That title comes from a favorite Boondocks quote of mine. Here’s the context of the quote, a scene in which 10-year-old Huey Freeman crushes 8-year-old Jazmine Dubois’ soul for no apparent reason:

Jazmine (wiggling her tooth): The tooth fairy will be coming soon.
Huey: The tooth fairy?
Jazmine: Yup. Everytime I lose a tooth, the tooth fairy takes it away and leaves a dollar under my pillow.
Huey: There ain’t no such thing as a tooth fairy.
Jazmine: Then who leaves the money?
Huey: Probably your parents. They have both the cash and the access to your room.
Jazmine: Why would they lie to me?
Huey: Because the truth hurts, Jazmine. The world is a hard and lonely place and nobody gets anything for free. And you want to know what else? One day, you and everyone you know is going to die.
Jazmine:: (bursts into tears)

The May/June 2007 issue of Orion Magazine has a fantastic article that you can read online, The Consolations of Extinction by Christopher Cokinos. It really resonated with me, partly because I’m a lot more like little Jazmine than I’d like to admit. Let’s face it: death is scary. The only thing scarier than the death of someone you know, is the death of everyone you know. And that includes the deaths of 200 species a day that we are personally causing. In his article, Cokino explores his own coming-to-terms with the damage we’re causing and what effect we’re ultimately having on the universe, and what that means for our day-to-day life:

AT THE FAR END OF THE PLANET’S FUTURE, there are only about 5 billion years before the sun bloats to a red giant. When it does, the sun will be bigger, much bigger, about 160 times bigger—and much brighter, some 3,000 times brighter. Well before then, the waters of the Earth will have boiled off, the surface will have been burnt to a crisp. That will happen in a billion years. Even by that point, the planet will have been a desert world for hundreds of millions of years.

If we’re still around then—if our descendants are around—how can we save the biosphere from what astronomer Chris Impey calls “death by stellar cremation�? Some scientists have seriously suggested altering the orbits of asteroids in order to alter the orbit of our home world, so that we might extend life’s span a bit longer. We seem ready to dare anything.

Further ahead, there will come the age when the sun cools off, becoming an Earth-sized white dwarf that dims, finally, into a black dwarf, a lump of carbon and oxygen, a dark cold gem at the center of a former solar system.

The consolations of extinction are the comforts of deep time, an acceptance of passage. “Take your place with grace,� Bruce Cockburn sings, “and then be on your way.�
The consolations of extinction are an acceptance of death, of all deaths, always, in all places. My lover, myself, my parents, my sister and niece, my grandnephew, my friends, my two sweet cats. The orioles this season sipping nectar from a feeder. The American dipper that makes sounds like clacking pebbles as it flies upriver, downriver, and back again. The river itself. The foothills I glimpse from my hammock are the shorelines of ancient Lake Bonneville, whose remnant Great Salt Lake will dry up too. Families die. Genera die. Whole ecosystems die. The solar system’s planets—nine, no, eight, or, okay, maybe twelve, count ‘em how you will—they’re goners too. Stars, including all 400 billion in the Milky Way: doomed. Galaxies, all of them, all 100-plus billion of them: doomed. Even protons will decay someday, the ages of the atom finally closed. This universe—one, perhaps, in an infinite multiverse—will die in a darkness and cold beyond our imaginings.

DON’T MISUNDERSTAND ME. I am not counseling indifference to contemporary extinctions. I’m not counseling a life of civic inaction or, worse, a life of civic inaction coupled with consumerist bliss. I don’t muse on stellar eschatology in order to cultivate a sophisticated nihilism or to justify purchasing a 900-inch-wide plasma-screen television.

I’m counseling diligence, but also calm: hands that work in the present and eyes that see through it. I’m suggesting that our PalmPilots and DayMinders and Nature Conservancy calendars show not only year, month, date, and day of the week but also geologic epoch. It’s a Tuesday in the Holocene. I’m saying that too much grief for the world means less energy to help it along.

When I’m not at the desk writing, I’ll be at the edge of Cutler Marsh counting white-faced ibises for the second year in a row, the beginning of a local effort to have the marsh declared an Important Bird Area and later, I trust, a National Wildlife Refuge. I’ll be attending a meeting of concerned neighbors who are watchdogging development along our road. Or I’ll be writing to the manager of a state refuge to discuss the local Audubon chapter’s interest in habitat-improvement projects. Today I’ll water some newly planted cottonwoods.

Some of these efforts will matter, others may not.

I do what I can without going crazy.

That big ol’ chunk is just part of the article. Go read the rest of it; you’ll be glad you did.