem with attractive young people laughing and cavorting. New condos are blanketing the city like kudzu.

It's awesome.

Lima is alive in a way that San Francisco hasn't been for a long time. Prosperity, relative though it may be for the majority of the population, is busy breeding joy. And creativity. And passion. All the things that make life worth living. The energy is palpable and infectious.

If you saw it, you'd be happy for them. The Limeñas. The kids in Beijing. The hipsters in Mumbai. Whether or not the planet can sustain it (it can't), the American lifestyle we've dreamed up is pretty sweet. Yes, potentially absurd and meaningless in excess, but utterly safe and incredibly comfortable. We should know; we can't seem to quit it, either. And we're still exporting it. WalMart is building 15 locations in Peru next year.

So barring a global pandemic that knocks off a healthy chunk of the population (swine flu, anyone??), considerable and coordinated political will (fat chance), and/or several technological breakthroughs that sweep in to save our collective fat ass, we're fucked.

We cannot stem this tide.

You and I have forty years left. How do you want to spend them?

That's the question I've been asking myself for the last two months. I apologize for the absence; I was trying to decide what to tell you. As you can imagine, this new awareness makes the act of painstakingly itemizing the contents of my life feel pretty naive/myopic/just plain stupid. My peeps were the first to hear this rant, and more than a few of them were dismayed. What do you do when your most annoyingly smug Eco Nerd friend suddenly sounds as if she's giving up the cause? Rejoice that she'll finally stop berating you for using bleach, or panic that even the optimists are being taken down by the ineluctable truth?

I scarcely know what to do myself. HCB and I have officially split, so I've spent the last month finding and decorating a new apartment. Without itemization or apology. I have the local Ikea showroom memorized. A year ago this fact would have given me hives. Now only the bill does.

I'm trying to reframe, to make sense...

So far I have only a half-notion, a loaf of bread on first rise. I DO know that we should NOT give up conscious consumerism. Of course not. As Michael says, "Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can't prove that it will." But I do think a shift is in order.

It has something to do with resilience rather than sustainability. Humanitarianism rather than environmentalism.

Ultimately, all we have - all we've ever had - is units of time and energy. It's just that now we can see the end of them. Seems to me we should spend what we have left seeking joy. For as many people as possible. Not the kind you can buy necessarily (though humans have a long history of treasured possessions), but the kind that comes from feeling truly safe. Safe from violence, from illness, from hunger, from poverty. Safe to love your partner freely, provide for your family, break bread with your neighbor, feel the sun on your thighs and taste ripe mango on your tongue. We should all have that chance.